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“The letter I sealed before I left,” she said. “Your name. This address. My maid had instructions to put it into Adam’s hands within the hour if I had not returned.” She held his gaze. “I have been gone nearly two hours.”

He set the glass on the writing table and looked at her, and the remainder of the afternoon’s warmth left his face.

“Even so,” he said, at length. “There is a great deal of London between Grosvenor Square and this street.”

“You are a practical man.” She took a step to the right, unhurried, as though finding a more settled position in the room. The side table was close enough now that she could have touched it without extending her arm. “You said so yourself. You built a shipping fortune on the correct assessment of risk. So assess this one.”

She kept her voice measured. She wanted him attending to her words, not her feet. “Tonight, you will give my husband a reason that is no longer merely commercial. He has already shown you, by your own account, that he is patient, thorough, and willing to dismantle everything he puts his attention to. You told me that yourself.” She paused. “He will not stop. And you will have made that choice here, in this room, tonight.”

Penhurst came around the end of the writing table.

She did not step back. She held her ground and let him come, because stepping back would take her into the corner of the room, and the corner was the end of all the arithmetic she had left.

He stopped less than two feet from her. He was a head taller, and his eyes had the patience of a man who had decided the conversation was finished and was now simply waiting for the other person to arrive at the same conclusion. “You have a great deal of faith in your husband,” he said, “for a woman who walked into this house alone.”

“I came alone,” she said, “so that you would release the child. Not because I had no one to send for.”

He lifted one hand and struck her on her cheek. She already had the candlestick in her grip before the thought of him hitting her again had finished forming in his wizened old brain.

She brought it down hard on the inside of his forearm where it was unguarded, and the contact was dense and sharp—the solid meeting of brass and bone—and the sound he made was pulled inward rather than pushed out, the sound of a man who has been genuinely hurt and has not yet decided what to do about it. He pulled his arm against his side.

She ran.

The door was fourteen feet across the room.

She did not think about the key in his pocket or the lock it fitted; she thought about the window in the wall beside the door, about the street beyond it and her own voice in that room at full volume.

The things she could reach if she could close the distance.

Her heels hit the floor hard, and she covered six of the fourteen feet before his hand closed around her arm above the elbow.

He caught her and used her own momentum to swing her back around. His face was entirely different now—forearm pressed to his side, jaw set, the careful warmth of the last hour gone as though it had never been in him. He gripped both her wrists.

“That,” he said, very quietly, “was not wise.”

She drove her heel into his instep with all her weight behind it. He did not let go. She got her fingers around one of his and wrenched it backward; he shifted the hold before she could complete it, transferring both her wrists into one hand and tightening his grip. She could feel the full difference in their size now in a way that had only been an abstract measure until this moment.

She threw her head back into his face.

It connected.

He swore, and his hands went loose for half a second, while she wrenched her left wrist free and drove her elbow hard into his ribs, pushing herself away from him with both feet.

His arm came around her from behind before she covered two steps, his forearm across her chest, and he hauled her back against him.

Her arms were pinned. The door was in front of her, but she could not reach it⁠—

From below, something struck the front of the house hard enough to shudder through the walls.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The impact hit the front of the house like a fist through wood, and Penhurst’s arm cinched tighter across her chest.

Then the door gave, coming inward off its hinges in one catastrophic motion, the brass fixture spinning wide, and Adam came through the frame at a dead run with two Bow Street Runners behind him.

He took in the room in under a second: the overturned candlestick near Juliet’s feet, Penhurst behind her, and a blade’s edge now resting cold against the side of her jaw.

Adam stopped dead, his heart plunging to his stomach. He threw out a hand to stop the Runners, and they halted just the same, their bodies stiffening when they sighted the blade.