Dancing With Danger

by Kerrigan Byrne

  “Love?” Mercy’s eyes peeled wide with sudden comprehension at the same time her sister gasped.

  She regarded the Duchesse, recalling what Mathilde had said about her lover. Dark. Handsome. Mysterious. Foreign. Sensual...

  The woman was all of these things.

  Long lashes swept down behind her mask. “I am sorry if I have shocked you, I almost thought Mathilde might have confided in you about me, as you were to bring her to me. I can’t imagine what you must be thinking.” The Duchesse finished her wine with a morose sigh.

  “I’m thinking you were both going to leave your husbands and run away together.”

  “You would be right,” she nodded. “The ship you were going to conduct her to belongs to me. I am the Duc de la Cour’s second wife, and he has taken to his deathbed, as they say. I can’t think that it’s soon enough.” Her bitterness was not at all concealed by her mask.

  “My stepson, Armand, has made my life untenable, and so I have taken the money that is mine and had arranged for Mathilde and me to sail to foreign ports indefinitely. I was going to help her set aside the medicines she took...the vices that were killing her slowly. We were each other’s safe harbor. Our lives were to be a grand adventure...and someone took that from us.” Her eyes went from a whiskey-gold to a fiery amber as her features hardened behind her mask. “I am here to find out who it was.”

  “So am I,” Mercy said with fierce determination, making another scan of the room, wondering if her killer was part of the revelry. “I wish Mathilde would have told me about you, Your Grace, it would be easier to believe your story. To be certain you had nothing to do with her death.”

  Felicity kicked her ankle.

  “I understand,” the Duchesse said around another melancholy sigh. “It is hard for us—was hard for us—as you might imagine. And because of where she came from...Mathilde did not trust easily.”

  “Of course it was difficult; people are not very understanding, are they?” Leaning over, Felicity placed her cobalt glove over that of the Duchesse. Sapphires over rubies. “I am sorry you lost your love.”

  Mercy allowed Felicity’s endlessly romantic heart to soften her own toward the idea of the woman’s innocence.

  The Duchesse gave Felicity’s fingers a grateful squeeze, then snatched her hand away. “Please do not be kind to me,” she pled in a watery voice. “Not yet. I will have time to shatter into pieces of grief, but first she must be avenged.”

  Visibly grappling for her composure, Her Grace followed Mercy’s gaze out toward the crowd. The revelers had taken on a fantastical quality, like a painted tableau or a moving picture. Vibrant, silken butterflies too frenetic to land.

  Mercy put a thoughtful finger to the divot in her chin. “Do you wonder if your stepson has found out about the two of you and disapproved enough to be remonstrative?”

  The Duchesse shook her head most violently. “Armand would never get his hands dirty, though he might have hired it done, a local ruffian, no doubt. I was trying to find out when...” She trailed off as something caught her attention.

  It wasn’t at all difficult to follow her gaze to exactly what had seized the Duchesse’s notice.

  Raphael Sauvageau demanded the consideration of any room he entered.

  It was as if he claimed every plot of ground he trod upon, and dared someone to take it from him.

  Mercy told herself that her heart only leapt because of the circumstance.

  Not the man. Nor the sight of him in formal attire, his shoulders straight and jaw sharp.

  Lucifer himself couldn’t have been more devilishly handsome nor shrewd and savage than he, striding at the head of a handful of men who were nigh on nipping at his heels, as if his word, alone, held them on a short leash.

  He approached a group of lads playing billiards. All of them, Mercy noted, were not fellows who easily wore white-tie finery, and yet each sported crimson carnations in their buttonholes.

  “Do you know him?” Mercy asked the Duchesse.

  “Who doesn’t?” she replied ruefully. “I know he is playing a dangerous game tonight. That there are men here baying for his blood.”

  “What do you mean?” Mercy asked, unable to tear her eyes away from him.

  The Duchesse shifted in her seat. “I overheard a conversation only moments ago between a man named Marco Villenueve and a Lord Longueville. Apparently, Mr. Sauvageau, he—how to say this?—he retracted a deal and blamed it on someone...a butcher?”

  “The Butcher of High Street?” Felicity supplied with owl-wide eyes.

  “Yes, yes, that’s the one.” The Duchesse nodded. “Everyone who stood around him looked as though they would have murdered him on the spot if they weren’t in the public domain. He’d admitted to taking their money and sending it to Russia.” She placed a hand at the base of her throat. “Russia, in this day and age? Madness.”

  Mercy suddenly understood what she was looking at. A tense conversation between the High Street Butchers—a particularly organized rival gang—and the King of the Fauves.

  Her lover.

  She tried superimposing the man who’d occupied her bed and body last night over the man who stood across the increasingly crowded billiards room.

  He’d been rumpled and randy or, at times, tender and tentative. Touching her as if she were as delicate as one of the carnation petals he now plucked from the buttonhole of his enemy and crushed beneath his shoe.

  What the devil was he thinking? That was tantamount to a public challenge to men like them, even she knew that.

  Wars had been started over less insult.

  “Lord Longueville is a dastardly man,” Felicity offered, turning so she could covertly peek over her shoulder in the guise of a stretch. “I heard Father once called him a pustulant boil on the arse of the empire. He is said to have lost his fortune, and thereby became this Butcher of High Street. Why, I wonder, is Mr. Sauvageau challenging him?”

  “It makes no sense. He’s generally considered to be a suave and politic fellow...” The Duchesse trailed off again, her eyes narrowing on him. “I heard the men talking about moving against him the moment he leaves tonight. More will be outside the courtyard of his estate in wait for his Gabriel, who is a notorious recluse. I don’t know him well, but I feel an odd sense of duty to warn him.”

  Felicity scrutinized the Duchesse. “Why would you feel a duty to—”

  “I’ll do it.” Mercy stood so quickly, she became a bit lightheaded, whether from the heat of the crowded manse or the sudden pounding of her heart, she couldn’t be sure.

  She blinked away the sensation before all but yanking Felicity out of her seat.

  “You and the Duchesse should go for the authorities without alerting anyone. I think there will be violence here tonight.”

  “Erm...” Felicity gulped and looked at the floor, her face flushing behind her mask.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t be angry.”

  A pang of anxiety thrummed deep in her stomach. “Felicity.”

  “I engaged an errand boy before we left, and sent a note to Morley the moment we arrived.”

  “What?” She forced the word out through clenched teeth.

  Felicity put her hands up as if to ward off a blow. Or a gunshot. “I know you didn’t want that, but, Mercy, it was foolhardy for us to walk into such a situation without anyone knowing where we are. The moment we arrived I sensed danger, and who better to turn to than our reasonable and protective brother-in-law?”

  “Felicity, you have no idea what you’ve done.” Mercy threw her hands in the air. “Morley is still obligated to take Raphael into custody.”

  “Raphael? Why would you be worried about...” Felicity cocked her head in a very sparrow-like gesture. “You say his name as if you’re acquainted. Mercy, are the two of you...involved?”

  Oh Lord. She was entirely unprepared to answer a question of that scope. “No! Well... Yes. That is—I—we—”

  “Mon Dieu.” The Duchess
e covered her mouth. “You’re in love with him.”

  “I never!” The protest rang false, even to her own ears.

  She felt rather than saw the Duchesse lift a dubious eyebrow from behind her mask. “Lovers, then?”

  Mercy’s lips slammed together. She couldn’t bring herself to deny it. To lie. And yet, how could she explain? If he was involved with Mathilde, then would the poor grieving Duchesse have her heart broken all over again to hear of it?

  “You made love to the man arrested for Mathilde’s murder?” It was Felicity’s eyes that carried the gravest of wounds. “And worse, you didn’t tell me?”

  It was the first secret ever kept between them.

  Mercy took her twin’s hand. “I met him in front of the wolf exhibit yesterday and he asked if he could come to me... I—I couldn’t resist him. And also, I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. Not when things are so complicated. But I promise you I’m not being sentimental when I tell you that I know he’s innocent of this crime. I have evidence.”

  Felicity pulled her hand away. “But he’s guilty of a thousand other crimes! Or don’t you remember the night he might have killed us for the gold Nora’s late husband stole from him?”

  “He gave that to Titus and Nora’s hospital,” Mercy pointed out.

  “It was no gift. He said he’d collect on the balance, remember? I think of that every day. What sort of debt Honoria and Titus might find themselves beholden to? When will he come for our sister?”

  “He won’t.” Mercy’s defense of him sounded pallid and desperate, even to her own ears. “He wants out of the Fauves. The gang was his father’s, and he was born to this life, but his plan is to leave it all behind.”

  To leave her behind.

  She turned to the Duchesse. “I suspect that has something to do with his reckless behavior tonight. I think...I think he might be trying to destroy what his father built.”

  “Mercy, you’re speaking madness!” Felicity shook her a little.

  “No...she’s not,” the Duchesse shocked them both into silence with her words. “Gabriel and Raphael Sauvageau’s father was known as le Bourreau. The executioner. He was said to have been an Englishman of some renown, though no one knew his identity. He was infamous in Monaco and France, indeed, all over the Mediterranean. I know that he used his family awfully, and broke his eldest son in the fighting pits.”

  Felicity wrapped her arms around her middle, shaking her head in disbelief. “How do you know all this?”

  Mercy wondered that as well.

  The Duchesse’s chin gave a tremulous wobble. “Because le Bourreau hurt Mathilde. Showed her...unnatural affections when she was just a girl, even though she was the daughter of his wife’s sister, Patrice.”

  Mercy gasped in horror for poor Mathilde. “You mean...”

  “Yes, Mathilde and Raphael are—were cousins. This is why I feel some duty toward him. He is a ruthless man, to be sure, but he was kind to her. Even when kindness was never a part of that awful dynasty.”

  Cousins.

  Not lovers.

  That was why Raphael had come to see Mathilde on the day she died. Why he was so fond of her without professing any romantic relationships.

  It was why he was so intent upon finding her killer.

  Because they were family.

  She turned back to the billiards table to find that he’d disappeared, though their men were still at each other’s throats.

  Damn but that was an irritating skill of his. Slithering away just when she needed to talk to him.

  “I have to find him. To warn him. Whatever he has planned tonight, he has to stop it.”

  Felicity grabbed for her as she fled away, but missed. “Mercy, no!”

  “You were right, Felicity, to send for Morley. You must go find him now. Must tell him there is a war brewing in this very house that might spill onto the streets of London, and then go home where it’s safe.”

  With that, Mercy turned and plunged through a crowd of drunken crowing lads, intent upon searching every room in the house until he turned up.

  Oh, when she caught up with him, he’d have more than a few things to answer for. Just how did he plan on finding Mathilde’s killer when he was busy stirring discontent between dangerous people?

  Didn’t he understand he was putting himself in undue danger?

  Just as she was elbowing through the crowd at the doorway to the ballroom, a strong hand seized said elbow and yanked her toward the dance floor.

  One minute she was walking. The next she was waltzing, and the transition had been so seamlessly elegant and effortless, it could only have been perpetrated by one arrogant rake.

  “What the everlasting fuck are you doing here?” Raphael snarled against her ear, even as he encircled her in an embrace that could only be considered protective.

  Mercy hated that dancing in his arms was about as exhilarating as flying. That she thrilled at every press of his thigh against hers and every subtle flex of his arm or his shoulder as he led her through the steps to the dizzying waltz.

  She tried not to notice that his nostrils flared when he was angry, and beneath a mask that seemed to be made of dark serpentine scales, each furious breath was rather endearing.

  “What do you think?” She tossed her head with brash irreverence, daring him to dress her down. “I’m looking for Mathilde’s murderer! Which is what you should be doing instead of—”

  “I thought we agreed you’d leave that to me.” His fingers almost bit into her back as he pulled her indecently close to avoid being clobbered by a drunken couple.

  “You assumed I’d leave it to you,” she bit back, finding herself reluctant to regain a proper distance, regardless of her ire. “I agreed to take my further findings to the police, which I will now that I have further findings. I didn’t before, and so no agreement between us was breached.”

  He opened his mouth to reply, and she beat him to it, cutting off any incoming homilies.

  “Listen to this.” She squeezed the mound of his coiled bicep in her excitement. “I spoke to the Duchesse de la Cour, who claims she wasn’t after Mathilde but about to run away with her. They were lovers, if you’ll believe it.”

  He didn’t miss a step, but remained silent for an entire refrain of music, as if he didn’t know which part of their conversation to address first.

  “Mathilde...with a woman? I always thought it was Marco...” he muttered.

  “Who?”

  “My second in command who was placed by my father before his death. He’s the one most likely to turn on me when—” He paused. “It doesn’t matter. I do know that Mathilde procured most of her vice from Marco. Often those arrangements are...physical. I know she’d angered him lately, and I intended to wrest a confession from him tonight.”

  She glowered up at his impossibly handsome, aggravating face. “And you kept that tidbit of information from me? How dare you!”

  The look he sent back to her threatened to immolate her on the spot.

  Not because it was angry.

  Quite the opposite. It was possibly the most tender, honest gaze she’d ever received in her lifetime. “I would die before I put you in the path of a man like Marco Villenueve... The Good Book says never to cast your pearls before swine.”

  “Yes, well, it also says never to eat shellfish, and I had a cracking huge lobster last night.”

  He barked out a harsh, caustic laugh that did nothing to soften the pinched lines of worry casting his features into stark and savage relief. “I don’t know whether to be delighted or infuriated with you.”

  “While you make up your mind, hear this,” she plunged ahead. “The Duchesse thinks possibly a member of her ducal family might have hired an assassin once they found out about their plans to leave together. So, you see, you can’t start a gang war right now because we’re so close to finding your cousin’s killer, Raphael.” She paused for a moment to glare up at him. “By the by, don’t for one minute think you’ve got
ten away with implying that you two were—”

  She made a plaintive squeak as he spun her off the floor with such force, they stumbled toward a hall beneath the grand stairs, parting the crowd, unconcerned with another drunken couple stumbling around.

  “Where are we going?” she huffed, trying to dig her heels in as he dragged her toward a simple, unadorned entry that branched from the main room.

  “I’m getting you out of here safely...so I can throttle you in peace,” he said from between teeth that his coiled jaw wouldn’t allow to separate. “Goddammit, Mercy, you have no idea what you’ve done.”

  Chapter 14

  Mercy wriggled, jerked, and flopped about, but was unable to break Raphael’s relentless grip as he tirelessly dragged her up a dark set of spiraling stairs and into a deserted passageway. “How dare you manhandle me, you ignominious arse!”

  “I’ve been called worse,” he muttered as he pinned her to his side with one arm, to test several door handles. Finding one unlocked, he shoved her inside and followed in, slamming the door shut.

  “Oh, no you don’t! I am not about to be tossed into some—” Just where were they?

  Mercy paused to look around their dim surroundings, noting the two small, bare, if neatly made beds, open trunks, and matching spare-looking wardrobes. Unused maids’ chambers, it seemed. Which would explain why the entire part of the house was abandoned, overcome as the staff would be during such an affair as this. They’d be below stairs where the kitchens were located, along with the male servants’ quarters.

  Raphael slid the lock on the door and blocked it with all six feet of hard, infuriated male.

  The only light filtered in through the thin windows above the beds, provided by several lanterns in the garden. It slanted over him at just such an angle, casting half his features in light and the other half in shadow.

  As if the two battled over him.

  Mercy stood fast, planting her feet shoulder-width apart so as not to advertise how the very sight of him made her weak in the knees. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing but I demand—”