“I will kill him,” Cedric said. “But before that, I need to teach you how to shoot. You won’t be a crack shot in forty hours, but you will have enough to make him give some pause.”
Ariadne squared her shoulders, “Show me what you need.”
The indifferent hackney dropped Ariadne at the gate of the graveyard and drove off without a look back. Fixing her cloak’s hood over her head, as she pushed the wrought-iron gates, rusted and twisted with rain and time, she headed up the path that circumvented the small chapel and headed to the graveyard.
Chill seeped into her skin, and the eeriness of the graveyard had her skin crawling with dread. Her heart was sitting somewhere in the middle of her throat while she forced herself to keep her breathing slow and calm.
At midnight, the cemetery was a kingdom of shadows and silence. Gravestones leaned at crooked angles, their inscriptions worn to whispers by time, while marble angels stood with broken wings, their faces streaked by centuries of rain. The air is heavy with damp earth and the faint, metallic tang of decay.
Cedric had given her the directions to Helena’s grave, where she and Cedric expected this man to have Emily. As she rounded an effigy of the Virgin Mary, she saw the tall headstone of Helena’s grave—and the child bound with rope to it.
“Oh God,” she rushed to the girl and tried to find where the rope was tied. Emily was unconscious, probably by the same drug this kidnapper had used to put the two nursemaids to sleep. What was a small comfort was that the girl was still breathing.
What made her blood run cold was that on either side of the grave, two more holes had been dug, one the size of a child and the other the size of an adult.
“Hold on, sweetheart,” she found the knot at the side of the grave and began to wiggle the end of the rope out—when something cold was pressed on the back of her head.
“Drop the rope.” He ordered.
She froze, and while she wanted to resist, she knew the object to her head was the mouth of a gun. Gently, she dropped the rope and held her hands up high. “Who are you? And what do you want with Emily? Why did you wantmehere?”
“Because Greymont stole someone precious from me, so I will steal someone precious from him,” the man said—and finally, it clicked.
Ariadne’s heart fell into a pit. “Silas.”
He laughed, “I find it strange that Greymont hasn’t caught on yet. The man swears he is the smartest of the smart, yet not even he could figure out that I was Helena’s lover. Well, the one she wanted after the four before me.”
She got to her feet and turned. “How could you betray your friend so…so wickedly?”
“Betray is a strong word,” Silas said as he kept the gun trained between her eyes. In the shadow, the man’s face had the rigidness of a gargoyle and his eyes the maliciousness of the devil. “We laughed at him. Every time she graced my bed, we mocked him.”
“You’re evil,” she said.
“Hand over your reticule,” he ordered.
Ariadne gripped her bag. “Let us talk?—”
“Give it to me, or I will put a hole through you and the girl.” At Sila’s calm, measured tones, fear had Ariadne doing as he ordered, and Silas took the reticule, flinging it into the space behind him, not caring where it landed with a thump.
“He was the one who was supposed to die that night, you know,” Silas spat. “Not her. I set the fire to make sure his room was to be engulfed first.”
She swallowed. “Emily is innocent. You do not have to take out your anger on her.”
“She was supposed to be my child, mine and Helena’s child,” Silas said. “I had everything planned, we’d escape to Europe, we’d be blissful in Milan, marry and be a family. She was mine, not his. Mine!”
Ariadne asked, “Are you going to kill me?”
“An eye for an eye,” he said and cocked the gun. “I am surprised Greymont sent you at all. Maybe he doesn’t love you as much as he thinks he does. Goodbye, Your Grace.”
She dropped to her feet the moment he pulled the trigger, grabbed the handle of the gun stuck in her boot, aimed, and fired. It went wide—but she aimed that way. The bullet stuck the firework inside her reticule, and the roman candles went off, shooting blue sparks into the sky with continuous loud pops in the air.
Silas spun on his feet, frantic—just before hell descended on him.
Seeing the blue sparkles shower the graveyard, Cedric bolted from his place in the chapel, where his late wife’s grave. As he skidded to a stop at the scene of mayhem, seeing Silas’s face was a shot to his gut.
He didn’t have time to process the betrayal because he launched himself at his old friend and delivered two blistering punches in swift succession.
Silas launched away and, flinging his coat away, dragged a ten-inch dagger from his boots. Cedric’s blood went from a simmer to a boil. He knew that someone was going to leave here dead and that he had to fight violence with violence.
