They had to see. There was no winning here.
After one final look at her, they turned and sprinted into the woods. Shadows swallowed them.
Ezra, Tej, and Rhys were gone.
A handful of Guardians gained enough control of their mounts to try to ride in pursuit of the highwaymen. Yet, at the edge of the forest, the horses reared. Despite the riders’ attempts to kick their mounts into submission, their horses refused to enter the woods. With shouts of frustration, the Guardians brought their mounts around and joined their compatriots as they raced through the village.
Jessica lifted her head to see the coaching inn whip past, and a mail coach just pulling in. The Guardians didn’t stop. They kept on riding, taking her farther and farther away from any plan she might have once had. Away from Rhys. Tej. Ezra.
They were safe, at least.
Held down as she was, she could do nothing but surrender to the jouncing, nauseating ride down the road and out of the village. She lost sense of time, the road unfurling beneath her. The sun was at its lowest point, moments before setting, when the Guardians finally slowed, then stopped. Oyster shells crunched beneath the hooves of the winded horses. She gasped as the man holding her down swung from the saddle and released his grip.
Her head spun as she was pulled off of the horse. She and the Guardians assembled in the curved driveway of a large three-story, brick-fronted manor house, built in the heavy style of a hundred years ago, with ivy crawling up the walls. A few lights shone in the mullioned windows, and torches blazed in front of the house, casting shadows across the weighty façade.
She clutched at the saddle to stay upright as she faced her captor. A heavy golden insignia hung from a chain around his neck. Icy blue eyes regarded her.
The Guardian tugged down his mask to reveal a face of sharp features, the scar bisecting his eyebrow and down his cheek only highlighting his cold handsomeness.
“Jonathan Page, I presume,” Jessica managed.
“Miss Colfax.” His voice was as frigid as his face.
“What is this?” A genteel but cutting voice sliced through the dusk as a man strode out of the manor. “You were supposed to kill them, not capture the jade.”
Jessica’s swimming gaze leveled enough for her to look upon the face of Sir Harold Mowbray. He held a glass of wine, which he sipped at before tossing the remaining contents into the crushed shells covering the driveway. Her former employer regarded her with disgust.
“She was in the way, Sir Harold,” Page explained bitingly.
The baronet rolled his eyes. “Leaving her alive was an unnecessary complication.”
“Shall I kill her?” Page asked the question as blandly as if he was asking if the baronet wanted minted peas with his roast pheasant.
Jessica tensed her body. She would fight until there was no blood or breath left in her.
Mowbray snapped his fingers. “Bring her. Take her upstairs.”
Icy fear spread along Jessica’s spine as two Guardians flanked her, grabbing her arms. She struggled against them, but their grips were too tight, and they hauled her inside.
11
She had vague impressions of a stately house—a substantial but soaring staircase in the entryway leading up to a landing, a timbered and vaulted ceiling above, corridors lined with portraits of esteemed but dead ancestors whose faces all carried echoes of Sir Harold, with the same disdain for everyone who hadn’t the good fortune to be born into aristocratic wealth. Golden objects stood proudly displayed in carved glass-fronted cases.
Money, everywhere she looked. Money and privilege.
If there were servants, they stayed out of the way, surely driven off by the thud of the Guardians’ boots on the polished floors. They dragged her up a side staircase less grand than the one in the foyer. Then she was hauled down a hallway before being tugged into a small room with wood-paneled walls. A fire burned in the hearth. She was shoved into a stiff-backed chair. One of the Guardians pulled her hands forward and bound them together with coarse rope before he stepped back and hovered in the nearby shadows.
“I’ll scream,” she warned Mowbray.
The baronet stood in front of her, his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a banyan and cap, clearly intending a quiet night at home rather than the presence of an unwanted captive.
“By all means, do so,” he offered mildly. “My staff knows better than to interfere in the master’s business. Nor does anyone live in close enough proximity to hear you. Besides,” he added with a twist of his lips, “given that you are the accomplice of three deadly highwaymen, I rather doubt anyone gives a damn if you protest a violation of your rights.”
Terror was her enemy, so she refused to let it show on her face. He was correct, however. Given that he was the local gentry, and she a penniless nobody who had, in fact, assisted a notorious gang, there was nothing and no one who would take her side, or even come to her aid. She was entirely at Mowbray’s mercy.
Discretely, she tested the ropes binding her. It was her bad luck that the man who’d tied her up was very good at his job. There was almost no give in the rope, and the knot was a secure one, likely practiced frequently on other captives.
How many of them had survived their encounters with the Guardians?
