“I do think we should hire more security…and probably shouldn’t leave until after dark.”
“Excellent!” Mercy swept to the front door. “I’ll just ask our entourage if they have any dangerous-looking friends.”
Dawn
Titus was stone-cold sober by the time he reached Sheerness.
As they careened through the sleepy port town, dawn licked the eastern sky with silver. Clouds built a swirling mass in the distance, pregnant with an approaching storm. The ocean ebbed and surged in a murky maelstrom, as a swarming flock of dark birds waved and shifted like an ominous flag above.
When the carriage clattered up to the dilapidated warehouse at #12 Seaworthy Street—the address on Dorian’s note—Titus leapt from the carriage before it even had a chance to slow down. Clutching his medical bag in one hand and a wicked iron-tipped club in the other, he realized he was more ready to use the unfamiliar weapon than the typical tools.
After suffering through the past couple of weeks, he was ready to break something.
Or someone.
The warehouse stood gaunt and bleak, hunkering alone over a vacant dock. It was as if the tightly clustered shipyard businesses to the south and north had turned their backs, leaving it to rot abandoned and alone.
Dim light flickered from a window in the corner facing the water. Along one dark alley, two passenger carriages and a cart used for hauling freight were hitched to sleepy horses. Their breaths curled from their nostrils into the chill of the morning, and Titus could almost hear the sound, so complete was the eerie silence.
Still as death.
What if they were too late?
Dread and fury threatened to overwhelm him, tunneling his vision with shades of crimson. Nora. His heart tattooed the syllables of her name into his ribs.
“Wait, dammit,” Morley growled as his and Dorian’s boots hit the ground behind Titus. “We don’t know what is awaiting us in there.”
“She’s in there. That’s all I need to know.” Even as he said it, he paced at the door, desperately listening for signs of life. He looked behind him to see Morley hang a rifle over his shoulder.
“That woman is banned from entering warehouses for the rest of her natural life,” the Chief Inspector muttered with no small amount of exasperation.
“Upon that, you can rely,” Titus vowed, grappling back both wrath and worry in an effort to summon the strength to discover whatever horror might await them inside. “Where is the security they hired?”
“I was wondering that myself.” Blackwell, a man fond of wearing long jackets even in the summer, had any number of weapons hidden on him at any given time. Whether he currently palmed a knife or a pistol remained to be seen. “Tell me you have a firearm in that bag, Doctor.”
“Trust me,” Titus said darkly. “I’ve instruments in here that would cause you nightmares.”
“Good. Let us hope we don’t need them.”
“There’s nowhere to climb,” Morley grumbled, his head tilted back to survey the drooping, dangerously sloped roof of the structure. “And no windows low enough to get to.”
“The front door it is, then.” Titus lifted his boot and kicked the door. The latch shattered and wood splintered as the thing exploded inward on rusted hinges.
They advanced into the gloom of the warehouse, Titus at their head, using the darkness on the street side to their advantage.
What he saw confounded him enough to freeze his feet to the floor.
The warehouse was an empty void of packed earth and mold. The air stirred with a sharp bite of pitch. Tired beams held aloft sagging rafters and a second-floor walkway was missing more boards than it boasted. A handful of shipping crates clustered at the top of a ramp that led out to the water, if freight wanted to be loaded onto smaller crafts.
A lone lantern perched on a crate and haloed three slim women, who stood abreast on the platform behind an open chest. Clad in dark colors as they were, the Goode sisters might have been hovering over a child’s coffin rather than a gleaming fortune.
Titus’s heart came alive at the sight of Nora, standing between her fair sisters like a midnight angel. He devoured her with his gaze, his vision blurred with exhaustion and unbridled emotion.
He released her name on a relieved breath, breaking into a jog toward her.
She shook her head, the warning in her wide eyes piercing him with caution the moment before a lone man melted from the shadows beneath the landing.
He maneuvered in front of the women and the chest with the deceptively sleek insouciance of a snake. But Titus could see that this serpent was coiled, ready to strike at the slightest provocation. He was neither bulky nor slight, tall nor short. Though his proportions were hidden beneath, an exquisitely tailored blue suit suggested at imposing strength and ideal ratios. Dark hair gleamed almost blue in the lantern light, and a diamond winked from one ear.
Titus’s fist curled around his club in readiness. Though the man appeared unarmed and unaccompanied, he knew a predator when he saw one.
This particular predator had the raw-boned, sharp-jawed elegance that would have suited the archangel for which he was named.
Raphael Sauvageau.
“The Black Heart of Ben More.” The gangster bowed at the waist, adopting a smile that was dangerously close to a sneer. “It is an incomparable honor. I have been an ardent pupil of yours for many years.” Though his English was perfect, his measured voice was tinged with the suggestion of a French accent.
Dorian snorted from where he stood at Titus’s left shoulder, also deceptively calm as a panther about to spring. “I’d give you terrible marks. Look at you, you’re here alone with no army at your back. You’re obviously going to die.”
“I’d rather no one die today,” Morley said, belying the rifle he’d tucked into his shoulder.
Dorian expressed a sigh of consternation, adjusting his eye patch. “You’ve always been such a boor, Morley. I can’t fathom how we’ve become allies.”
The chief inspector ignored him. “Where are the security officers hired to protect these women?”
“He told them to go home!” Mercy gestured to the gangster, her features a mask of ardent disbelief. “We brought five useless armed brutes with us, but he somehow arrived here first. When he introduced himself and told our guards to go…well they just… left.”
“They’d doubtless heard of me.” Raphael Sauvageau’s laughing, tawny eyes locked with Titus, and something like recognition flared there. “You are the dangerous one, Doctor,” he murmured as if to himself. “One of these women belongs to you.” He circled the girls, making a great show of inspecting them, not as a man, but as a beast might his next meal. “The question is, which? The bespectacled bluestocking, the mouthy minx, or…” He stopped in front of Nora, whose features remained carefully blank, her composure born of years of living with volatility. “Ah yes, the benighted beauty.”
“If you touch her—” Titus lunged forward, but Dorian caught his shoulder.
“I haven’t, and I don’t intend to.” Sauvageau put up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender as Morley drew a bead. “There’s no need for all of that. It is only my brother, Gabriel, and me. We mean no one harm.”
Another man stepped from behind the stacked crates to take up sentinel behind the women. He wore a long coat over shoulders half again as wide as his brother’s, and a curious hood that shielded his features from view. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. The way he loomed over the women spoke terrifying volumes.
Raphael kept his tone conversational, genial even. “We only needed the two of us to load our gold into the cart and we will be on our way.”
“Horseshit,” Dorian spat. “Surely your savages are close by.”
“Fauves, not savages.” Raphael’s eyes gleamed with a dangerous ire. “We are untamed but elegant beasts. We aren’t like the brutes and bullies here. We are teaching men to find their own sovereignty. To create their own class in a system that would repres
s them.”
Morley made a distinctly British sound of disgust before he muttered, “Bloody French, even their gangsters are vogue.”
“Monegasque,” Raphael corrected. “Half English, actually, but that isn’t what you need to worry about… your current problem, is that I stand between you and your women, and you stand between me and the door through which I need to carry my gold. Fortunately for all of us, these challenges are easily resolved.”
Morley cocked his rifle. “You’ve balls of brass. I’ll give you that. But you’re insane if you think you’re walking out of here with that gold.”
“Say I don’t.” An edge leaked into the gangster’s voice, turning his consonants lethally sharp. “Like you, Dorian Blackwell, I have a long memory. I do not forget what is taken from me, and I always take what I’m owed…would it do for any of you to wallow in wonder over when I’ll chose to collect on the debt? Because there will be a reckoning. I am just as relentless as any of you. Dare I say more so.” He plucked at a loose fiber from Nora’s sleeve, and only the delicate flare of her nostrils advertised her panic. “No one in this room would be safe.”
This time no one stopped Titus when he advanced. “I will end you, Sauvageau.”
The pile of muscle behind the girls unsheathed a knife. He did nothing with it, but each woman tensed at the sound, the twins reaching for their elder sister.
On anyone else, Sauvageau’s smile would have been disarming. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor, but did you not take an oath to do no harm?”
Titus wasn’t a doctor right now. He was a man. A man come to claim his woman, to snatch her out of the jaws of a monster.
And then throttle her with his bare hands.
“I’m a surgeon,” he hissed. “Which means I know exactly how to carve into you until your voice would give out from the screaming.”
Raphael glanced back at Nora with an impressed expression. “I do believe he loves you.”
She stared at him, her heart shining in her eyes. “I love him.”
Titus almost dropped the implements in his hands. To hear the words from her mouth for the first time stole his breath. But the fear that they could be her last words filled him with a dread he’d not known possible.
“And so we find ourselves at an impasse.” The gangster clapped his hands together. “Kill me and take my gold, and start a gang war the likes of which this city has not seen. Let me go and take my gold, then look over your shoulders until I come for it… and for you. Leave now and give me back my gold. And be done with the entire business.” He opened his arms like a benevolent king before turning to Nora. “The Fauves have no dealings with you or yours, and the Chief Inspector saved me from having to kill your husband for stealing from me in the first place.” He glanced at Titus. “Did you a favor, I think.”
“But—but what about the clinics?” Felicity’s panicked question echoed through the room like the ricochet of a bullet. When the gangster turned to her, Felicity gasped, putting her hand to her mouth as she visibly began to shake. Behind her lenses, her clear, blue eyes went owlish and round as wells of tears gathered in spikes in her lashes.
“What’s this you say?” Raphael glided toward her with a serpentine grace, and she took several steps backward, tripping on the hem of her gown.
Gabriel caught her shoulders with lightning reflexes. The wicked knife still in his hands, the flat of the blade resting against her arm.
She looked at it and whimpered, going slack like a frightened bunny in the enormous man’s grip. Her skin blanched a ghostly shade and her breath started to sob into her throat as if she couldn’t gulp enough air.
Raphael held out a hand, but paused when she shrank away. “You needn’t fear me, child. What do you mean about the clinics?”
“I—I can’t…I—I…” Felicity broke off, beginning to hyperventilate in earnest.
“Back away, sir.” Mercy lunged forward and slapped Raphael’s hand aside. “She cannot breathe when she is frightened!” She yanked her sister toward her and, to Titus’s astonishment, the silent and mysteriously hooded Gabriel released Felicity from his grip and retreated toward the water, sheathing the knife immediately.
Something about his posture told Titus that he was not…unaffected by the encounter.
Strange.
For his part, Raphael gazed down at the hand that’d been slapped away as if truly seeing it for the first time, and then up at Mercy with an arrested expression.
As if sensing danger, Nora stepped forward, thrusting herself between Sauvageau and her younger sisters. “You asked when we arrived, why we’d chosen now to come for the gold you’d lost.”
“Not lost,” Raphael corrected. “It was taken.”
She flicked a glance at Titus, looked away, and then back as if she couldn’t help herself. She stared at him, though she answered the gangster. “The reason we thought to…recover the gold was to give it to Dr. Conleith, so he could properly operate and finance the surgeries he’s building in the city.”
Titus was only paces from her now, but he couldn’t reach her, not without the risk of Sauvageau doing something dangerous. “Nora… what the devil?”
Sauvageau rested his elbow on his folded forearm, crooking his finger against his chin. “I’ve seen these surgeries in the city. I thought they were called Alcott’s.”
“Doctor Preston Alcott was a mentor of mine,” Titus explained, hoping to take the focus from Nora. “One who has passed.”
Sauvageau nodded. “Conleith is a bit too Irish for current times, I suppose.” He looked Titus up and down. “You’re young for such a celebrated surgeon.”
“No older than you, I’d wager.”
“Touché.” A dark brow lifted. “I assume you didn’t send your ravishing lover and her entourage to procure you this gold.”
“I’d never,” Titus vowed before sending Nora a hard look. “She’d insisted she didn’t know where it was.”
“She only learned of this warehouse last night,” Mercy rushed to explain, whilst still rubbing a hand over Felicity’s back as she glared imperiously at Sauvageau. “This was supposed to be her grand gesture, and you are ruining it.”
Raphael’s dark eyes lit with amusement even as he said, “I’ve ruined a great many things, and people, Miss Goode, but this is the first time a grand gesture has fallen victim to my name.”
Titus was as irate as he was confused. “Grand gesture? Nora, what is she on about?”
Nora rubbed at her eyes as though to wipe away tears, but they remained curiously dry.
Mercy fielded the question before she could summon an explanation. “We—Felicity and I—told Nora that we didn’t give a fig about husbands, or our reputations, and so she doesn’t have to marry the Duke’s son. We thought that if we could retrieve the money you needed for your clinics, then you might forgive her for leaving you…even if it was partly to save you.” She tossed her golden curls. “Again.”
“Mercy,” Nora hissed.
Everyone in the room fell away until, in Titus’s vision, there was only her, dressed in raven black, her pale skin gilded by lamplight. “Is this true?”
She glanced around at their audience and drew a steadying breath as she drifted to the edge of the platform. “I thought…” She hesitated. Swallowed. Once. Twice. “I knew that if you loved me, you stood to lose everything, and I couldn’t live with that. But I imagined that if… if I could give you the fortune you stood to lose, we could possibly see a way to—to be together.”
His anger welled to the surface. “You could see a way. You could see a way, Nora, because the path has always been clear to me. I told you that.”
She shook her head, her eyes fathomless wells of regret. “I realize you think that now. But I’ve seen what the loss of fortune does to a man. It drove my husband to the very depths of madness. To do unspeakable things and to ally himself with criminal dregs.”
“You wound me, my lady.” Sauvageau covered his heart as if she’d pierced it
. “After I’ve worked so hard to fashion myself as the criminal elite.”
She went on as if he wasn’t even there. “William hated me in the end… did you know that? That a man can love and hate at the same time? It is an ugly thing, Titus. I couldn’t have born that from you. It would have destroyed me to watch the light leave your eyes. To see those who respect you turn their backs. To watch as doors are slammed in your face and friends desert you. You might think that you’re strong enough to survive that, and maybe you are… but I’m not. This city needs you. The world needs what you’re going to discover. The miracles you’ll perform.”
Titus suddenly wished he could sit down. It all made a bit more sense now. This entire time he’d expected her to trust him. To understand what he wanted and what he meant for them and to believe that he could bring it all to pass. However, in doing so, he’d forgotten that the men in Nora’s life were forever making decisions for her. And she’d been tossed about on that turbulent sea like a boat with torn sails and no anchor.
What cause had she to believe in anyone?
“Nora, I—”
A heartrending sob broke through the noise, and they all turned to see Felicity bravely holding both hands over her mouth, now, as hot tears streamed from her eyes.
Raphael, who seemed to have made a point to remain close by, handed Felicity a handkerchief as the soft-hearted girl wept.
She stared at it for a moment, as if it might bite her, then reached out and took it.
The gangster’s face softened in miraculous increments. “You must be possessed of a heart as cold as mine, Miss Goode, to remain unmoved by their plight.”
She sniffled and dabbed at her eyes, her lashes wiping at the fog of her spectacles. “I just… I thought I’d arranged a happy ending…”
His mercurial noise might have been a chuckle. “You are a clever girl. You don’t really believe there is such a thing as a happy ending, do you?”
“Of course I do.” She emitted a hiccupping sigh before taking several hitching breaths. “I believe that sometimes the stars can align. That one change of heart can change the course of fate. That forgiveness and love are possible, even against the most terrible odds…even for someone like you.”
Courting Trouble Page 16
