He was watching her with an expression she had never seen on his face before. Not fear for himself. Fear for her. The particular quality of a man watching someone he loves preparing to do something he cannot stop and cannot reach.
She looked away from him before it could undo her.
She turned toward Harry instead.
Her brother, who had never stopped looking for her. Who had spent his own money and his own time and his own hope on the possibility that she was still alive. Who had looked at her across a drawing room and saidyou have my father’s eyesin a voice stripped of everything except the raw fact of it.
She raised the pistol.
Harry held very still. His face had gone pale, but his jaw was set and his eyes were steady on hers, and even in this moment she could read him, the same quality she had recognized the first time she had seen him. He was a man who would not beg.
I’m sorry, she thought at him.I need you to trust me.
She held the gun on him for one heartbeat. Two.
Penharrow made a small, satisfied sound beside her.
Megan turned and shot Penharrow.
She had aimed for his chest. She caught his stomach instead, the report of the pistol shockingly loud in the closed room, and Penharrow staggered back against the wall with a sound that was less a scream than a furious, disbelieving exhalation. The man by the door lurched forward and the door burst open in the same instant as Webb came through it low and fast, and the room became something she could not track individually, noise and movement and the crack of another shot from somewhere she could not identify.
She watched as if in a dream as Penharrow sunk to the floor but raised his arm. He was going to fire.
She saw it in the way his face changed, shock collapsing into the particular cold fury she knew better than almost any expression in the world. He had one pistol and it was leveled at Oliver, who had moved forward and was not yet clear of it, and Megan had no weapon left and no time and no choice.
She stepped in front of him.
The sound of it was not what she had expected. The impact was a shove that spun her sideways, a burning that spread outward from her left shoulder before the pain had properly arrived. She hit the wall. Slid down it. Heard Oliver’s voice yell her name, not in the careful way he usually said it but broken, raw, uncontrolled.
The room continued without her for a little while.
When it resolved back into something she could follow, she was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and Oliver was beside her, his hands on her face, her name in his voice in a register she had not heard from him before.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“You are not all right.” His voice was entirely unlike itself. “You have been shot.”
“It is not serious.” She could feel the truth of this even through the pain, which was considerable but not the spreading, drowning kind she suspected would accompany something serious. “Shoulder. I can feel that it is not deep.” She paused. “I may have some experience with wounds.”
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite the opposite.
Webb appeared in her field of vision, assessed the situation in approximately two seconds, and began giving instructions to someone over his shoulder with the brisk efficiency of a man who had triaged on battlefields and found a London drawing room considerably less chaotic by comparison.
“Penharrow,” Oliver said. His voice had steadied but his hands had not left her face.
“Still alive,” Webb said. “But I don’t think he’ll survive a wound like that.”
“I hope he suffers.” Oliver’s jaw was very tight. “But we should get him a doctor. I’m not the same man as him.”
Harry appeared on her other side, crouching down, and looked at her with an expression she did not have a name for. She suspected she was wearing something similar.
“I aimed at you, but I’d never shoot you,” she said.
“Yes.” He reached out and took her hand, not the injured side, and held it with the careful, deliberate grip of a man deciding. “I know. I understood what you were doing.”
“Did you?”
“Not immediately,” he admitted. “For approximately three seconds I thought my sister was going to shoot me.”
