Dancing With Danger

by Kerrigan Byrne

  As she flounced away, one knee-weakening truth became unerringly obvious.

  He was in trouble.

  No.

  He...was in love.

  To him, the emotion hadn’t been definable. He’d never truly stopped to ponder it. Just accepted that he felt something like it for his brother. Had done so once for his mother.

  Not that his emotions for Mercy were anything filial. Indeed, he hated to admit they might be stronger even in so short a time.

  He’d known he’d loved Gabriel because his brother meant more than himself. Because he’d die for him. Kill for him. His loyalty was absolute and unquestioned.

  But for Mercy?

  He’d burn the entire world to the ground if she asked him. He’d accomplish any Herculean task. Sail to the ends of the world to fetch a trinket she liked.

  He not only loved her enough to stay if it were possible.

  He loved her enough to let her go if it meant keeping her safe.

  The realization galvanized him forward as she wrenched the door open and plunged into the hall.

  He hovered behind her like the very wrath of God, brandishing his own sharp dagger as they spiraled back down the stairs. Raphael searched for another way out, but the only entrance and exit to this specific tower dumped them right toward the main hall of the keep.

  Damn these old fortresses.

  He lunged around her as they struggled through the short corridor toward the great hall, gathering her free hand in his. “You’ll stay glued to me, Mercy, or so help me God!”

  To his surprise and utter relief, she nodded in compliance.

  Keeping her latched between him and the wall, Raphael shoved past bodies who’d begun to flee down whichever hall they could find, not knowing they raced toward a dead end.

  An acrid smell itched at his nose, smoke and something bitter.

  He snatched a panicked footman clean off his feet. “What’s going on out there?” he demanded.

  “Madness!” The gawky lad’s voice squeaked with the fear of a man barely out of his teenage years. “Someone spied the Bobbies and before we knew it, a tussle broke out right on the ballroom floor. Men at each other’s throats. Never seen anything like it. Someone tossed over an oil lamp and now the drapes in the gaming den have caught. Best we run, man.”

  Cursing, Raphael released him and shouldered his way to the end of the hall.

  He took a quick toll of the anarchy when they broke onto the landing that wrapped around the great room’s second story, at eye level with the ostentatious chandelier.

  Morley’s men spilled into the courtyard like blue-coated rats. Some doing their best to contain the tide of panicked partygoers, funneling them out to safety.

  Others brandished an asp to meet the blows of gangster cudgels.

  Longueville was nowhere to be found, and without him and Raphael to maintain the temperature on the simmering tension between the Fauves and the Butchers, it had boiled over into this potentially lethal catastrophe.

  It wasn’t supposed to have happened this way. Only the leaders and their closest comrades were to meet here and witness his challenge.

  Then they’d gather their men to come after him in the night.

  That was how things were done in their world. They were no street-rat ruffians, their wars were waged in the dark so there were no witnesses.

  Away from the public and the police.

  But Longueville had blatantly brought an army to a masquerade, willing to crush revelers if necessary.

  The rules of engagement had been thoroughly breached.

  Two staircases led down to the ballroom floor, one on the east wall and the other on the west.

  Raphael and Mercy weaved through abandoned card games and a fortune teller’s upended table toward the west staircase as a fight began to spill up the east side toward the second floor.

  “The Duchesse was in the billiard’s room when last I saw her!” Mercy called over the din. “There!” She pointed to a large solarium now crammed with people trying to escape the smoke beginning to seep up through the three open archways.

  Raphael nodded, his eyes lasering everything else away but a bold figure who’d led the police charge into the courtyard. He already had two Butchers in irons and was dragging them roughly toward a police cart very much like the one in which Raphael had first kissed Mercy.

  Chief Inspector Morley.

  He’d get Mercy to him before returning for the Duchesse.

  Her safety was paramount to anything else.

  Cursing every fucking god in existence, Raphael tucked Mercy deeper against his side, readied his weapon, and waded into the fray. He was careful to keep his dagger away from drunken, panicked courtesans, artists, and actresses as they shoved and fled.

  Keeping to the outskirts, he hoped to avoid the increasing intensity of the violence in the great room. Once on the main floor, he had no qualms about using his elbows, fists, or his blade to quell any who came close. Who thought to claim bragging rights by landing a blow against Raphael Sauvageau.

  He had one eye on the brawl and the other on the exit that remained infuriatingly distant, when he felt Mercy lunge behind them.

  Raphael whirled just in time to see her blade embedded in the chest of one of his own men, who’d apparently thought to attack from behind.

  They thought to stab him in the back. Thinking, no doubt, that he wouldn’t see it coming, this coup against the rules of conflict.

  Because he’d taught them the code and abided by it.

  But Marco...he didn’t have a code. He would conduct his villainy out in the open, if only to amass the notoriety the Sauvageau brothers had taken a lifetime to procure.

  Raphael would see him in hell, but first...

  Gaining ground, he stopped an attacker with a swift elbow to the throat. He threw his dagger at another man who had a running start. It embedded in his eye, dropping him instantly.

  Now Raphael was weaponless, but it didn’t matter, he only had five paces to the door and sharp fucking knuckles.

  Anyone in his way had a death wish.The peal of a woman’s scream rose above the din, the desperation in the sound seeming to slow time itself.

  “Felicity! She didn’t leave in time!”

  Raphael had to employ both hands to stop Mercy from lunging through the brawl toward the far staircase.

  Where Marco Villeneuve fought against the crowd of tussling men, his arm around the waist of a struggling, petite woman Mercy’s exact likeness in feature and formal gown.

  Felicity’s mask had been torn away and her hair ruined by the cruel hand threaded through it, using the pain of his grasp to subdue her.

  Tears streamed down cheeks frozen in a heart-wrenching mask of panic that Raphael could never even imagine painted on Mercy’s resolute features.

  “We have to get to her!” Mercy cried, her own expression more temper than terror.

  Felicity spotted them across the crowd, and the sight seemed to inject her with courage. As close as they were to the fire, Felicity’s struggles produced violent coughs that interrupted her sobs. However, she landed a lucky blow with her elbow into Marco’s sharp jaw.

  Stunned, Marco released her.

  Only to spin her around and deliver a merciless blow with the back of his hand.

  Felicity dropped beneath the fray, disappearing from view.

  An inhuman roar brought Raphael’s notice to the top of the stairs.

  What he saw slackened his limbs with shock.

  Mercy chose that moment to lunge so frantically toward her sister, and he almost lost his grip. “Let me go!” she screamed. “I will murder that man!”

  “You won’t have to,” he said, strengthening his grip on her, pointing to the top of the stairs.

  Gabriel was unmistakable, even in a lupine mask Raphael had never seen before. He charged down the stairs toward Marco. What men were not tossed over the banister became little better than smears on the wall.

  To Marco’s cred
it, he stood against the oncoming juggernaut, pulling a knife from his belt.

  A shot from the direction of the door brought time to an absolute standstill. Everyone screamed and the collective crowd ducked, subsequently checking themselves for wounds.

  “Are you struck?” Raphael grasped Mercy, gripped with horror. “Dammit, are you all right?”

  “I’m unharmed,” she said, her voice shaking and small.

  Raphael checked the entry for the shooter but could identify none.

  When he looked back toward the stairs to find that Gabriel had disappeared in the thickening smoke, he felt as though the bullet had found his own chest.

  Marco was reaching down to collect Felicity, who’d yet to recover from his blow.

  Raphael wheezed out his brother’s name just in time to watch him rise from behind the banister like the very specter of the black-swathed reaper.

  Gabriel and Marco both lashed out at the same time, one with his blade, the other with nothing more than a scarred fist the size of a sledgehammer.

  Gabriel’s punch connected with an audibly satisfying crunch of bone, though Marco’s knife barely missed the eye he’d aimed it for.

  By the time the traitorous Spaniard finished rolling arse-over-end to land in a twisted heap, Gabriel had stooped to retrieve Felicity from where she’d been draped unconscious on the stairs.

  Raphael’s eyes burned, his throat closed over with emotion.

  Not with relief.

  With horror.

  Horror that echoed in the gasps and exclamations of the congregation before leaping out of Gabriel’s way as he carried the young Baron’s daughter like a bolt of cobalt cloth.

  Marco’s knife had missed his brother’s flesh, but it’d cut his mask away.

  Exposing his face to everyone.

  Gabriel kept his chin held high, relentlessly marched forward, using his monstrous appearance to part the sea of people still ebbing toward the door.

  Raphael surged forward, shoving through the crowd, knowing he’d get Mercy to safety.

  Trusting his brother to save Felicity.

  He could see through the doors ahead that Morley had tossed his prisoners into the police wagon. Just in time to catch a sobbing woman with a bloodied nose as she collapsed.

  Raphael had half-expected the Chief Inspector to have fired the shot, as he was a famous marksman, but there was no way he could have done it.

  He was simply too far away.

  Just as they were about to break free of the castle’s threshold, a figure lunged from around the corner and kicked out at Mercy’s legs.

  She gave a sharp cry of pain, and went sprawling onto her hands and knees.

  Striking like a venomous cobra, Raphael had the man’s throat in a vice grip before anyone could react. “You’ll die for that,” he vowed, reaching down with his other hand to lift Mercy off the ground.

  “So says the dead man walking.” Even over the deafening chaos, the unmistakable click of a pistol washed Raphael’s veins in ice.

  “Think you can knock me down and get away with it?” sneered former Detective Inspector Martin Trout, his face still a tapestry of purple and yellow healing bruises. “Unhand me, or I pull the trigger.”

  Raphael’s hands ached for the feel of Trout’s thin bones breaking beneath them. He would pick his teeth with this man. Would make him choke to death on his own genitals for daring to touch her.

  Something inside ignited, engulfing those pushing for escape in a billow of smoke.

  The crowd rushed the door with renewed vigor. Bodies flowed around them as if they were stones in a rushing river, heavy enough to not be swept up in the current, but in danger of being swallowed by it.

  If Raphael moved, Mercy might be trampled.

  She gasped his name and tugged at his sleeve, having yet to regain her feet. The pain she valiantly tried to hide from her voice lanced through his chest. “Raphael, his boots!”

  Raphael looked down to see the barrel of the gun aimed not as his middle, but Mercy’s head. And below even that.

  Were Brogan boots with an uncommonly tall heel.

  Like one a detective of dubious height might buy to enhance his stature.

  The soles of which had left muddy footprints beneath Mathilde Archambeau’s window when he crept in to murder her.

  “It was you!” Mercy snarled, a fierce woman even on her knees. “You cretinous pig.”

  Raphael released the man’s neck with the greatest reluctance, knowing a fear he’d never imagined possible at the sight of a pistol about to kiss the temple of his woman.

  “Just a hired gun, so to speak,” Trout corrected, oozing with antipathy and malevolence. “Spoiled French aristocrats pay better than the English government to punish their scandalous stepmothers. Better, even, than the High Street Butchers.”

  “If you shoot now, you’ll be found out.” Raphael nodded in Morley’s direction. “You can’t murder the Chief Inspector’s sister-in-law when he’s right across the courtyard.”

  Trout grinned. “This is all laid at your feet, and people see what we tell them to see, which is the King of the Fauves killing a Baron’s daughter and me wrestling the gun from you to put you down. I’ll emerge from the fire a bloody hero. Your fucking brother-in-law will likely pin the medal on my jacket himself.” His finger caressed the trigger. “I thought that woman on the stairs was you,” he spat. “Don’t worry, I won’t miss a second time.”

  Chapter 16

  From Mercy’s perspective, Raphael moved with such incredible speed, the rest of the world slowed in comparison.

  One moment she was staring down the barrel of the instrument of her death.

  And the next, he’d seized the pistol by said barrel, wrenched it toward his own middle, and twisted it out of Trout’s hands before another shot could be fired.

  He didn’t shoot the man, as she thought a generally unscrupulous gangster such as he might do.

  Rather—with his demonic features made even more so by his mask—the violence he perpetrated on Trout with the butt of the pistol no doubt left the man wishing for death.

  If he didn’t succumb to it.

  She wasn’t sure a man could survive such a savage beating.

  She wasn’t sure she cared.

  A crimson mask blocked her view just as she was coming to liken the odious detective’s face to the ground meat inside sausage casings.

  “Are you hurt?” The Duchesse pulled at her elbow, lifting her to her feet.

  Mercy stared at her dumbly. Was she hurt? The opposite, it seemed. She felt no pain whatsoever. She couldn’t feel her fingers or her lips. Perhaps she gestured in the negative, but she couldn’t tell.

  “That man was hired by Armand to kill Mathilde,” Mercy said in a rather matter-of-fact way.

  The woman’s kind eyes hardened. “That is exactly Armand’s way. He often turns to the corrupt officials to do his bidding.” She ripped off her mask, whirled, and spat on him, stepping on his neck with the sharp heel of her bejeweled boot.

  “You break her neck, I break yours.”

  And she did.

  Dimly, Mercy was aware of Raphael’s strong arms sweeping her away, of following a burgundy gown back into a burning building.

  “Felicity!” She dug in her heels, searching the increasingly smoke-clogged room for her sister.

  In all the chaos, she hadn’t witnessed her sister’s escape, and considering who was carrying Felicity, it wasn’t likely she’d have missed it. He was head and shoulders taller than most men.

  “Many of us took pleasure barges and gondolas to get here,” the Duchesse said over her shoulder. “I directed your sister and Gabriel to the tunnel beneath the keep that will take us to the canal where my boat is waiting.”

  That roused Mercy from her stupor better than anything else she could imagine might do. Felicity. Her guileless sister was a stranger to violence. So sweet-natured and timid was she, no one ever even entertained the notion of striking her.


  They hurried by torchlight through the thousand-year-old tunnel toward the sound of water lapping at the stone docks. Voices ahead of them advertised that others had come this way in search of their boats, and what that meant for her sister, Mercy couldn’t imagine.

  A strange birdlike whistle from the dark caused Raphael to tense and freeze beside her.

  Veering to the left, Raphael went toward an alcove that branched off the main causeway; Mercy and the Duchesse followed quickly on his heels.

  They found Gabriel sitting with his back against the stones, hood pulled low over his face, those startling, abysmal shadows swallowing the horror of his features from view.

  Cradled in his massive arms, Felicity looked like a child rather than a woman of twenty.

  His fingers hovered over the place above her cheekbone where a raw mark formed.

  Pale lashes cast shadows over her cheeks, and Mercy made a raw sound of relief to see them tremble.

  She rushed to her sister, sinking down next to the giant of a man to take her cold, limp hand. “Felicity, can you hear me?”

  “She woke.” The graveled voice came from the void behind the hood. “She opened her eyes, said your name, and...and looked at me...”

  A bleak note underscored his words with abject desolation.

  “She faints when she’s...” Mercy cut off, realizing the man had spoken in perfect English.

  “When she’s terrified,” he finished.

  Raphael had mentioned before that Gabriel did not speak English. No doubt, it was a truth they hid from the world.

  “I don’t have her smelling salts.” She tapped Felicity on the uninjured cheek. “Darling, can you come around? Do you hear me?”

  “Some cold water from the canal, maybe?” the Duchesse suggested, tearing the hem of her dress. “I’ll soak this and put it against her neck, that might do the trick.”

  A resourceful woman, the Duchesse.

  Raphael loomed over them, both a comforting presence and a frightening specter of wrath splattered by the blood of his enemy.

  He glared daggers down at his brother. “Why are you not being carved into by Dr. Conleith right now?”