Erin walked out through the kitchen door and into the night. The cold air hit her face and she breathed it in, deep and ragged, and the stars were bright overhead and the moon was high and the grounds of the Duke of Ashworth's estate stretched out before her in silver and shadow, and Florence was not here.
Again.
The word was a stone in her chest. Again. Another empty house. Another lead that had ended in nothing. Another night standing in a stranger's garden while her daughter was somewhere else, somewhere she couldn't reach, somewhere behind another locked door in another privileged house owned by another man who served at Arthur's pleasure.
She pressed her hands against her face. The bandaged one throbbed. The night air was cold against the backs of her fingers. The owl called again from the woods, closer this time, and thesound was mournful and absurd and she wanted to scream at it, to fill the quiet with something as vast as the fury and the grief and the terrible, crushing weight of failure.
She stood there. The team was behind her in the house, finishing the search, documenting the scene, detaining the Duke and Duchess. Garrett would handle it. Garrett was good at handling things. Erin was not handling anything. She was standing in the dark with her hands over her face and the last thread of her composure fraying to nothing.
She dropped her hands. Breathed. Looked up.
The grounds sloped away from the house toward the south, a long sweep of lawn that disappeared into ornamental gardens and then into darkness. The formal garden was visible in the moonlight: sculpted hedges, gravel paths, a stone fountain. Beyond it, the land rose gently toward the tree line, and beyond the trees was the shimmer of water she'd noticed earlier. And between the garden and the water, half hidden by a stand of willows, was a building.
Small. Single storey. Stone walls, slate roof, arched windows. A summer house. The kind of ornamental building that estates like this scattered across their grounds, places for tea and reading and looking at the view. It was dark. Or almost dark. From this distance, in the silvered moonlight, it was hard to tell. But as Erin stared at it, her eyes adjusting to the contrast between moonlight and shadow, she saw it.
A light. Faint. Warm. The glow of a lamp behind a curtain, barely visible, the kind of light you'd miss entirely if you weren't looking. If you weren't standing in exactly this spot, at exactly this angle, in exactly this state of desperate, searching attention.
The world narrowed to a single point. Then her pulse came roaring back, too fast, slamming against her ribs with a force that she could feel in her teeth.
She didn't call Garrett. She didn't radio the team. She didn't do any of the sensible, professional, operationally correct things that her training demanded. She walked. Down the slope, across the lawn, past the formal garden with its sculptured hedges casting sharp-edged shadows in the moonlight. Her boots were wet from the grass. The cold air burned in her lungs. She was walking fast now, then faster, the summer house growing larger with each step, the faint glow in its window becoming more distinct, more certain, more real.
The willows parted around her, their trailing branches brushing her face and arms like curtains. The summer house stood in a clearing by the water, a pretty building, well maintained, its stone walls pale in the moonlight and its door painted dark green. A gravel path led to the entrance. Flower pots flanked the door, filled with lavender that she could smell even in the cold: sharp and clean and familiar, the same lavender that grew in the kitchen garden at the castle.
The door was locked.
Erin tried the handle. Solid. A mortice lock, brass, old but functional. She stepped back. She looked at the window, curtained, the warm glow behind it steady and domestic and impossibly ordinary. Someone was inside this building, at midnight, with a lamp on and the curtains drawn, in a summer house at the far edge of an estate where a man had just told MI5 that there were no children present.
She kicked the door.
The first kick jarred her leg from ankle to hip and made her teeth clang together and accomplished nothing. The lock held. The door didn't move. She stepped back, adjusted her stance the way she'd been taught in field training two decades ago, drew her leg back, and kicked again. This time the frame cracked, a sharp, splintering sound that echoed across the water. The third kick drove the door inward with a crash that shattered thesilence of the grounds and sent the wood slamming against the interior wall and knocked one of the lavender pots off its ledge. It hit the gravel and broke and the smell of lavender rose into the cold air like a signal.
Inside: warmth. The smell of wood smoke from a small stove in the corner. A single room, larger than it looked from outside, furnished as a self-contained cottage: a sofa, an armchair, a kitchenette along one wall, a bookshelf. Rugs on the floor. Curtains at the windows. A lamp on a side table, the source of the glow she'd seen from the house.
A woman was standing up from the armchair, her face a mask of shock and fear. Middle-aged, grey-haired, wearing a cardigan and reading glasses. A book was tumbling from her lap. She was opening her mouth to speak or scream and her hands were raised in front of her in the automatic gesture of a person confronting an intruder.
Erin didn't look at her.
She looked at the bed.
It was against the far wall. A narrow bed, made up with white sheets and a patchwork quilt. And in the bed, sitting up now, blinking in the sudden light and the cold air rushing through the broken door, her hair tangled from sleep and her blue eyes wide and confused and beautiful and alive, was Florence.
The world stopped.
Six days. One hundred and forty-four hours. Eight thousand six hundred and forty minutes of searching and waiting and raging and breaking and holding on by her fingernails while the world tried to tear her apart. Six days of every nightmare scenario cycling through her mind on repeat, of pressing Florence's sweater to her face to remember the smell of her, of lying awake at three in the morning imagining things she would never tell anyone. Six days of holding together because she hadto, because people were depending on her, because if she broke then nobody was looking for Florence.
And here she was. In a bed. In a summer house. Blinking at the light. Alive.
"Mummy?"
The word broke Erin open. She crossed the room in three strides and she had Florence in her arms before the syllable had finished, lifting her from the bed, pulling her against her chest, wrapping herself around her daughter's small body with both arms and holding on with a force that was probably too tight but she could not make herself let go. Florence was warm and solid and real and she smelled of soap and clean pyjamas and underneath it the particular, unmistakable Florence-smell that Erin had been carrying in her lungs since the morning on the bridle path.
"Mummy. Mummy, you came."
"I came, baby. I'm here. I'm here."
Florence's arms went around Erin's neck and held on with the desperate, full-body grip of a child who had been waiting and had not been sure anyone was coming. Her face was pressed into Erin's neck and her breath was warm and quick against Erin's skin and she was crying, not loud, not hysterical, but the quiet, relieved tears of a small person whose fear had just ended.
"I knew you'd come," Florence said. Her voice was muffled against Erin's neck. "I told Mrs Allard. I told her my mummy would come."
