Zachary wheeled the animal, eyes blazing. “To rescue Elizabeth.”
He spurred the horse hard. It lurched forward and tore out of the yard, dust flying in its wake—Zachary riding toward a ragged, desperate hope, his path resolute and irrevocable—toward peril, toward redemption, toward the woman who was his fate.
Chapter Forty-Six
Zachary rushed to Dyer’s mansion, tethered his horse to a flower seller’s stand, moved like a shadow. Soon eight men lay where he’d left them—trussed, groaning, their conversation betrayed them into complacency. Probably presumed him dead at his factory. Bad mistake.
At the corner, he hauled the ninth sentry up by the shirtfront. “Where is she?”
“In Dyer’s office,” the man muttered.
“How many?”
The man shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ll give you two seconds to give me a count.”
The guard blinked rapidly. “Two dozen.”
He lied. Zach gave a hard chop to the side of the man’s neck. He dropped. He’d be out for a long time. Enough to get Elizabeth free.
From across the curb, the flower seller applauded in a cracked voice. “She’s inside. Tried to run, they dragged her back. Bout time someone put that Dyer bastard down. Go get her.”
Zachary evaluated the façade, following the line of the Vanderbilt awning across the street where he’d paid off his debt to Dyer. He eased to the third window, swung himself up, andpeered. Elizabeth. A bruise swelled on the side of her cheek, a coarse rope taut against her throat.
A thug held her. Two guards flanked the door, two lounged at the mantel, one hovered near her, others were parked in corners like wolves in a den. The odds read grim. He calculated muscle and temperament, then smiled with a violence that was almost gentle. Eight he could handle. The guards around her laughed. They wouldn’t be laughing for long. He dropped to the ground.
He bought a bouquet. Hat low, he knocked at the front door.
“Flower delivery,” he said to the butler. Zachary’s fist caught him square in the jaw. Down he went, a painted heap on polished marble. Zachary tossed the flowers on the inert butler, a macabre tribute and slid into the lobby. No guards appeared. The remainder must be in the room with Elizabeth or sent to torch his factory. Sloppy. No doubt, Dyer had decided his factory would burn before his office was ruffled.
He knocked. The door opened a crack. He shoved through.
“Zachary!” Elizabeth cried. Yanked back, the rope whipsawed raw marks on her neck. The sight of her defiant, even as she bled—boiled his rage.
Zachary stared down his opponents, fixed his eyes on every one of his prey. He inhaled, then let out a long exhale, relaxing the restraint he normally kept on his body. The world came into sharp focus, the sound of pounding blood in his ears grew louder and slower, as did everything else. His opponents charged.
“Get him!”
Men fell on him.
Zachary fisted his hands and launched himself in a tornado of movement. He dug his fingers into the bicep of the first foe’s swinging arm, ripped at the muscle, while striking the forearm on the same side, straight with the heel of his palm. He hit several times per second and knocked a man senseless. An elbow rose into an abdomen, then a palm slammed into a groin—quick,humiliating, efficient. Men fell as if the room were clearing itself by some beastly law.
A guard slashed. Zachary spun, the heel of his foot catching a chest, sending the man flying. Another drew a pistol and leveled it toward Elizabeth. “I’ll kill her,” the brute snarled.
“You’d answer to Dyer. Not to me,” Zachary said calmly. He rolled, scooped up the knife of a downed man, and with a single, merciless throw severed the median nerve bundle that controlled his thumb and finger. His hand spasmed and the gun clattered from paralyzed fingers. Zachary kicked it toward Elizabeth.
She jerked free of her tether and snatched the weapon. For a breath, terror and resolve warred in her face. “Watch out,” she cried, and then aimed, hands steady.
Red-faced, a Goliath of a man, his eyes slits of rage swept at Zachary’s head. The blow grazed him, a tremor of stars at the edge of vision. He could not afford oblivion. He answered raw and precise. He broke a wrist with a wrenching twist, delivered a right that traveled from his planted foot clean through a jaw, and used the momentum to shoulder another man into a table. A rib cracked beneath an elbow that drove a man backward through plate glass. The window exploded into a spray of glittering light and falling drape.
Dyer’s guards were like a hydra with twelve hundred heads. With an answering yell as bloodcurdling as that of a beast, he rushed to meet their numbers. The fight was bloody and primitive all the worst ways a human can endure and inflict. Zachary’s training—pugilistic roots, the quiet cruelty of Chen’s methods—made him more than a brawler. He was an instrument of necessity. He pivoted away from a six-foot behemoth, swept his leg, flipped, and came down with the spear-hand strike into the man’s abdomen. Several quick jabs to the face. Blood spattered from his nose and throat. The guard’seyes closed, and he made a gurgling sound, flailing his arms impotently backward and pancaked to the floor.
One by one, the thugs collapsed or fled. Once, a blow cracked across Zachary’s forearm with an impact like a tree struck by lightning. Heat flared, and something deep and white screamed at him—his arm. The limb hung at an angle. At that moment, all that mattered was that Elizabeth was alive. Dyer’s men lay on the floor, writhing and the rest unconscious.
Silence fell like a curtain. No longer did he hear the blood pounding in his temples. For a ragged second, Zachary only heard the throttled breathing in the room where Dyer’s men—lay and the gentle scrape of silk where Elizabeth had been restrained. He lifted his good arm. She stepped forward and crushed him to her, small and fierce against the ruin of his shirt.
“You reckless fool,” she whispered, hands trembling as they found his broken arm, fingers tracing the line of deranged bone. “Careful, my love. You must see a doctor.”
