She felt oddly detached, as if she were playing a scene on some stage. None of it seemed real. She had spent all her credulity on a man who didn’t want her. Nothing else much mattered right now.
“I know there is a list. Bucky told me. And I told him that I took nothing with me from the Lassiters’ that wasn’t mine.”
“But you have the key!”
She nodded, keeping as perfectly still as she could. She felt so numb. It didn’t mean she wanted to be dead, and that gun was just a bit too unsteady and pointing directly at her chest. And the man holding it was sweating.
“I did,” she said. “I gave it to the duke. But unless there is some secret compartment no one knows of, the only thing engraved in the gold is a key, a lion, and the letter G.”
He blinked a few times. “What doesthatmean?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure I don’t know. Please. Leave the way you got in. You have a chance to get away before you’re found. You can’t shoot me, you know. The noise would bring the entire staff up here before you could make it to the window.”
He just stood there. Felicity didn’t move. The numbness was wearing off. She was very much afraid she was going to start trembling any moment. She might have just been rejected, humiliated, demeaned and deserted, but she wasn’t dead. She didn’t think she wanted to be. Not at all.
Lord, did that mean she would survive Flint Bracken intact?
Not intact. Battered and broken and heartsick, cracked like a porcelain vase.
“Well?”
He lifted the gun.
* * *
It tookFlint a half hour to extricate himself from the duke. It shouldn’t have. After all, he had discovered more information than the duke had anticipated. They now had the names of twenty-five people involved with the Lions—some they had suspected, some they had not. He noted that the Lassiters were the last name on the list. Poor Felicity. She had loved that little girl.
“You don’t need the locket anymore,” he told his father, picking it up off the desk. “I’ll return it.”
His father was a second too late to retrieve it from him. “Don’t be daft, boy. That is evidence.”
“I’ll make a copy. This one goes back to its owner.”
Which was some of the business he had to attend to. Leaving his father sputtering like a landed carp, Flint took the time to freshen up, not even bothering to call his valet. Then he broke into his own safe to retrieve something his grandmother had tucked away there five or so years before, which he thought would go very well with the locket. With both in hand, he took the front stairs two at a time until he reached the second floor.
It didn’t occur to him that the hallways were suspiciously empty of staff, or that the house seemed unnaturally silent, as if it had been deserted. He was too focused on the doorway to the Chinese bedroom.
Giving his jacket a tug, he knocked.
And waited.
He knocked again. He waited again.
He never considered waiting any longer. He had asked Felicity to stay here, and she wasn’t answering. And they hadn’t found Francis Reed. He turned the knob and pushed.
The door opened easily in his hand, but the sitting room was empty
“Felicity?”
Nothing. He walked on through. Her room was made up, the tables cleared of any personal effects. He walked into the dressing room, anticipation curdling into dread.
It was just as empty—no people, no clothing, no Felicity. There wasn’t so much as a dropped hairpin on the floor. The space looked as if it had been uninhabited for months.
He backed out much faster than he’d come in.
“Higgins!”
His voice echoed down the stairs and back.
