And even if he said he could, she wouldn’t want that for either of them.
Tonight changed everything. She had become a monster. Unworthy of his respect and certainly undeserving of love.
“I’ll explain the situation to your father,” he murmured, his fingertips brushing away the tears that slid down her cheek.
Her father. Oh God. His career could end over this. She tried to breathe and realized she was breathing too much, too fast. It felt like her heart might explode.
“Easy does it,” Peter soothed. “You’re safe, Gabriella. I’ve got you. Just relax.”
She followed the gentle flow of his voice until her pulse slowed and her breaths settled into an easier rhythm. The carriage rumbled onward, turning this way and that while rattling over uneven stones.
“I thought she was going to kill me,” Gabriella confessed.
“I know you did.”
“Except she couldn’t have.” How easy it would be to lie in order to save herself, only her conscience wouldn’t allow it. No matter what it might cost her.
“You don’t know that,” Peter said. “That woman murdered three men in brutal ways. She was calculating. Dangerous.”
“She was unarmed.”
“What?”
There it was, the shock, the dismay, the thing that would forever taint her in his eyes. “She came toward me, raised her arm and I…I thought she had a weapon, but she didn’t.”
“How do you know she didn’t drop it while you struggled?” Peter asked.
“How do you know we struggled?”
“The broken vase in the foyer and the mess both of your hair is in.”
Gabriella blinked. Yes. There had been a struggle. That was how they’d ended up in the parlor. But first, they’d had a conversation. She tried to think, to focus her mind on what had been said.
“I know who she is and why she did it.” Clarity swept through her. She turned to Peter, who quietly stared back at her through the darkness. “Her name is Sally Finch. Her brother—”
“Hold on,” Peter said with a frown. “Do you not mean Sally Jones?”
Gabriella shook her head slowly while recalling the list of names Peter at interviewed at Moorland House. “No, I do not. According to what she told me, her brother was Howard Finch, the soldier who took his own life.”
“She gave me a false name,” Peter murmured, a stricken look filling his eyes. “When I met her at Moorland House I failed to make the connection between her and the men who’d been killed. All because I had the wrong name. Had she told me it was Finch, I’d have…”
He muttered a curse, and dropped his face into his hands. Gabriella sympathized. Sally’s deception had been so simple, Peter would not only feel like a fool but blame himself for Kipling’s death.
“You’re not the only one who missed the clue,” she murmured.
“But I am the one in charge. I should have figured it out. If I’d only gone with you to Kipling’s lodgings instead of helping Croft, I would have recognized Sally Finch and—”
“We did the best we could with the information we had.” And as a result, she now had blood on her hands. The reminder carved a hole in her stomach and filled it with lead. She squeezed her eyes shut and did what she could to focus on breathing.
“Gabriella?” Peter’s voice was filled with concern.
“Finch served in the army with Warren, Orwell, and Kipling,” she muttered, forcing the rest of the details past her lips, “but something happened to him at Waterloo.”
“War tends to leave its mark on people.”
“It wasn’t the war. It was them. They left him to die when they should have helped him.” Finch’s brothers in arms had been scared, she realized, but was that any excuse for abandoning him? “Only he didn’t die. He survived, but lying on that battlefield, wounded, for several days before help arrived, allowed his wounds to fester. When he eventually returned to England, he did so without his legs. His sister visited him at the hospital here. Until he managed to take his own life, exactly as his record described.”
“She was avenging her brother then.”
