“Is Alden married?” she asked.
“No, ma’am, but a woman on our ship sure wanted to marry him.”
When Isabelle breathed the air again, the smoke seemed heavier. Acrid. Then the clang of the town’s fire bells resonated through the room.
She jumped up from her seat, her heart clanging with the bells. The last time Sacramento City caught fire, it took almost every building with it.
She raced over to the window and saw the center of town glowing an eerie orange. She had to return to the hotel before the flames reached K Street and destroyed everything inside, including Aunt Emeline’s box.
Her body trembled at the thought of discovering Victor below, but she couldn’t let her fear stop her from saving Aunt Emeline’s gift and the money she needed to start over. In the chaos, the smoke, she could slip back into the city and rescue her things without Victor seeing her. Then she would return to this cottage.
She knelt down beside Isaac. It would be too risky to take him down near the fire. She needed to move swiftly, through the alleyways to avoid the blaze and the man who wanted to destroy her as well.
“I need you to stay here and watch the house,” she told him.
“Like I did with the hotel?”
“Exactly. The fire shouldn’t come this way, but if it does”—she pointed east—“follow this street outside town, to the floral gardens. I will find you there.”
He reached for her hand. “Miss Labrie?”
“Yes, Isaac?”
He leaned over, kissing her cheek. “Don’t get too close to the fire.”
Smoke poured down K Street, curling between the empty buildings and abandoned wagons. Flames followed close behind the smoke, but unlike its predecessor, the flames showed no mercy. They devoured the wooden structures faster than Moby-Dick destroyed Ahab’s boat.
A crowd of people watched the flames from the street, listening to buildings explode in the distance when barrels of gunpowder ignited. Victor pushed through the mob, rushing up one more block, his leather portfolio tucked safely under his arm.
He’d walked the streets for far too long tonight, trying to find either the Golden Hotel or someone sober enough to give him accurate directions. It wasn’t until he’d found a man headed to fight the fire that he discovered the hotel was near the wharf. A brick-and-granite edifice in a long queue of wood.
He gritted his teeth as he stared at the structure. The front door was shuttered with iron. He’d come so close to finding Mallie, and now it seemed like she’d escaped him once again.
The smoke burned his throat. Stung his eyes. Lifting his loose shirt up over his mouth, he watched the fire in the distance, the flames casting a hazy glow through the curtain of smoke, the roar of destruction shaking the ground.
He wouldn’t stop searching, for her or for Isaac. He would find them both after the fire subsided, and they would return to Virginia together, as a family, even if he had to shackle them together for the entire journey home.
Oh, the rage in Eliza’s face when the three of them walked through the door. He’d triumph without saying a word.
Heat radiated between the buildings, and the smoke almost drove him back toward the crowds. But then he saw her—an apparition in a cloud sustained by the fire. And he couldn’t move.
He’d worried that Mallie might outgrow her beauty, but she was even more beautiful now than she’d been as a girl. And Mallie was his. He’d inherited her. Subdued and trained her. He would treat her as a lady. Eventually. First, she must be taught a swift lesson as a reminder: he owned her, for the rest of her life.
As she held up her lantern, checking the iron shutters, he stepped toward her. But then she seemed to disappear into the smoke, along the back of the hotel.
He smiled in spite of the heat. The alley was the perfect place to waylay her. No one in the crowd would see him take her. Or hear her scream.
He moved swiftly into the alleyway, searching for her light. She may have outwitted him before, but he wouldn’t lose her now.
Chapter 35
Sacramento City
July 1854
Flames engulfed the planks on G Street, the roar of thunder echoing across town as buildings collapsed in on themselves, spraying a storm of embers across the stunned crowd. Alden pushed through hundreds of bystanders watching the destruction, trying to make his way up toward Isaac and Miss Labrie.
He didn’t get far. As the volunteer firemen lined up on the streets, one of them asked him to help pull the heavy fire engine with its canvas buckets, leather hooks, and one-hose reel toward the flames. Alden grabbed one of the drag ropes and joined the men.
