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Jack’s glower remained unwavering. “He shouldn’t need saving. He shouldn’t be mixed up in this business at all. He’s no bloody warrior. Lazarus will have him for breakfast. Make bloody sausage of him.”
She threaded her hands in her lap to keep them from around Jack’s neck. “Thank you. I didn’t think it was possible, but you’ve actually made me feel worse.”
He flashed her a disarming O’Gara smile. “It’s a gift.”
Cat opened her mouth to parry that contention when the coach lurched wildly. Jack fell against the door, jarring his shoulder, which he grasped with a grunt of pain. Cat was tossed from her seat in a tangle of skirts.
The coach lurched again and, with a crack of breaking lumber, came to a stop, the rear wheels in a ditch, a heavy hedge pressed against the glass.
Jack threw himself out the door, a pistol held tight to his body. Cat right behind. The coachman was cutting the left leader free from a tangle of harness, swearing as he did so. Of the groom there was no sign.
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. I were barely moving when a great shape slunk among the trees. Appeared in the road afearing the horses. They bolted with nary a thing I could do to stop them. Took the turn too sharp.”
“Where’s our friend with his musket?”
The coachman scanned the wreckage. “Don’t know. He was here a moment ago.”
In answer, a shot sounded from the woods. Then a silence pregnant with possibilities. All of them horrible.
“Cat,” Jack barked, “get back inside. No arguments.”
By now he and the coachman were nervously searching the trees.
“Your man speaks sense, my lady.” A dark shape. A shiver of drawn steel. “Useless though it is.”
A voice she recognized from nightmare. The deep throaty rasp as if words came difficult. The scorn underlying that hateful title by which he insisted on addressing her.
She fumbled uselessly with the door handle.
The shape moved into the meager light from the coach’s lamps, standing astride the road like a black colossus. His face in shadow, only the wicked gleam of his eyes alive within the darkness.
Jack’s pistol rose, steadied, and erupted with a sharp report and a flare lighting up the heavy lines of Lazarus’s face.
Thirty feet away. No way Jack could miss.
But Lazarus’s movements came fluid and unerring. He dodged with a feint that had him at Jack’s throat, his dagger slammed hilt deep into the slighter man’s stomach.
Cat screamed. The coachman swore. And Jack crumpled to the ground, his face registering shock as blood spread over his waistcoat. Dripped from between his fingers.
Lazarus never even spared a glance for his victim. Instead his empty stare fell on her. “We’ve a meeting to keep.” He swung her unresisting body over his shoulder. Strode back into the wood.
Grief snapped her free of her daze. Shrieking and cursing and pummeling and kicking, she struggled. His steps never slowed, his body absorbing her blows without a mark. Finally the woods closed around them, cutting off her view of the broken coach, of Jack’s sprawled, bleeding body.
“You killed him,” she cried.
Lazarus’s grip around her tightened. “Lucky man.”
“Damn.” Aidan crushed the note in his fist. Eased himself back from the brink of complete and unrecoverable panic. That would get him nowhere except killed that much faster. He needed to think. Plan. Work the scenarios. But time stood against him.
One hour. The message delivered to his door by a terrified peasant boy warned Aidan he had one bloody hour to bring the diary to the gatehouse. Exchange it for Cat. He tried not to dwell on the “or else.” Lazarus had left that to his vivid imagination. And what it conjured only made him more desperate.
What had happened to Jack? Did he still live, or had Lazarus already claimed his first victim? And how did Cat fare? Alone? Afraid? As terrified as he was?
“You can’t let that scoundrel have the diary, Aidan.” Daz sat sunk in an armchair, huge gnarled hands clutching a shawl to his stooped shoulders, up to his ankles in a steaming bucket of salt water. A moth-eaten cap perched atop his wispy, balding head. Only his eyes shone stern with determination. “Not if what you suspect is true and Máelodor seeks the tapestry and stone. I knew the man once, and I don’t expect he’s improved with age.”
Aidan lit a nerve-steadying cheroot. Dragged on the thick tobacco flavor, hoping it would calm his shaking hands. Ease the tension threading his body like coiled wire. It didn’t. He tossed it on the grate with another oath.
