Chapter One
“Where is my pistol? I had it just a minute ago.”
It couldn’t have disappeared. Gus Jones frantically stuffed his hand into the pocket of his jacket, searching for the weapon, sighing with relief when his fingers touched cool metal. The gun was right where he had left it.
You dolt. How many times a day do you have to check for it?
Another anxious moment which had set his heart racing. The need to constantly have a loaded pistol close at hand was an odd response for someone who had so recently been shot.
There couldn’t be many safer places than his family’s home in London. In addition to that was the fact that the man who had tried to kill him was over two hundred miles away in France. But even the deep blue waters of the English Channel couldn’t separate Gus from the painful memories of that day at Château-de-La-Roche, when a bullet had very nearly ended his life.
I am home, and I am safe.
These panic attacks made no sense; then again, they never had. The mind was a strange beast. You could tell yourself all the sensible things in the world but fear always lurked in dark recesses.
“You must focus on the task at hand,” he chided himself.
Seated on the dusty floor of the cramped attic, he was taking an inventory of his weapons cache. Over the years, it had built to quite an impressive collection: pistols, rifles, and a compelling set of death-wielding knives.
There was also enough gunpowder to give his mother nightmares if she ever discovered what her third-eldest son had hidden in the space above her sitting room.
He really ought to have stored all of it at the RR Coaching Company offices in Gracechurch Street rather than here. If the explosives did go up, the family home would be reduced to rubble.
But despite his better judgement, Gus had continued to bring his ill-gotten arsenal home with him.
Home.
What were the chances he would ever see this place again?
The eve of battle always gave a man reason to consider his life choices. To question exactly the point where he had gone wrong. Only a fool willingly took up arms and went to start a war.
Augustus Trajan Jones had arrived at so many of these crossroads in his nine and twenty years that it was nigh on impossible for him to decipher which of the paths taken had led him to where he now stood.
What was clear, however, was his duty to help Armand and Evangeline La Roche. To do all he could to save them both from a senseless death.
As he leaned over and picked up a single-barreled H.W. Mortimer shotgun from the floor, Evangeline’s letter crinkled in his jacket pocket. It was a letter he had read many times.
Dear Augustus,
If you are reading this letter, then you are not dead.
Things have gone from bad to worse since you left.
My uncle has gathered a large store of weapons at the château.
He means to go to war with the Lamballe gang and will not listen to me.
Please do not return to Saint-Brieuc—it is no longer safe.
Evangeline
He knew exactly why he was still carrying it weeks after it had arrived, long after he had memorized its contents. The missive had come from her.
The relationship between him and Evangeline was complicated. It always had been. But a near-death experience could give a man reason to reassess his priorities.
If Armand La Roche was determined to go to war against a rival smuggling gang in France, then Gus most certainly would be standing alongside him when the first volley was fired. He wasn’t deterred by Evangeline’s express command that he shouldn’t come.
If she hadn’t wanted me to travel to Saint-Brieuc, she wouldn’t have written.
