But Nando wasn’t to blame, and Maxim knew it.Hewas. Just as he’d been to blame for Mina’s ruthless murder.
He shook his head. “If I hadn’t chased after her, she’d be safely aboard that ship right now, sailing away from me.”
And God help him, as much as he couldn’t bear for her to leave him, he would happily send her away any day if given the choice between her living and leaving and her dying because she’d remained.
“You cannot know that,” Nando countered, reaching out to him.
“I do know it,” he snarled, shaking free of his brother’s touch. “The bullet that hit her was meant for me. If I hadn’t gone to the docks, if I hadn’t taken her aside, if I had asked her to marry me instead of holding that fucking betrothal feast…”
“How do you know the bullet was meant for you?” Nando asked. “There could have been a footpad in the crowd, and mayhap his shot went astray.”
“No.” Maxim shook his head again, for he’d been turning those few moments over in his mind again and again in endless search of the answers. “I had pulled her aside, away from the crowd, begging her to speak to me in private. And that was when it happened.”
“But why would someone shoot at you?”
“Given what happened in London, need you ask?” He scrubbed a hand over his jaw, feeling helpless and furious and terrified all at once. “The rebels have grown bold. They could not kill me when I went abroad, so they’re determined to slay me here on my own soil.”
Yes, that was what had happened to Tansy. He had no doubt. Another one of Charles’s loyalists, striking with the intent to undermine the kingdom and the line to the throne. Their uncle was dead, but not all his supporters had been stamped out. They had been silently waiting, biding their time. Perhaps the knowledge that he would soon possess a wife and heirs had been the spur for their murderous plans.
And Tansy was paying the price.
“You think loyalists to Charles are trying to kill you?” Nando asked.
“I know it.” He thumped his chest with a fist, directly over his heart. “Here. My instincts have never been wrong. That bullet was meant for me, and instead, Tansy was shot, and she might well die. Because of me.”
His voice trembled and broke on those last three words. It was as if, eighteen years later and in an entirely different world, he’d suddenly found himself thrust into the same hell he’d inhabited on the day he’d held Mina in his arms outside the burning ruins of her family’s home.
His chest tightened; his head pounded.
He had to move. Couldn’t remain in the same spot another second.
His waterlogged boots resumed movement, measured paces.March, march, march.
March to keep the madness at bay. March to keep the demons that inhabited his skull quiet. March to forget.
“I blame myself,” Nando was saying, keeping time at his side. “You cannot blame yourself. This is not like what happened with Mina.”
The urge to strike something had never been stronger, but Maxim tamped it down with brutal determination.
“This is everything like what happened with Mina,” he countered harshly. “You don’t know because you were scarcely more than a whelp. A lad still on his mother’s teat.”
He regretted the lash of his outburst the moment it left him, but damn it, all he wanted was to know how Tansy was faring. To know if she would live.
To see her. To touch her. To beg her forgiveness.
“I’m reasonably certain I wasn’t on our mother’s teat at twelve years old,” Nando said smoothly.
“You were a boy,” he said hoarsely, raking his fingers through his still-damp hair. “You know what I’m saying, Nando. You weren’t there that day. You didn’t pull her body from the burning remnants of her home. Didn’t see what they’d done to her…”
A shudder racked him.
No, he wouldn’t lose himself in the past now. Mina was long gone. He had to keep his lucidity about him. To be here for Tansy. She needed him.
“I understand, brother.” Nando wrapped an arm around his shoulders, and this time, Maxim didn’t retreat. “I’m so sorry for what happened to her. But you need to retain your strength and your health, for Tansy’s sake and for the sake of Varros. Your people need their king. And Tansy will need you as she recovers.”
He stopped pacing, the aching sting of tears he couldn’t quell burning his eyes and pouring down his cheeks. “What if she doesn’t recover?”
“She will,” Nando insisted with far more certainty than Maxim could muster. “Now go and at least change your clothes, brother. You stink of fish.”
