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He thought he saw her smile waver when she read it, then she was hugging him tightly. “You’re the one who needs to take care of yourself. Your escape is still all the news. They’ll be searching for you.” She drew back to look at him, and to his consternation he saw that she had tears in her eyes. “I couldn’t bear to lose you again.”
He bent and kissed her forehead. Even if he could speak there was nothing he could say to comfort her.
He turned to go.
“Wait.” She laid her hand on his arm, forestalling him. “Here.” She thrust a smaller bag into his hands. “There’s three pounds sixpence. It’s all I have. And some bread and cheese. Oh, Apollo.” Her brave speech ended on a little sob. “Go!”
She gave him a shove just as he was about to bend to her again.
So without looking at her, he turned and ducked into the cramped tunnel he’d seen Wakefield take earlier that night.
He had no idea where it would lead him.
MAXIMUS DIDN’T KNOW how long he’d been searching St. Giles that night when he heard the pistol shot. He dived around a corner and ran flat out down an alley, heading toward the sounds. Overhead the moon guided him, his fair mistress, his unattainable lover.
The hoarse shouts of men and the clatter of hooves on cobblestones came from ahead.
He spilled into a cross street and saw to his right Trevillion riding hell for leather straight toward him. “He’s headed toward the Seven Dials!”
Maximus ran across in front of the horse, so close he fancied he felt the horse’s breath upon his cheek as he passed. On foot he could duck down one of the many tiny alleys too small for a man on horse and head Old Scratch off. For he knew, deep in his soul, that it was Old Scratch that Trevillion hunted tonight. Old Scratch, the man who wore his mother’s pendant at his throat.
Old Scratch, who’d murdered his parents nineteen years ago on a rainy St. Giles night.
A jog to the left, a duck to the right. His legs were aching, the breath sawing in and out of his lungs. The Seven Dials pillar loomed ahead, in the circular junction of seven streets. Old Scratch sat his horse casually under the pillar, as if waiting for him.
Maximus slowed and slunk into the shadows. The highwayman didn’t have his pistols out, but he must have been armed.
“Your Grace,” Old Scratch called. “Tsk. I’d thought you’d grown out of hiding long ago.”
He felt the coldness invade his chest, the fear that he was too small, too weak. The powerlessness as he’d watched this man shoot his mother. There had been blood on her breast, splattering scarlet over the white marble of her skin, running in the rain into her spilled hair.
He wanted to vomit. “Who are you?”
Old Scratch cocked his head. “Don’t you know? Your parents knew—it’s why I had to kill them. Your mother recognized me, even beneath my neck cloth, I’m afraid. Pity. She was a beautiful woman.”
“Then you are an aristocrat.” Maximus refused to rise to the bait. “And yet you’ve sunk to thieving in St. Giles.”
“Robbing, I’ll have you know.” Old Scratch sounded irritable, as if he thought robbery somehow above thievery. “And it’s a pleasant hobby. Gets one’s blood flowing.”
“You expect me to believe that you do this for excitement?” Maximus scoffed. “Acquit me of stupidity. Are you a poor younger son? Or did your sire gamble your inheritance away?”
“Wrong and wrong again.” Old Scratch shook his head mockingly. “I grow weary, Your Grace. Don’t be such a coward. Come out, come out to play!”
Maximus stepped from the shadows. He was no longer a cowering boy. “I have all of them but that one, you know.”
Old Scratch clucked as his big black horse shifted from one foot to another. “The emerald drops like this?” He touched his gloved fingers to the emerald pin at his throat. “That must’ve cost a pretty penny, for I know I sold them for such. Your mother’s necklace kept me in wine and wenches for many years.”
Maximus felt his ire rise and tempered it. He wouldn’t be drawn out so easily. “I only need that one to have it remade.”
Old Scratch crooked one finger. “Come and take it.”
“I intend to,” Maximus said as he circled the horse and man. “I’ll take it and your life as well.”
The highwayman threw back his head and laughed. “Am I the reason for that?” He gestured to Maximus’s costume. “La, sir, I confess myself flattered. To’ve driven the Duke of Wakefield into madness so deep that he donned the guise of a common actor and runs the streets of St. Giles. Why, I—”
It happened so fast Maximus had no time to think, let alone act. He heard the clatter of hoofbeats behind him, saw the glint of metal as Old Scratch raised his left hand from where he’d kept it hidden in his coat.
And then there was the flash and the bang.
