Page 87 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
“He was bleeding rather profusely already. Do you know how difficult it is to get blood out of marble?” Phoebe asked inanely.
“I can replace the fucking marble!”
Laurence straightened his shoulders in offense. “Don’t you dare swear at my sister!”
“If your ears are too delicate for such language, you’ll want to absent yourself,” Kit said in scathing tones. “Because I’m going to use rather a lot of it in short order. Hold him down, if you please.”
“What?” Laurence shifted back a step. “I don’t want to touch him!”
“Well, I’m not going to ask your sister to do it,” Kit said. “Put your foot just there. Back of his neck. It’s just for a moment.”
With a grimace, Laurence settled his booted foot at the back of Russell’s neck and pressed, studiously ignoring the muffled curses emanating from the pinned man. In one smooth motion, Kit withdrew the sword from Russell’s back, flipped it round, and cracked the handle against the back of his skull. With a groan, Russell went limp, rendered unconscious.
Kit turned on Phoebe at once, and Phoebe took a hasty, dizzying step back at the fury that contorted his face.
“You’re going to shout at me again, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Hell, yes, I’m going to shout!” Kit raked his fingers through his disheveled hair, tugging in a surfeit of agitation, and at last bellowed, “What the hell were you thinking?”
Well, if the servants had managed to sleep through the nastiness of some minutes prior, almost certainly they had been roused now. Possibly that booming shout had woken the entirestreet. She fancied it had been louder even than the gunshots. “I was thinking I didn’t wish to become a widow quite so soon!” Phoebe volleyed back. “I was thinking that none of us could have gotten a clear shot from my parents’ balcony when it is so far away, and someone had to save you! And don’t you dare shout at me—”
“Shouting,” Kit said, his voice tight and seething, “is infinitelybetter than throttling you.”
“See here,” Laurence interjected. “I’d rather not be party to two murders, if it’s all the same to you. Especially my sister’s.”
“You can go home,” Kit bit off, “when you help Rafe and Brooks shove this cretin and his accomplice into my carriage.” With a sharp stab of his cane, he rounded on Phoebe once again. “And you! What have I told you? The most important thing?”
Hesitantly, Phoebe offered, “Aim for the soft bits?”
“Never fight when you can run!”
Phoebe winced at the roar, her head aching. Her eyes had produced two of him somehow, refusing to merge the separate images down into one. “If you’re only going to shout at me, when I have worked very hard this evening to save your life—”
“Nearly getting yourself killed in the damned process!”
“—then perhaps I should simply leave.” Return to Mama and Papa, who would certainly not have the audacity toshoutat her. But she stumbled on the first step, and Kit reached out to steady her, grabbing her arm. Perhaps it was the blow to her head, or the stress of the evening, or the fact that she had nearly lost him, or that he had shouted at her again, or even some unholy amalgamation of all those things, but she felt dangerously near tears at the moment, and she had the vague sense that crying so soon after pitilessly stabbing a man in the gut was somehow not the done thing.
“Perhaps you fucking should,” Kit said as his eyes raked Phoebe’s face. “Laurence, I’ve changed my mind. Take yoursister home. She needs a bath, a doctor, and a very large glass of brandy. In that order. Tell your mother.”
“I can’t leave you alone with this villain,” Laurence said, nudging Russell’s prone body with the toe of his boot.
“He won’t be going anywhere I don’t want him to,” Kit said, canting his head toward the door, from which Rafe and Brooks had emerged at last. Brooks carried with him several lengths of rope, though Phoebe could not guess from where he had sourced it. “I won’t be home before dawn. Got a bit of business to handle.” He gave a jerk of his head as Rafe and Brooks knelt nearby to bind Russell hand and foot before the man could rouse to consciousness once more. “Stuff him in my carriage, if you’d be so kind.”
“You mean to kill him,” Laurence said, with a long, hard swallow.
Kit gave a restrained smile. “Not immediately.”
A shudder slid down Laurence’s spine. “I could fetch a policeman,” Laurence said. “There’s no need to sully your hands with further bloodshed. Justice—”
“Often goes unserved.”
“I’ll attest to that,” Rafe said, grunting as he and Brooks hefted Russell’s limp body off the ground. “We’ll just throw him atop the other fellow,” he said. “Fairly certain that one’s already dead.”
Good, Phoebe thought viciously.
“And for the love of God,” Brooks hissed, struggling beneath Russell’s weight as they began to carry the man toward the door, “keep your damned voices down. Already the household is waking, and I’d prefer not to have to explain this to them.”
In deference to the terse demand, Kit pitched his voice lower as he said, “I’ve sullied my hands enough for any ten men already, and your sister will sleep easier knowing I have personally and permanently removed this putrid blight on thenoble arse of humanity from the world. Isn’t that so, Phoebe?”
