Page 342 of From Rakes to Riches

He was simply too far away.

Just as they were about to break free of the castle’s threshold, a figure lunged from around the corner and kicked out at Mercy’s legs.

She gave a sharp cry of pain, and went sprawling onto her hands and knees.

Striking like a venomous cobra, Raphael had the man’s throat in a vice grip before anyone could react. “You’ll die for that,” he vowed, reaching down with his other hand to lift Mercy off the ground.

“So says the dead man walking.” Even over the deafening chaos, the unmistakable click of a pistol washed Raphael’s veins in ice.

“Think you can knock me down and get away with it?” sneered former Detective Inspector Martin Trout, his face still a tapestry of purple and yellow healing bruises. “Unhand me, or I pull the trigger.”

Raphael’s hands ached for the feel of Trout’s thin bones breaking beneath them. He would pick his teeth with this man. Would make him choke to death on his own genitals for daring to touch her.

Something inside ignited, engulfing those pushing for escape in a billow of smoke.

The crowd rushed the door with renewed vigor. Bodies flowed around them as if they were stones in a rushing river, heavy enough to not be swept up in the current, but in danger of being swallowed by it.

If Raphael moved, Mercy might be trampled.

She gasped his name and tugged at his sleeve, having yet to regain her feet. The pain she valiantly tried to hide from her voice lanced through his chest. “Raphael, his boots!”

Raphael looked down to see the barrel of the gun aimed not as his middle, but Mercy’s head. And below even that.

Were Brogan boots with an uncommonly tall heel.

Like one a detective of dubious height might buy to enhance his stature.

The soles of which had left muddy footprints beneath Mathilde Archambeau’s window when he crept in to murder her.

“It was you!” Mercy snarled, a fierce woman even on her knees. “You cretinous pig.”

Raphael released the man’s neck with the greatest reluctance, knowing a fear he’d never imagined possible at the sight of a pistol about to kiss the temple of his woman.

“Just a hired gun, so to speak,” Trout corrected, oozing with antipathy and malevolence. “Spoiled French aristocrats pay better than the English government to punish their scandalous stepmothers. Better, even, than the High Street Butchers.”

“If you shoot now, you’ll be found out.” Raphael nodded in Morley’s direction. “You can’t murder the Chief Inspector’s sister-in-law when he’s right across the courtyard.”

Trout grinned. “This is all laid at your feet, and people see what we tell them to see, which is the King of the Fauves killing a Baron’s daughter and me wrestling the gun from you to put you down. I’ll emerge from the fire a bloody hero. Your fucking brother-in-law will likely pin the medal on my jacket himself.” His finger caressed the trigger. “I thought that woman on the stairs was you,” he spat. “Don’t worry, I won’t miss a second time.”

16

From Mercy’s perspective, Raphael moved with such incredible speed, the rest of the world slowed in comparison.

One moment she was staring down the barrel of the instrument of her death.

And the next, he’d seized the pistol by said barrel, wrenched it toward his own middle, and twisted it out of Trout’s hands before another shot could be fired.

He didn’t shoot the man, as she thought a generally unscrupulous gangster such as he might do.

Rather—with his demonic features made even more so by his mask—the violence he perpetrated on Trout with the butt of the pistol no doubt left the man wishing for death.

If he didn’t succumb to it.

She wasn’t sure a man could survive such a savage beating.

She wasn’t sure she cared.

A crimson mask blocked her view just as she was coming to liken the odious detective’s face to the ground meat inside sausage casings.

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