And if ever there had been a moment to regret his old vow against spirits, this was it.
Across from him, Dash looked about as well as a half-drowned rat, slumped in a chair as though his body were too heavy to support itself. Gideon knew Dash well enough to recognize the signs. If left alone, Dash would return to Beckman House, shut himself in his study, and continue drinking himself into the grave he’d been digging.
No.
Gideon had failed enough people already.
He tugged the bell-pull.
Dash looked up with bleary suspicion. “What are you doing?”
“Saving you from yourself,” Gideon said. “Badly, no doubt, but one does what one can.”
“I do not require saving.”
“Plainly.”
Burke appeared, and when Gideon ordered the carriage brought round, Dash didn’t argue.
An hour later, Gideon found himself seated at a gaming table in a house he would have normally avoided. And as he glanced over his cards, he caught a glimpse of Dash, sinking lower and lower into a red velvet chaise between two pretty women who meant nothing to him. It was an ugly sort of cure, perhaps. Crude. Desperate. But Gideon hoped—God help him—that if Dash remembered there was a world beyond Mrs. Bloomington, something in him might stir.
Instead, Dash stared through the women as though they were ghosts.
Blast and damn. Gideon understood the feeling.
Gideon lifted his tea and caught the scent of brandy in the steam.
Paused. Then drank anyway.
It burned.
He closed his eyes, savoring the feeling, one he’d not experienced in over a decade.
Beatrice was no longer in London.
She hadn’t thought to tell him goodbye.
From there, the evening declined in predictable fashion. Dash drank too much, muttered in French, and proved immune to every distraction Gideon had hoped might jolt him out of his misery. By the time Longstaffe arrived, Dash could hardly stand, and it took both men to get him into the carriage.
But just before the coach drove away?—
For one impossible second, Gideon thought he caught a glimpse of… Sebastian.
An older version. Not clearly. Not truly.
Only the turn of a head near the doorway, a flash of that familiar profile.
Gideon went cold. Then the stranger disappeared.
Of course he must have been mistaken.
Sebastian Hartwell had been dead for years.
Gideon looked toward Dash, half-conscious now and murmuring Mrs. Bloomington’s name as though it were a prayer.
Beatrice gone.
Dash breaking.
