When a Rogue Meets His Match - Elizabeth Hoyt Page 0,155
from his study, his expression dark and his eyes as glacial and remote as she had ever seen them. He led them unerringly toward Hanover Square, reining his horse to a stop in front of Marstowe’s home.
The town house was the first one in a long row of pretty, terraced residences that formed a neat square around a central garden, but unlike its neighbors, no lights glowed from within, its windows dark and empty.
King dismounted and took the stairs two at a time to the front door. For the second time that day, Adeline swiftly picked the lock and pushed the door open. They entered the cavernous interior, lit weakly by the gaslights from the pavement outside. King stalked through the entranceway and into the center of the hall, and a moment later, a candelabra flared to life. Holding it before him, he strode through the space, checking each darkened room, his steps as sure and unerring as if he had been here a thousand times before.
“Upstairs,” he grated, but Adeline was already on her way up.
Two flights of stairs, three floors of rooms, and all of them filled with nothing but the ghostly shapes of furniture sheeted against the dust. King and Adeline returned to the ground-floor hall.
“The mews,” Adeline said.
They hurried out the back of the townhome, into a fallow kitchen garden still covered with snow. Across the expanse of garden, the row of stables and living quarters above that belonged to the neighboring townhomes were as well lit as the houses themselves, both the animals and their keepers at their evening meals. The stable on the end that belonged to the baron was not blazing with light, though wavering candlelight glowed in a window.
Adeline started forward, only to be caught by a hand on her arm.
“You should go,” King said to Adeline. “You don’t have to be here.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You are not an assassin. You don’t need to be a part of this.”
“I am already a part of this.”
King stared at her.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said, repeating the words he had once said to her outside a gaming hell. Without considering what she was doing, she kissed him hard. “Besides,” she whispered, pulling back, “someone has to hold the basket with the severed head.”
King caught her face with his, crushing his lips to hers with the same urgency she had felt, and then turned, hurrying over the snow-covered ground.
A crash sounded from within the stable, and a string of muffled curses rose before it was abruptly cut off. Adeline and King were running now, yanking open the stable door and pounding down a dusty, stall-lined alleyway that hadn’t seen horses in years. At the far end of the stable, where the space opened up into a room that would have at one time housed harnesses and saddles, Marstowe had Elliot by the collar of his jacket, the boy struggling in his grasp.
The baron struck him on the side of the head with his fist and Elliot staggered, going to his knees. He shook his head, and his small hand reached into the top of his boot, withdrawing something. He stumbled back to his feet, and in the weak light Adeline saw a blade flash forward. The baron screamed and released Elliot, lurching back against the wall, clutching his upper leg. Blood was blooming on the inside of his thigh at an alarming rate.
Adeline and King reached the end of the stable as Elliot scrambled back, only to fall to his knees again. For the first time, Adeline noticed the chains affixed around the boy’s ankles, secured to a heavy iron hook set deep into the wall near the center of the room. The child’s face and clothes were filthy, his livery jacket torn. He had a large lump at his left temple with dried blood crusted on the broken skin and staining his fair hair. Fresh blood trickled down his chin from a split lip that was swollen and bruised.
Across the room the baron had collapsed against the wall, still gripping his thigh and making mewling sounds. Marstowe was coatless, and his shirt was untucked and bunched around his waist, the top buttons at the fall of his trousers open. Blood was pulsing steadily through his fingers and pooling beneath his leg, turning his buff breeches dark.
“He stabbed me,” he keened. “Dear God, he stabbed me. The scaly bastard attacked me. Tried to rob me. I’ll see him hanged.”