They tussled over the weapon, struggling back and forth and shuffling even deeper into the dense fields. Luke thrust the gun skyward in a desperate attempt to wrest it from Seth’s grasp, but Seth was taller and leveraged his height to keep a firm grip on it. He elbowed Luke in the gut, making him oomph loudly and sending him doubling over in pain. The pistol came down sharply and discharged with a deafening roar.
Recoiling from the flintlock’s heat, Seth jerked away his hands and whipped his head around, panic seizing him. With terror, he scanned the grass for Charity, harrowed by the thought that she might have been harmed. To his immense relief, she knelt a safe distance away, clinging to the long grass around her. She wascovered in soot, her face turned in his direction, those glacial eyes wide.
“Seth?” she called. “Oh God, tell me you have not been shot. Please, tell me—”
“I am not shot,” he hastily assured her, consciously omitting the incident where a bullet had grazed his shoulder earlier from one of her father’s henchmen.
A pained groan followed, redirecting Seth’s attention, and he spun to see that it was Luke who had been caught. In their scuffle, he had somehow managed to shoot himself.
He collapsed into the long grass, falling upon a pillow of blades as the gun slipped from his grasp to skitter across the mud.
“Luke…” Seth bent over him, unsure what to say or feel. This was his friend, once, yet now… he loathed the man. He despised Luke for the peril he had brought upon Charity—how he had abducted her and tried to take her life, Seth could never forgive that. With a resigned sigh, he was about to pull back, when a desperate hand caught his wrist. Any thought Seth had of tearing his hand out of Luke’s grasp faded when he saw the sinews of the man’s neck tightening and blood spattering down his lip.
He is dying.
“You… I…” Luke strained to sputter as blood began quickly clogging his throat.
Compelled by a mix of duty and the need for closure, Seth bent down into the mud, closer to him.
“You… you should know… everything now,” he struggled to gurgle through suffocating breaths, his hand curling pincer-like around Seth’s wrist. “…He is responsible for the fire.”
“We know this—”
“No, no. I know it. Be… because he made me do it.” Luke’s words made a chill pass over Seth’s body. Suddenly, the fire, the roar of flames seemed a great distance away now, even the cracking timbers he barely registered as the barn caved in on itself.
“What?” Seth whispered, attempting to fathom Luke’s words. Luke’s other hand went around Seth's shoulder as he tried to raise himself a little off the ground, coughing up more blood, but clearing his throat enough to make out words.
“Holmwood… he—he offered me a place… a place at the Bl…”
“At the Bloomsbury?” Seth finished his sentence, coaxing him on so he could hear the whole truth now. Luke nodded, just once.
“Arthur’s spot… it should have been mine. Holmwood gave me a deal… start the fire,” Luke grunted. “No one was to get hurt.” Tears flashed in his eyes. “He… he told me he’d get everyone out. He lied to me. He lied. I watched my own brother die… because I desired his spot at Aldenbury.”
More words came, more garbled cries, but Seth could not make sense of them now. He clasped Luke’s hand and helped him lie down again as blood continued to seep from his mouth, staining his shirt. Seth could do nothing. The wound was too deep in the chest.
This can’t be true. It can’t be…
Yet, the truth was evident in Luke’s tormented expression.
“We both… bear responsibility,” Luke uttered as his breathing grew erratic and shallow. He gaped at the night sky over Seth’s head. “He must pay. I pay with my guilt, and now… with this.” He grimaced. “He m-must… p-pay too.” He struggled to say the last words with great effort, then suddenly, his breathing ceased altogether.
Seth gazed upon Luke’s lifeless body, the man who had grown into a close friend, the man who had insisted time and time again on revenge.
And now, for the first time in over a decade, he finally understood him.
It wasn’t solely his desire for justice that had driven Luke mad after all of these years, but a deep-seated guilt over his complicity… complicity in the death of those who once cared for him.
CHAPTER 26
“Seth?” Charity whispered into the void. She needed to alert Seth to what she had heard. Something was happening. “A carriage… I think a carriage is approaching.” Her hands stretched out, desperate to find him, until suddenly, their fingers entwined.
“I’m right here, Cherry, I know,” he assured her, his tone deep and comforting.
“And—and Shelby, is he well?” she stammered.
“Shelby was sent to the farrier, he will make it.”
Charity breathed a sigh of relief at the news.
