Page 71 of The Forgotten Boy

She had almost taken too long—as Ismay crossed the forecourt, she heard the faint thunder of approaching riders. She left the gate open and fled up the many stairs to her solar, where she had a clear view.

Seized suddenly by the terror she had resolutely kept hidden for so many weeks, Ismay frantically counted the horsemen and, more important, searched for the identifying banner.

She’d known what it would be, and yet she’d hoped. For George, maybe; as detestable as his actions had been, he surely held her in fondness, and he was by all reports as changeable a man as he’d been a boy. She’d known him since he was tiny, and she could use that, could twist all his mixed-up loyalties against him.

But it was not the royal banner with its three silver bars that marked George, Duke of Clarence’s distance from his brother’s throne. No, the banner floating on the Northumberland wind tonight was the white bear and ragged staff on a field of red: the banner of the kingmaker himself, the Earl of Warwick.

Ismay knew, in that moment, there would be no clemency. Warwick dealt only in death.

CHAPTER FORTY

JULIET

2018

When Juliet tried to retreat into the corridor, Duncan strode across the bedroom and shut the door, keeping his hand braced against the wood. “We’re just going to talk,” he repeated.

“If all you wanted to do was talk, you wouldn’t have broken into my house.”

“I wouldn’t have had to break in if you’d only been reasonable and answered my texts like you should have.”

How the hell had Duncan found me? Juliet let that question settle for later, knowing she needed all her wits about her. He wasn’t drunk, but she was pretty sure he’d been drinking. But where? And how did he get himself to Havencross in the middle of a blizzard?

An image fell into her mind, perfectly formed, as though she’d seen it herself: Duncan picking the lock of a side door and hiding himself in the many rooms and passages of Havencross for days. Spying on her, keeping one step ahead of her nightly rounds, waiting for the right moment to confront her.

Tilting her head and aiming for nothing more than a tone of curiosity, Juliet asked, “How long have you been at Havencross?”

“Clever girl,” he purred, his gaze stroking down her body in the manner she’d once loved. “Not clever enough to have worked out the tracking app I put on your phone years ago, but still. I’ve been here two whole days, watching you perform your security checks”—the last two words clearly had invisible air quotes—“listening to you talk to yourself, and on the phone. Who is he?”

He shot the question at her, and Juliet jumped. Realizing she still had her back pressed against the door, she forced herself to step sideways, away from both the door and Duncan, wondering how to spin out the time before Noah got here without further angering her ex-husband. But she was also determined not to play his games. She had tried for years to anticipate Duncan, to placate him, to guess at his intentions and give him what he wanted. All it had gotten her was an empty hospital room and the tiniest of graves.

“Noah’s a friend,” she said. “His family lives nearby and helps look after the house.”

“A friend? I heard the way you talked to him last night. How long have you been sleeping with him?”

“I’m not doing this, Duncan. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but we are over. I don’t owe you explanations about my life. I don’t owe you anything.”

He slammed his palm against the closed door. “You. Owe. Me. Everything. Because of you I’m on suspension. Because you drove me out of our bed and out of our house and that bitch Kelsey was just waiting in the wings—”

“Enough! You brought everything on yourself, Duncan. You always have. You’re a third-rate professor in a second-rate college, and you think screwing a twenty-one-year-old student makes you hot. But it just makes you sad. You’re a sad, bitter man who—”

He slapped her so hard that she stumbled back against her the desk. If he hadn’t hit her open-handed, she was pretty sure she’d be unconscious on the floor. Juliet braced herself, one hand at her aching jaw and the other scrabbling behind her on the desktop to find something—anything—useful.

Duncan closed in, his pupils so wide his eyes seemed almost entirely black. Juliet’s searching hand closed on the owl paperweight behind her and she tensed, waiting for her moment.

Without a flicker of warning, the lights cut out and her bedroom plunged into darkness. Juliet reacted instantly, swinging the paperweight in Duncan’s direction and hitting him somewhere hard enough to shift his position. Knowing her space perfectly well by now, Juliet dashed around him and flung open the door.

The darkness was absolute. The medieval corridor had no windows at all, and if she hesitated she knew she would lose all sense of space and position. Juliet ran to her right, to the door that connected the medieval section with the Victorian. She heard Duncan, swearing freely, begin to follow her.

He would have to be careful. But Juliet could afford to move faster: in her wool socks, any creaks the old floors made were covered by the howling wind outside. She made straight for the main staircase, heading for the Victorian kitchen and Clarissa’s old-age suite of rooms beyond. Where the landline telephone waited.

Call the police first, or the Bennetts’ farmhouse? The farm was only two miles across the fields; if they had a tractor capable of getting through a blizzard, no doubt they’d be much quicker getting to her than the police would. All she had to do was keep out of reach of Duncan.

Her first check came when she picked up the vintage telephone at Clarissa’s bedside and heard nothing—no clicks, no dial tone. Damn stupid blizzard, she cursed silently. The second check came hard on the heels of that disappointment: the distinctive, shattering sound of a gunshot.

Where in the hell had Duncan gotten a gun?

“Do you hear that, Juliet? I’ve got plenty of bullets. Enough to shoot at every shadow and still have one left for you. I know you’re in the house. I’ll find you. I’ve been here for two days, prowling around and finding all the places to hide. If only you would have talked to me, it wouldn’t have come to this.”

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