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"He is lowering it." She looked at the boy. "Aren't you, Jem."

The boy looked at her. Looked at Kit. The pistol trembled. Then it dropped another inch, the muzzle pointing at the floor between them.

"Good lad," Audrey said, softly.

Kit heard the boots on the stairs behind him. He knew them before he turned. The unhurried pace. The weight of a man who never rushed because he had trained the world to wait.

Reeve appeared in the doorway.

He took in the scene with the same appraiser's patience he had shown in the tunnel: the warrior finished, the boy wavering, Kit with his pistol drawn, Audrey alive in a coffin she was supposed to be dead in. His expression did not change. That was the most dangerous thing about Reeve: the stillness. Other men panicked. Reeve recalculated.

The boy swung his pistol toward Reeve. Kit adjusted his aim to Reeve's chest. Three weapons. Three directions. The room locked into place.

"Well," Reeve said mildly. "Not dead, then."

"No," Audrey said from the coffin. "Not dead."

Reeve looked at her. He studied her the way he had studied Kit in the tunnel — slowly, thoroughly, as though cataloguing what she was worth.

"The famous Lady Kendal. The widow who wouldn't sell. The widow who wouldn't be warned. The widow who wouldn't stay away." He smiled. "I can see why he couldn't do it. You're a stubborn little thing, aren't you. Hard to kill something that won't lie down."

"I've had practice," she said.

Reeve turned his attention to the boy. "Put that down, lad. You haven't got the nerve and we both know it."

The boy's pistol shook.

"He does have the nerve," Audrey said. Her voice was even and certain and she was looking at the boy, not at Reeve. "But he doesn't need it. Because he has a choice."

She held the boy's gaze. "You have to decide now, Jem."

The room was still. The warrior's moaning had subsided to a wet rasp. The candle on the mantelpiece guttered. Kit could feel his heartbeat in his trigger finger.

"Coward," Reeve said. Quiet. The word a master uses on a dog. "Useless, snivelling little coward. I should have left you in the gutter where I found you."

The boy flinched. The pistol dropped.

Spit moved. He came through the doorway behind Reeve like smoke, silent, angular, blood on his temple from Kit's boot. His arms closed around the boy from behind, pinning the pistol against his chest, one hand over the boy's mouth. Jem thrashed. Spit held him like a sack.

Reeve raised his pistol. He aimed at the coffin. At Audrey.

Kit lunged.

The pistol fired.

The report in the boarded room was a physical thing, a wall of sound that hit Kit's chest and rattled his teeth and filled the air with smoke. He had caught Reeve's forearm as the gun went off, his hand closing around the wrist and wrenching upward, and the ball struck the ceiling and plaster rained down in white chunks and the smoke rolled through the room in a grey cloud.

For two seconds Kit could not see her. Two seconds of smoke and plaster dust and the ringing in his ears and the absence of her voice. Two seconds during which every part of him that was not fighting went somewhere black and airless and absolute.

He looked.

She was still in the coffin. Sitting upright. White dust — plaster, quicklime, both — settling on her hair. Alive. Alive. Her eyes found his through the smoke.

She saw his face. He knew what she saw because he could feel it — the mask gone, everything behind it exposed, the anguish and the terror and the desperate, annihilating relief. He could not hide it. He did not try.

Then Reeve's knife was in his hand and the blade slashed across Kit's forearm and the fight began.

They circled in the narrow space between the platform and the hearth. Kit switched the pistol to his off hand and drew his own knife. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped from his fingers and he felt nothing. Reeve came in low, the curved blade aimed at the gut, and Kit twisted sideways and countered with a short slash that opened a line of red across Reeve's wrist.