Page 8 of The Cutthroat Countess

Her first knife hit him in the thigh, and Jo knew immediately that she should have aimed for his head, because he merely glanced down at the two-inch blade in his leg as if it were an annoying insect.

He shook his head and pulled out the knife, chuckling. “Now what did you ’ave to do that for?” He dropped the knife with a clatter and lumbered toward her.

Outside, Angus’s cries increased in frequency and volume, and Jo didn’t hesitate to draw her largest blade, the four-incher, which she aimed for his throat.

The man might be huge, but he was sluggish and slow to duck; the knife struck its target dead on, and the giant made a choking sound and reached for the knife handle.

“You’ll live longer if you leave it in,” Jo advised.

Not a lot longer, but at this point in his life, she imagined every second was precious.

He ignored her advice and yanked the blade out. Blood spurted from the artery like a geyser. “Bloody ’ell,” he croaked, reaching up to his throat and then examining the blood that covered his hand. “I’m dyin’!” He staggered to the side, and the sun illuminated his face for the first time. His small dark eyes were wide with wonder, his heavy jaw sagging open. “I fink—I fink—” He stumbled toward her, and Jo embedded two more knives in his massive form as he came at her, remembering at the last minute that Morrison’s body was on the floor behind her as she moved to evade the monster.

Her last two knives were little better than toothpicks and certainly wouldn’t stop him if all the others had failed to do so, but Jo threw them anyhow—not that the behemoth noticed.

He backed her up against the front door and lifted his truncheon, his breathing labored and thick. But the club slipped from his big hand and clattered to the floor, and he looked down, perplexed.

Jo took the opportunity to kick him in the knee as hard as she could.

He gave a gurgling scream and tipped to the side like a felled tree. Jo didn’t wait to see if he was still alive; instead, she ran for the back door and the sight beyond it: Angus dipping and attacking while a man swung his pistol from side to side, trying to take aim at the flapping bird.

“Angus! Go!” she yelled, but her words were cut off by the deafening crack of a pistol and an agonized kraa!

“No!” Jo screamed as the raven’s large black form fell from the sky in a clumsy tangle of wings, a cloud of feathers raining down after him as his body plummeted into Morrison’s vegetable garden.

Fury crackled in her brain, and Jo turned to the man still holding the smoking pistol.

“You bastard!” she shouted, her voice breaking with a sob. She’d thrown the last of her knives in the house and hadn’t stopped to retrieve them, so she took a running jump and landed on the stunned man—who was far smaller than the giant in the cottage, but still bigger than Jo—and brought them both to the ground with a bone-jarring thud.

“You killed him! You killed him,” she shrieked, punching any part of the man she could reach.

Once again, a human shadow fell over them, but this time Jo’s head exploded with a blinding flash of light and pain before she could turn.

“Angus,” she whispered.

And then darkness claimed her.

Chapter 24

The last nine days were among the most unpleasant in Elliot’s memory—today’s journey from Dover being the worst of them. As if spending almost three pointless weeks in France wasn’t bad enough, the mail coach from Dover had been held up while he’d been fitfully dozing.

It had only been thanks to Elliot and another passenger—both of whom had been armed and had assisted the mail coach outriders—that he’d made it home with his valuables intact. The highwaymen had not been so lucky, and the last he’d seen of the three men was their bodies stretched out beside the road, a silent, gruesome warning to anyone who saw them before the mail coachmen notified the authorities when they reached their destination.

Thanks to their timely, accurate pistol work, the coach was scarcely an hour late.

But it was an hour that he didn’t have to waste, and Crisp had to barber Elliot while he bathed to make up for lost time.

The work he’d been sent to do in Paris—interrogate an agent detained by the small, unofficial British delegation in the city—had proved fruitless. He should have been home at least a week ago, but Sir Stanley had sent a messenger asking him to investigate several other matters.

Elliot was beginning to wonder if his new division chief was up to the challenge of running the Secret Office. All three of the matters he’d spent his time on in Paris could have been better handled through official channels. Especially the agent he’d questioned, who should have been turned over to the French authorities.

Perhaps there had always been a part of his job that had been frustrating and bureaucratic and he’d only noticed now because he’d missed Jo with a ferocity that left him restless and irritable.

Or maybe he’d just lost his taste for the work, a great deal of which felt more than a little unsavory.

In addition to his pointless tasks, Paris had been bloody chaotic and dangerous. Despite the return of the Bourbon monarch, the capital was suffering badly, still reeling from the effects of Napoleon’s return the year before. People were hungry and suffering and crime was rife; Elliot had been held up at knifepoint not once, but twice, during his stay.

Thanks to the fracas on the journey from Dover, he’d arrived too late today to call at Townshend house and knew the ball tonight—surrounded by hundreds of revelers—would not be a place where he and Jo could converse privately.