“Why—”
A horrible grating noised reached his ears, followed by a shriek from one of the women, and the sound of glass and wood breaking. He released the rope, landing heavily on one leg, biting back an oath that soon turned to a shout of surprise when a loud grating sound was followed almost immediately by dirt, dust, and a large piece of black wrought iron crashing down next to him.
Dust stirred from the floor, surrounding him in a cloud that blinded him for a moment, but after a few seconds of coughing and waving his arms, he managed to get a look at what had happened.
“Alden!” Mercy was shrieking his name over and over again. “Alden! Holy shit, he’s—”
“I’m all right,” he said, coughing and spitting out bits of dust and dirt. “It didn’t hit me.”
“Thank god for that.” He was pleased to hear just how much worry there had been in Mercy’s voice, which had turned soft when she realized he was unharmed. That quickly changed when she lit into Lisa. “What the hell do you think you were doing? You could have killed him! Those railings are totally unsafe, and having him pull one of them in on top of him could have ended up with him impaled by it, at the very least.”
“I did the best I could,” Lisa said, her voice as sharp as a knife. “After all, I was here all by myself while you were out havingdinnerwith your friends.”
“I do not have time for you right now,” Mercy said in a voice that shook with anger. “Alden! Tell me where you are.”
He explained his circumstances, ending with asuggestion that he might be in some hitherto undiscovered hidden room. “It’s a small one if it’s that, although I can’t get to one end of it.”
“Stay where you are,” Mercy ordered without a shred of irony over that statement. “I’ll go down a floor and find you. Do you have something you can tap the wall with?”
He gave a grim little smile at the debris piled around him. “Any number of things, yes.”
Forty minutes later, after much tapping and calling to each other, Mercy finally located a panel in a linen cupboard that opened into the small, stunted room where Alden had slumped to the floor.
“Mercy!” He got to his feet painfully when light streamed in through the narrow opening, motes of dust dancing as the air was stirred by her entrance.
“At last!” She entered the passage, bringing with her a flood of emotions.
Pleasure at the sight of her filled him... pleasure and something else, something warm and serious, too serious to think of at the moment. Later, when he had time to do nothing but reflect, then he’d examine the emotions her presence triggered in him.
But for now... “That was smart thinking on your part.”
“Eh,” she said with a little twist of her lips. “It’s nothing Nancy Drew wouldn’t do. Come on, Ned, let’s get you out of here.”
Chapter 14
Alden took a step and winced at the pain.
“You’re hurt,” Mercy said, hurriedly picking her way over the debris. She paused to glare for a moment at the piece of railing that had fallen into the room, holding out her hands to help him. “You said you weren’t, but you are. Dammit, Alden!”
“I’m not injured badly. My knee is a bit sore, but to be honest, it was that way after my session with Vandal today.”
“Go ahead and lean on me,” Mercy told him, and almost an hour after falling into the passage, Alden stumbled out of it, sweating, covered in dirt, dust, and minute shards of the glass that had come down with the railing, and more grateful for being alive and able to kiss Mercy than he ever recalled.
“You know what this means,” he said a short whilelater, sitting in the kitchen and allowing Mercy to dab at the various cuts, scrapes, and bruises from the fall.
“You’re not a superhero?” she asked, spreading a little antiseptic ointment on a bandage and applying it to one of his injured fingers.
“That’s a given. No, what my experience means is that the house is unsafe. I’m going to have to insist that everyone move out of it to the gatekeeper’s lodge, which is perfectly habitable since it has been renovated.”
“I don’t think you have to lock down the entire house,” Mercy said, tucking away the bandages into the first aid box. She was still kneeling at his feet, her eyes grave as she looked up at him. “With the exception of the furry four-legged invaders, I like the house. I like being in it, and since you had the exterminator guys upstairs, I haven’t seen so much as a mousey whisker. And now you want us to leave?”
“It’s not safe,” he said stubbornly, admitting to himself that he really would hate to see everyone leave the house. He’d stay, naturally, since it was his home and his responsibility, but he wouldn’t risk anyone else’s well-being. “If the floor can go like that at any time—”
“Yeah, but what if it didn’t—” She stopped, and got to her feet when Lisa and Lady Sybilla entered the kitchen.
“I understand that you have been injured,” Lady Sybilla said in her slow, precise voice. She pursed her lips and made a show of examining Alden. “You do not look seriously harmed to me.”
“He’s not, but hecouldhave been,” Lisa said, giving him what he thought of as her come-hither look. “I declare, he’s just the luckiest person alive. No one elsewould have walked out of that horrible situation with just a couple of scratches.”
