Page 86 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
Scratch growled out an oath as he slammed the spent pistol against the side of Phoebe’s head and shoved her away from him, sending her reeling and stumbling across the lawn, dazed.
With a feral snarl of fury, Chris hurled himself at Scratch. He had started from too far away, from too low a position. He couldn’t have possibly managed the momentum necessary to tackle Scratch properly—but he came within arm’s reach as he landed sprawled upon the grass, and he grabbed for Scratch’sknees as Phoebe wilted to the ground, her fingers landing inches away from the cane Scratch had dropped.
The cane. Chris banded his arms around Scratch’s knees, took a heel to the chin as Scratch stumbled. “The cane,” Chris gritted out past the coppery tang of blood that filled his mouth. “Phoebe. The cane. It’s the one that Emma bought for me.”
He saw the significance of the words hit, saw her grapple for Scratch’s discarded cane, her fingers seizing upon it. Unsteadily she rose to her feet once more.
Scratch kicked out again, but he couldn’t manage the leverage to wrench Chris’ arms free with the movement, and in the doing he toppled himself, falling to his stomach with a slow lurch.
There was a strangewhiskof metal, the pound of footsteps across the grass. Scratch went suddenly still, all struggles ceasing.
“You can let him go, Kit,” Phoebe said, and there was a strange, cool inflection to her voice. “He’ll not move a muscle. Unless he wishes to risk a sword straight through his back. Isn’t that right, Russell?”
“Go to hell, ye damned—” The furious statement halted abruptly in a yelp as Phoebe eased the point of the sword that had been concealed within the cane through the dirty linen of his shirt and poked his flesh.
“I’ve already shot you,” Phoebe said with deadly calm. “Stabbed your wretched cohort. Do you truly believe I won’t run you through given half a chance?”
Chris eased away at last, searching through the darkness for the cane Scratch had forced him to relinquish. His knee throbbed as he used the cane to climb once more to his feet, his chest heaving with frantic breaths, like he’d run for miles. In the moonlight, the blade glittered silver, and Phoebe looked like a Valkyrie fresh from battle; blooded and disheveled and vengeful.
Chris had never been so damned proud in the entirety of his life.
Or so fucking furious.
Chapter Twenty Five
Give me the damned sword.”
Phoebe knew from the harsh tenor of Kit’s voice alone that he was angry. Angrier, perhaps, than she had ever seen him. He’d wrapped his hand around hers upon the hilt of the blade—what would have been the handle of the cane, had the sword still been ensconced within it. It was a struggle to pry her fingers from beneath the cover of his and cede control of the blade to him.
Not because he held her fingers too tightly. But because she really,truly, wanted to stab the man pinned beneath the tip. Skewer him like the vermin he was. She hadn’t even suspected that she harbored such vindictiveness within her, such a capacity for violence.
At last she managed to stagger back a step, uncertain whether the buzzing in her ears was from the report of the pistol or the blow Russell had dealt with it. There was the warm wetness of blood upon her cheek, an odd, raw feeling there that she thought might be a powder burn from the firing of the pistol a bit too close to her face.
Kit breathed in rough pants, as if he could not quite catch his breath. But his hands were steady as he kept the tip of the sword pressed firmly to Russell’s back and supported himself with hiscane, even if he leaned a bit too heavily upon it.
“You struck my wife,” he said to Russell, and there was a deep, dark, ominous undercurrent threaded through his voice. A dangerous tide that lurked just beneath the surface, ready to pull the unwary down into the depths. “No one touches her and lives.”
“Ye would’ve kilt me anyway,” Russell ground out into the grass beneath his cheek.
“Yes,” Kit said, and his voice dropped an octave further. “But now I’m going to do it slowly. And isn’t it just all too convenient that you’ve got a place prepared already.”
Russell made a frantic motion—perhaps spurred into it by the naked truth in Kit’s voice—and let out a cry as the tip of the sword pierced his skin anew. “I’ll go,” he said in a plaintive whine. “Ye’ll never catch sight o’ me again. I swear it on me mam.”
“I won’t,” Kit said. “And neither will anyone else. There won’t be enough of you left for anyone to find—because I’m going to take you to the place you meant for me, carve you into pieces, and scatter whatever remains across the fucking country.”
“Ye’ll never find it! I won’t tell ye!”
“I promise you,” Kit said, his voice pitching to a guttural snarl. “Youwill. If I must carve it out of you alongside your tongue—”
“I am going to pretend I did not hear that.”
Phoebe jumped, startled, and even that small, jarring motion made her head swim. “Laurence,” she said in a tremulous voice, her shoulders wilting with relief as her brother appeared at the edge of the lawn. “When did you arrive?”
“About two minutes too late to be of any use, it seems,” he said, as he tucked the pistol he carried—Papa’s, unless Phoebe was much mistaken—into his waistband. “Crossed paths with Rafe in the foyer. I’m guessing he’ll be along shortly. Did youknow there’s a man bleeding all over your floor?”
A hysterical gurgle of laughter slipped up her throat. “Yes,” she said. “I stabbed him.”
Kit hissed out a seething curse. “And then left the damned dagger in his gut,” he said.
