Rachel spun toward him, her composure finally cracking, outrage flaring bright and uncontained. “You arrogant—how dare you barge into my house?—”
“Your house?” Wilhelm cut in coldly, never taking his eyes off Hale. “You forfeited any claim to decency the moment you bound your daughter to a chair.”
Madeline’s chest heaved.
Rachel laughed sharply, hysteria threading the sound. “She is not your concern.”
“She is my concern,” Wilhelm replied, his voice darkening. “And you will release her. Now. The constables have already been alerted. You can choose how this ends, but itwillend.”
Hale’s grip tightened on the gun. Sweat glistened at his temple. His jaw clenched hard enough to strain. “You should leave,” he muttered, though his voice lacked conviction. “This is not your affair.”
Wilhelm took a single step forward.
Madeline’s heart slammed violently against her ribs. “Wilhelm, don’t—” she gasped, terror and desperate longing tangling painfully in her chest. The ropes bit into her wrists as she strained uselessly toward him. Her entire body screamed to be closer, to shield him, to touch him.
“Madeline,” he said softly, finally tearing his gaze from Hale to look at her again, and the tenderness there undid her more thoroughly than any declaration ever could. “I’ve got you.”
Rachel turned on her then, her face twisting with fury and something dangerously close to panic. “This is your doing,” she hissed. “You couldn’t simply obey. You had to ruin everything.”
Wilhelm’s attention snapped back to Rachel, his expression turning lethal. “Do not speak to her.”
Rachel recoiled, then rallied, her chin lifting defiantly. “You think yourself her savior?” she sneered. “You know nothing of her. Nothing of the trouble she brings.”
“I know exactly who she is,” Wilhelm said. “She is brave. She is kind. And she is everything you tried to crush out of her because you could not bear to see it flourish.”
Madeline’s vision blurred as tears spilled freely now, hot and unrestrained. To hear herself spoken of like that—seen like that—felt almost unbearable in its intimacy.
Rachel’s breath came in sharp, uneven bursts now, her composure finally splintering under the weight of being cornered. “She owes me,” she snapped, the words tumbling over one another, brittle with desperation. “Her life. Her position. Her dowry. Everything she has is mine.”
Wilhelm did not raise his voice, nor did he move toward her. He simply looked at her with something like cold revulsion.
“You poisoned her,” he said, each word delivered with deliberate clarity, as though naming facts rather than accusations. “You hunted her. You do not get to speak of what she owes you.”
Something broke. Rachel’s face twisted violently. Her control snapped so completely that Madeline scarcely recognized her. Fear flared across her features, raw and unmasked, and it transformed instantly into rage.
“Shoot him,” she shrieked, spinning on Hale with wild, frantic urgency. “Shoot himnow.”
The world seemed to lurch sideways.
Madeline’s heart slammed so hard it stole the air from her lungs. “No—!” she screamed, the sound feral before she could stop it, panic exploding through her body as she strained violently against the ropes, pain flaring at her wrists.
Hale’s eyes went wide, the whites showing starkly as his breath hitched. Whatever resolve he had clung to evaporated in an instant. His hand shook visibly now, the pistol no longer steady, the barrel jerking erratically as it wavered between Wilhelm’s chest and shoulder.
Everything happened at once. Wilhelm moved, lunging forward with brutal speed, all restraint abandoned, his body already committing to impact even as Madeline screamed his name. Her voice broke apart under the force of terror.
The gun went off.
The crack was thunderous in the confined room, violent and concussive, the sound tearing through Madeline’s ears and down her spine. For a split second, there was only noise and motion and the sickening certainty that something irreversible had just happened.
Wilhelm collided hard with Hale. The two of them slammed into the wall with bone-jarring force. The impact rattled the room, dust shaking loose as they crashed to the floor in a tangle of limbs.
“Wilhelm!” Madeline sobbed, the sound raw and broken, her entire body thrashing helplessly against the chair as terror ripped through her. “Wilhelm—please?—”
She could not see where the bullet had struck. All she knew was the sound of the gunshot still ringing in her ears and the unbearable fear clawing at her chest, threatening to tear her apart from the inside.
Wilhelm grunted. The sound was wrenched from him as they went down. His shoulder struck the floor hard. Hale cried out in terror as Wilhelm’s fist connected with his jaw, sending the pistol skittering uselessly across the floor.
Before Hale could even gather himself, the door burst inward with violent force, wood slamming hard against the wall.
