“He told me to deliver a message.” Daphne’s jaw clenched, and something dark and furious burned behind the glaze of pain. “He said — ‘Tell Eleanor the old Hargrove cottage. Past the churchyard, through the east field. She comes alone, or they die.'”
Dominic went very still. “I know the cottage. It has been abandoned for years.”
“It is on the edge of your estate.” Daphne looked between them, her broken wrist held carefully against her chest. “He has been squatting there. He told me — bragged about it, the sick bastard. Said he has been living in that cottage for months, watching the village from the hill. Watching the bakery. Watching Nell.”
Nell’s stomach turned to ice. Months. He had been sleeping a mile from her children, eating in the dark while he planned this, watching the smoke rise from her ovens every morning.
Dominic stood. The motion was fluid and controlled, and the soldier in him had taken over completely — every trace of warmth, of tenderness, of the man who had kissed her in the drawing room a week ago, had been locked away behind something hard.
“Martha.” He looked at the girl, his tone steady and commanding. “Can you ride?”
Martha nodded, wiping blood from her split lip with the back of her hand. “Yes, my lord.”
“Take my horse. Ride to Bramwell Park. Tell Philippa to send the magistrate’s men to the Hargrove cottage — east side, past the churchyard wall. Do you know it?”
“Yes, my lord.” Martha was already on her feet, swaying slightly. “The one with the collapsed roof.”
“That is the one. Tell them armed men are needed. Tell them children are inside. Go.”
Martha fled out the front door. The sound of hooves followed moments later, fading fast into the dark.
“Stay with Daphne,” Dominic said to Nell, reaching for the door.
“No.” The word came out quiet and absolute. Nell stood, her hands steady for the first time since Gabriel had walked into her shop that morning. She looked at Dominic and did not blink. “He has my children. I am coming.”
“He said alone. If he sees me —”
“Then we do not let him see you.” She stepped closer, her chin lifting. “I walk in the front. You find another way in. The cottage has a back window — I remember it from when the Hargrove widow kept chickens. It has been boarded up for years, but the wood will be rotten.”
Dominic stared at her. Something shifted behind his eyes — the soldier reassessing, recalculating, factoring in a variable he had not expected. Then his jaw set.
“If he has a pistol aimed at one of the children, you do not rush him. You talk. You stall. You give me time to get inside.” He gripped her arm above the elbow, his fingers fierce. “Promise me.”
“I promise.” She held his gaze. “Promise me you will not miss.”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “I never miss.”
They left Daphne with Mrs. Potts, who had already set water to boil and was pressing a clean cloth to the worst of the cuts, clucking softly as she worked. Daphne would be safe there.
The walk to the Hargrove cottage took fifteen minutes through the dark — past the churchyard with its leaning stones, through the east field where the frost crunched like broken teeth beneath their boots, and up the gentle rise to where the cottage crouched against the tree line like something that had been trying to hide for a very long time.
The building was a ruin. Half the thatch had collapsed inward, and the walls were black with damp. A single window faced the lane, its glass long since shattered, and a faint glow leaked around the edges of a board that had been nailed across the frame from inside. Firelight. Someone had lit a fire in the old hearth.
Dominic pressed his mouth to her ear. “Two minutes. Give me two minutes to reach the back, then go in.” His lips brushed her temple — not a kiss, not quite, but a touch that said everything a kiss would have said if there had been time. Then he melted into the darkness around the side of the cottage, moving with the trained silence of a man who had stalked French sentries across Spanish hillsides.
Nell counted her heartbeats. One. Two. Three. She made it to sixty before she could not bear it anymore, and she had promised him a hundred and twenty but her children were inside that cottage with a monster who had nothing left to lose.
She pushed the door open.
The cottage was a single room, low-ceilinged and filthy. A fire burned in the old hearth, throwing jumping shadows across crumbling plaster walls. The floor was packed earth, and the air stank of smoke and damp wool and something sour underneath— the smell of a man who had been living like an animal for too long.
Gabriel stood in the centre of the room.
He looked worse than he had that morning. Wilder. More desperate. The ruined half of his face twitched with a rhythmic tic she did not remember, and his eyes burned with a feverish, unhinged light that told her Daphne had been right — there was nothing human left in him. His clothes were splattered with blood that was not his own.
He was gripping Lily by one arm. Oliver sat against the far wall, his wrists bound with curtain cord, a bruise darkening along his jaw where he had hit the floor at Daphne’s. His dark eyes were wide and bright with fury, not fear. He was watching Gabriel the way a cornered dog watches a bigger animal — looking for the moment to bite.
“Mama!” Lily’s scream pierced the close air, and she reached toward Nell with her free hand. “Mama, he is hurting us!”
