Page 108 of The Wedding-Crashing Duchess

“Let her go,” Ronan said, and his voice did not shake now, though everything in him was shaking. “I will do what you ask. I will sign whatever you put in front of me. But you let her go first.”

Jonathan laughed.

“You must think me a great deal more foolish than I have shown myself to be this morning. No, Ronan. You will follow me, and you alone, and we will finish this business somewhere your friends cannot interrupt us. The girl comes with me until it is done. Once I have what I need, she is yours again, whole and unharmed. You have my word.”

“Your word,” the words came out of Ronan, bitter as bile.

“It is all either of us has left to offer the other,” Jonathan said, and there was, beneath the coldness, something almost like an apology in it. “Come. Quickly, before your friend with the loud voice finds us and forces my hand in ways neither of us will enjoy.”

Ronan looked once toward the sound of the approaching men, weighing, in the space of a single frantic heartbeat, every possible course open to him. He could call out and bring Gregory and the constables down upon this ruin within moments, could trust in numbers and muskets to end this before it went further. And Sarah would be dead before a single shot was fired.

He said nothing and followed.

Jonathan led them deeper into the wood, away from the lodge, away from the sound of Gregory’s voice growing fainter and more distant with every step, along a path so narrow and overgrown that Ronan understood at once it had been chosen for precisely this purpose. It was a place no search party, however determined, would think to look until it was already too late.

The man holding Sarah followed a pace behind, the blade never leaving its place against her arm, and Ronan kept his eyes fixed on his daughter’s face the entire way.

His mind, even now, would not entirely stop working. It was, he supposed, the same part of him that had spent a lifetime managing accounts and tenants, refusing even now, in the very worst hour of his life, to simply surrender to terror. He was grateful for it, distantly.

“It is not far,” Jonathan said over his shoulder, as though this were nothing more than an inconvenient walk before breakfast. “There is a clearing ahead. We will finish our business there, quietly, and then everyone may go about the rest of their day.”

“You truly believe that,” Ronan said. “That after this morning, any of us simply goes about the rest of our day.”

Jonathan did not answer him. Perhaps, Ronan thought, watching the rigid set of his brother’s shoulders as they walked, there was no answer he could give that would not sound as hollow to his own ears as it did to Ronan’s.

The clearing, when they reached it, was small and hemmed in on every side by close-grown trees, the sort of place a man might walk past a hundred times without ever noticing it was there. Weak morning light fell through the bare branches overhead, and Ronan thought, with a strange, detached clarity, that it was almost peaceful. It seemed a cruel sort of place to lose everything.

“Release her,” Jonathan said to the man beside him, and for one wild, soaring moment Ronan believed he might actually intend to keep his word. But the man only pushed Sarah forward a few staggering steps, still gripping one thin wrist, the knife still close enough to threaten. “There. You may see for yourself she is unharmed. Now, approach me slowly, Ronan, and we will settle this like the civilised men our father raised us to be, whatever else either of us may think of him this morning.”

“Father,” Sarah’s voice was very small and frightened, and it undid something in Ronan that he had been holding together by sheer force of will since the moment he had woken to find her gone. “I want to go home.”

“I know, my darling. I know you do.” He kept his voice as gentle as he could make it, though every part of him was screaming to close the distance between them in a single stride and tear her free of that man’s grip by whatever means necessary. “You must be very brave a little longer for me. Can you do that? Just a little longer.”

“I am scared.”

“I know.” His own voice cracked on the words. “I’m here, and I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I promise you that, Sarah.”

He began to walk forward, slowly, exactly as he had been told, his cane striking soft against the frost-damp ground, his eyes never once leaving his daughter’s face. He was perhaps ten paces from Jonathan when he saw the blade in his brother’s own hand.

“That is close enough,” Jonathan said. “Now, the documents are in my coat. You will sign where I show you, and then, and only then, does she come to you.”

“Let her come to me first.” Ronan’s voice had gone low, urgent. “You said yourself she is only leverage. Once I sign there is nothing further to gain by holding her.”

“And once she is in your arms there is nothing further to compel you to hold still while I finish the business properly,” Jonathan said. “No, brother. We do this in the order I have chosen. Sign first.”

It happened faster than Ronan could account for afterward, faster than thought, faster than any plan he might have made.

Sarah, who had been standing rigid and trembling in the second man’s grip, seemed suddenly to reach the very limit of what a small, frightened child could endure. She twisted and kicked backward with all the strength her six years could summon, her small heel connecting solidly with the man’s shin. He gave a sharp cry of pain and his grip loosened just enough and Sarah tore free and ran.

She ran toward her father, arms outstretched, sobbing his name, and it struck Ronan with a terror sharper than anything he had felt yet that morning.

Jonathan moved, and lunged for the fleeing girl, blade raised, and there was no time to think.

He threw himself between them.

The blade caught him low in the side, just above the hip, a burst of white-hot pain that stole the breath clean out of him and buckled his bad leg beneath him. He heard Sarah scream, felt the cane slip from his hand and clatter uselessly against the frozen ground.

“Run.” He forced the word out through gritted teeth, catching Sarah by the shoulder with his free hand, turning her bodily away from him, away from Jonathan, toward the direction Gregory’s voice had come from. “Run, Sarah, run to the men in red coats, do you understand me? Run and do not look back, no matter what you hear. Run!”