Bournestein motioned to the brute at his left and the man snatched Sienna’s arm, spinning and pinning her, crushing her into his chest. She started to fight, swinging at anything her fists and feet could reach. Then she heard a distinctive click and the barrel of a pistol set hard against her temple.
She froze.
“Father.” Her yelp came out strangled.
Bournestein waved his hand in her direction. “It’ll keep ye still for this, lass. Don’t want to jostle Blue Bob’s arm now, do ye?”
Logan had already closed in the distance to Bournestein and his men, stopping far enough away to not be an immediate threat, but also past the distance her father’s cane would reach. Her father used his cane mercilessly, and he was quick with it, the iron rod running through the middle shaft of the wood making every blow brutal.
“Get that pistol off of my wife’s temple, Bournestein.” Logan’s tone had shifted. A tone she recognized. Still deadly. But now cold as well. Cold and controlled. Cold to the point that he was going to win. Win no matter what.
It was exactly what she needed to hear.
He was going to be fine, no matter what happened next.
The brute’s arm around her belly tightened, clasping her hard to the stench of him. If she didn’t have the barrel of a pistol aimed at her head by a twitchy hand, Logan’s voice would have done even more to bolster her confidence.
Bournestein lifted his cane, circling it as he pointed it to the castle behind them. “Ye think this fancy hunk of stones gives ye right to order me about, boy?”
“It’ll give me the power to tear you down, whorehouse, by whorehouse, gaming hell by gaming hell, if you don’t let Sienna go.”
A caustic chuckle left Bournestein and he spit toward Logan’s feet. “Ye reach too far, boy. Ye always have. Those presumptuous airs about ye.” He swung his cane in front of Logan, cutting it with a whistle through the air. “Yer me, boy. Ye’ve always been me. Born in the wrong station. The only difference is I know where I belong and I’ve never fought it. I embraced it and that has given me the world.” He jabbed his cane into the granite gravel next to his foot. “The money. The people. I control everyone in St. Giles.”
Logan’s glare skewered him. “Not everyone.”
“No. Not everyone.” Bournestein chuckled, the snake smile curling the outer edges of his lips into his portly cheeks. “Ye were the only one to ever defy me and live. And still ye fight it. I told yer mother ye were the heir—ye would have me empire. That was how she let me into her bed, boy, did ye know it? She whored herself out fer ye.”
“You bastard, I never wanted your empire—your blood money.” Logan’s voice lost the note of cool detachment and he took a step forward, fists clenched, then stopped himself, withdrawing his gained step.
He wasn’t ready to strike. Not yet.
He was waiting. Waiting for something. Sienna’s muscles coiled. Whatever it was, Sienna had to be ready.
Bournestein whipped his cane through the air, jabbing it at the castle. “Ye think the riches of yer duchy are clean? Built on the end of a blade—just the same as mine—the only difference being it was hundreds of years ago.”
“Yet we don’t live in that world anymore, Bournestein.” Logan’s voice had tempered, back in control again.
“We always live in that world, boy. That’s what ye never could accept.” Bournestein guffawed, shaking his head. “I never should have kept ye for Sienna after yer mother died. I figured on ye being her best protector, but I should’ve kicked ye and yer brat brother out of the Joker’s Roost the second they took her body away.”
“And I should have left.” Logan’s reply was instant and cold, juxtaposed to the rage starting to mottle on Bournestein’s forehead. Logan glanced up at the sky. Sienna’s eyes followed his look. Darkness was settling. Whatever was going to happen, needed to happen fast. Her father’s men excelled in the dark—it was where they lived and breathed, in the darkest shadows.
Logan’s gaze fell to Bournestein. “But I stayed because I couldn’t leave Sienna to your mercy. I was her best protector. You’re not wrong on that score. Only she needed to be protected from you.” Logan took a cautious step toward him, within striking distance. “Bournestein, it’s time. Let my wife go. Let your daughter go.”
Bournestein swung his cane with the speed of a striking snake. Logan caught the end of the stick in midair, the cords of muscles on his forearm straining.
Bournestein tried to yank the cane away to no avail, and his face mottled fully, spittle forming on the edge of his mouth as his words flew. “Ye think yer so smart, boy, ye think reason will get ye out of this. That was what ye never understood. Folk like us, we decide things with blades and gunpowder. And I ain’t seen none of that on ye, boy. So I think we’ll be leaving now. And I’ll be back fer me cane.” His hand holding the cane flung open, releasing his grip on it. He turned and strolled lazily to his horse, grabbing the reins and bringing it alongside Sienna. “Try and stop us, boy, and it’ll be the death of yer wife.”
Logan’s voice cut into the silence. One word.
“Hunter.”
A shot blasted into the thick air.
The brute holding Sienna dropped behind her, sinking to the ground, his hand on the pistol falling from her temple. Sienna sank in unison, his dead arm tangled around her, dragging her down with him.
Another shot, the blast next to her ear as the man’s hand hit the gravel, knocking the trigger.
She slammed into the ground and instinct sent her rolling. Rolling away from the brute, and when she landed on her back, she saw her father’s horse rearing from the blasts of the guns.
Rearing directly above her.
Frantic hooves flailed high in the air over her face. White legs against the streaks of dark blues streaming across the sky. Hooves coming down at her face.
A mass of cloth and flesh landed over her eyes, her chest, suffocating her scream just as the hooves descended on her head.
She could feel the impact, hear the bones above her crushing.
One hoof. Two. Up, and then down again a second time. The weight of the horse crushed down upon her through the flesh. A convulsion ripped through the body atop her.
Everything went still. Everything except for the horse running, the ground trembling as heavy hooves darted to a frantic escape.
But the body on top of her face and torso—still.
Still and dead.
A mass so heavy she couldn’t breathe.
She moved her arm, wedging it up next to her ribcage, pushing. Too heavy. She was quickly running out of air.
She shoved again.
And again. Then somehow freed her other hand to push up as well.
In one striking whoosh, the body lifted off of her, air and dust enveloping her. She flipped to her side, gasping. Gasping for air.
No. Hell. No.
No. No. No.
Not Logan. Not Logan.
Her eyes shut tight. She couldn’t roll back to the body behind her. Couldn’t see his crushed body. Blood on his face. On his skull. Couldn’t see him not breathing. Not living.
“Sienna.”
Logan’s voice sank down to her, filtering into her ears between her gasps.
Her eyes flew open and she looked up.
Logan was crouched over her, his hand reaching to her face. Terror in his eyes.
A ghost. A ghost and this would be the last time she saw him.
No.
No.
No.
“Sienna.” His hand touched her cheek.
A solid hand.
A hand made of flesh and bone.
Her fingers clasped onto the back of his, squeezing it, making sure it was real. “Logan?”
“Are you hurt? Sienna?” Panic had taken over his voice and he reached with his other hand to her shoulder, shaking her. “Sienna, talk to me. Talk to me.”
“Logan? What? You’re—if you’re there—then what—who?” She pushed herself up slightly
, craning her neck to see behind her.
Her father. His skull cracked. Blood seeping in blotchy spots into the purple velvet of his overcoat.
“Father?”
Logan wrapped his arms around her, pulling her upright. “Are you hurt?”
She couldn’t tear her eyes off her father. His broken body. Always so big. Always so fearful. Now crumpled in a mangled mess.
The father she loved.
The father she hated.
Logan’s hand went onto the back of her head, turning her away from the sight and tucking her face into his chest. His chin came down on the top of her head, cocooning her. “You don’t need to witness it, Sienna.”
She let him. Let him turn her from the man that had controlled so much of her life. She couldn’t believe he was gone. Dead from the world.
She started to shake. Tremble after tremble racking her body.
Pulling back slightly, she looked up at Logan as unspent panic took a hold of her. “You—you ripped my heart out—I thought it was you on top of me and my world was collapsing into nothingness.”
He didn’t reply, only crushed her to him, holding her, refusing to let her go.
“Logan.” Hunter’s voice reached her ears.
Logan’s chin lifted from her head and he twisted to the side to look at something.
“The other three?” Hunter’s low words were deadly, ready for anything, ready for orders.
Sienna turned her head against Logan’s chest, following the voice. Hunter stood next to them on the ground, the second rifle Bridget had readied in his hands and pointed at the three other brutes. One was flat on the ground, not awake, a bleeding gash across his head that could have only been caused by her father’s cane. The second one sat next to him, holding his knee that was askew, his face grimacing in pain. The third stood behind the other two, his hands up in front of him, eyes begging for mercy.
Logan had worked quickly with her father’s cane in his hand.
Her husband’s muscles tensed under her cheek. Sienna shifted forward to look past Logan, only to see the brute that had held the pistol to her temple now in a pile on the ground, his forehead oozing blood.
“Go. They can go.” Logan heaved a breath into his lungs. Sienna could feel how very against his instinct that command was. He wanted the brutes dead.
She wanted the brutes dead.
But that was not the world they lived in anymore.
“You are positive?” Hunter asked.
Logan nodded, his chin bumping into the top of her head. “There’s already been too much bloodshed. But see them to the border of the land. Give them their horses and coin enough so they don’t terrorize the countryside on their journey back to London.” Logan’s voice went brutal and he twisted to the brutes. “If I hear so much as a tulip was crumpled under your feet on your way south, I will come for you.”
The two awake men nodded, quickly dragging their unconscious man back to the horses they had ridden into Shadowmoor. They heaved him on his belly over one of the horses and then mounted with haste.
His rifle still trained on the men, Hunter mounted Logan’s horse and followed the men down the pathway to the main road.
Logan shifted, going to his feet and lifting Sienna up with him. He set her to her toes and Sienna looked around her at the carnage, her gaze averting past her father’s lifeless eyes.
Her stare landed on the brute that had held her and she noted the bullet hole. Her look whipped to Bridget. “Hunter shot him? That was the first blast? He shot him with my head inches away?” Her mouth went dry at the thought of how very close that bullet had been to her skull.
Bridget nodded, a gleam of pride in her eye. “He’s one of the crown’s finest marksmen.”
“The finest marksman. And the only one I would trust to take that shot—to hold your life in his trigger finger.” Logan’s arm tightened around her shoulders.
Bridget glanced at the two bodies, then looked to Logan. “I’m going to go check on the stable boy—we saw them hit him over the head and drag him into a stall when we pulled in. Then I’ll gather up men to take care of the bodies and the horses.”
Logan inclined his head to her. “Thank you.”
Charging a wide swath around the bodies, Bridget disappeared into the center stable.
His arm moved down to an iron clasp around her back and Logan ushered Sienna up the path toward the castle. She didn’t resist.
It wasn’t until he’d led her up to her chambers and closed the door behind him that she could take a full, deep breath into her lungs.
His arm locked around her back slid off of her and he walked over to the table. He picked up the decanter of brandy on the table and set the crystal to the lip of a glass.
“He saved me, Logan.” The words left her not as her own, small and breathless.
His hand paused in pouring the drink and he looked to her, the crinkles around his eyes deep in concern. “He did. In the end, he did.”
He finished pouring the amber liquid into the glass and strode over to her, grabbing her wrist and lifting it. He set the glass in her hand.
Grateful, she took three healthy swallows.
She’d thought it odd that he’d left the full decanter in her room days ago and she hadn’t touched it. But with her memories back about her, she realized how she actually liked the taste. Growing up in the Joker’s Roost had done that for her. To her.
She took a fourth swallow.
Logan lifted the glass from her hand and drank the rest in one long gulp.
He set it on the side table by the door and moved back in front of her, his hands clasping her face between his palms. The tips of his fingers trembled against her skin. “Hell, Sienna, you don’t know what those seconds when you were under that horse did to me.”
“The same thing done to me when I thought it was you atop me, shielding me, bones cracking.”
He nodded, his silver grey eyes solemn. “For everything your father was and wasn’t to us—he saved your life. For that one action alone, I will honor his spirit and forgive the years before.”
“Can you do that? Can I do that?”
His lips drew inward for a long moment. “I don’t think we have a choice in the matter. He’s gone. He cannot come after us ever again.”
Tears sprung into her eyes, and for once, she didn’t feel the need to wipe them away, to hide them from the world, from her husband. “We’re free, aren’t we?”
He nodded, the liberated look in his eyes simultaneously breaking and filling her heart. His fingers moved upward, curling into her hair. “Free. As long as I have you by my side.”
She smiled through the tears streaming down her face. “You have all of me, Logan. You’re my always.”
{ Epilogue }
Sienna hadn’t asked about it. Hadn’t wanted to ask, for it had taken a month for her to even begin to think of her father’s end. Of how his need for control caused his own demise.
That, she had finally settled in her mind.
There was just one thing more. Of everything of their childhood, of everything she had remembered in the last six weeks since her father’s death, this was the one worry she could not shake.
But there, under the crook of her husband’s arm long atop the back of the wrought iron bench high on the ridge, it was finally time to put to rest the last of the past.
Setting her thoughts in order, she watched the sun dipping low in the far-off sky, tinges of purple splendor starting to streak across the sky. Logan sat with ease, his right ankle propped atop his left knee, his fingers twiddling with a long lock of her hair, weaving it in and out of his fingers. The serenity about him struck her time and again—peace she’d never thought to see in his body or his eyes. Seeing it swelled her heart over and over.
So much so, she almost didn’t want to ask the question and upset the tranquility. But she needed to know.
She twisted her head upward to see Logan’s face, to see his reaction before he tried to cov
er up whatever he didn’t want her to see. “About Robby—I never asked.”
His grey eyes went guarded. “Never asked what?”
“What happened to your brother after he delivered me to Shadowmoor?”
“He left.” Logan’s look went off into the distance for a long moment before it dropped to her. “But he wanted you to know he was sorry.”
“Sorry for that last night at the Joker’s Roost before we escaped?”
“Sorry for everything.”
She nodded, a deep breath settling into her chest. “Did he ever learn that we were never going to leave him behind?”
“I told him in London after the Revelry’s Tempest burned down—and it was something he never knew. Bournestein certainly never told him. And all these years he lived with the belief that we were going to leave him behind.”
“Did he believe you when you told him?”
Logan’s right cheek pulled back. “I think—in so much as he wanted to believe me. I think he knows deep down I never would have abandoned him—we never would have abandoned him.”
“I tried to tell him that night after he dragged me off, but he was too drunk to hear me.”
“And he hurt you.” Logan’s voice went hard, remnants of long ago fury still tangible in his words.
Her lips pulled inward for a long moment. “I do not give him an excuse, but I know that was not the true him. He was drunk and in a rage, but even with that he would never hurt me. Scare me, yes, but never truly hurt me.”
His arm tightened around her shoulders. “And I could never let him have you. Not when I needed you.”
She lifted her fingers, touching the strong line of his chin that she loved to sketch. “I never wanted him, Logan, only you. Always you.”
His head bent down to her, his lips finding hers in the longest, softest kiss that still managed to curl her toes.
She looked out at the last sliver of the sun disappearing beyond the rolling hills. “Tell me Robby escaped. Escaped to somewhere good after he left here. I want that for him, this peace we have found.”
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