“Damned bobbies,” he heard someone say.
Sebastian turned just in time to see five officers approaching. At first, relief flooded him - the police were here, which therefore meant that he would not be the only one with eyes on Augusta.
Then, he saw the looks upon their faces, and the barely contained rage that he recognized so well, and realized that it was directed upon Augusta. She, unawares, stood speaking to Doctor Pinkton as the officers approached.
“Bloody hell,” he grumbled as he continued to push through bodies with more fervor.
At that moment, the loud woman from the stage ended her speech and descended the stage, only to be replaced by Doctor Pinkton. The damned man had no situational awareness, no ability to see what was headed straight for the women - thewoman- whom he had promised would be alright.
The woman from the stage now spoke to Augusta with great gusto, gesticulating wildly. She, too, did not notice the officers until they were upon them.
Whatever was said thereafter, Sebastian could not hear it. All he knew was that the woman looked furious, and the officers stood up taller with hands on their batons.
“Get out of my way,” Sebastian growled at a particularly beefy man blocking his view. He was so damned close, soon he would be able to…
An officer raised a hand to the woman, though whether it was to calm her or to threaten her, Sebastian was unsure. It would not have mattered, it seemed - the woman’s hackles were so raised that the officer had hardly made the move before she was shoving him back, red-faced and angry.
In horror, Sebastian watched as Augusta stepped between the woman and the officer, hands raised between them as she spoke fearfully. The officer’s fury, however, did not lessen. If anything, he appeared to prepare for a fight.
“Hey!”
Sebastian felt as though he’d shouted with all his might, but his words carried themselves away into the air as though they werenothing. No one turned their heads to even look at him.
Sebastian elbowed past several more men.
“Hey!” he tried again.
It meant nothing. In one swift motion, the officer raised his hand and cracked it against Augusta’s face. Sebastian watched her head snap back as she cried out and fell to the ground.
“That’s my bloody wife!”
Everything after that moved so quickly, it would not be until many days later that he would make sense of it. He was running, and then he was hitting, and then he was being hit. He did not hear the screaming, or the gasps of horror from the crowd.
Instead, he was facedown on the ground, a heavy weight at his back and his arms pulled behind him. The frozen cobblestone bit into his cheeks as a pair of handcuffs clamped down upon his wrists.
Around him, chaos erupted. The shouts and rushed steps that his mind had blocked out now came to him all once as a sea of bodies rushed past. His breath left him as a punch landed against his back.
It then returned to him when he saw her. Not so far away. Down on the ground just as he was, her arms pulled behind her and cuffed as she winced in pain.
When her eyes opened again they locked upon his own, and in that moment, it did not matter. Not the pain, or the cold, or even the fear of what was to come.
For there, in his wife’s eyes, he saw love again.
Chapter Thirty
In all her life of privilege, Augusta had never once been hit.
Therefore, she did not realize just how much it would hurt when the officer’s hand struck her, a lightning strike cracking down upon her face so hard that she fell to the ground. Neither did she realize how crushingly painful it would be when he pushed his weight upon her back, nor how cold and unforgiving the handcuffs might be.
She bloody well knew it now.
She also now knew other things - how hard it was to sit in a carriage whilst handcuffed. How to be processed as a prisoner. What the inside of a jail cell looked like.
“You’ll be given your own, for now,” the officer said as he guided her into the dank, dark space, tucked away into an alcove in a quieter part of the prison.
He was not the man who had hit her, though he’d witnessed the scene. He looked at her almost apologetically when he slid the bars of her cell shut, locking her fate as a criminal in place. “They said you’re a viscountess.”
She nodded, unsure of what to say to that. She had never been one to throw her weight around with titles to get what she wanted, though she supposed that if a cell must be her destiny, then a private one was at least some small grace.
