Page 96 of What Angels Fear

Sebastian gathered her into his arms. “We’ve no choice.” He had to shout to be heard above the roar of the fire. “The doors to the lane are padlocked from the outside.”

“Then break the lock.”

Sebastian glanced toward the front of the building. Already, the smoke was so thick that each breath burned his throat and tore at his lungs. “I can try.”

Coughing badly, he carried her to where she could catch a breath of the fresh air flowing in from the gap beneath the two front doors. Casting about in the thickening smoke, he found a heavy sea chest, bound with brass but small enough that he could grasp it with both hands. Using the end of the chest as a battering ram, he slammed it against the juncture of the heavy wooden doors. His aim was to break the lock, or at least tear off the hasp. He could feel the heat of the flames searing his back, sucking the air from his lungs. Gritting his teeth, he slammed the chest into the doors a second time, and heard a satisfying crack.

With all his strength, he rammed the doors a third time. The chest shattered in his hands.

“It’s no use,” he cried, heaving the chest aside. “We have to go out the back.”

He bent to lift Kat into his arms, but she clutched his chest and shook her head. “Leave me. Without me, you can slip through the water door.”

He met her gaze, his chest jerking for breath beneath her spread fingers. “I’m not leaving you. So you may as well give over trying to be so bloody noble and simply accept that it’s my turn.”

There was an instant’s silence; then he heard her answering laugh, faint but true.

With a tearing roar, the great overhanging beam from the central well collapsed in a violent shower of sparks. “Bloody hell,” Sebastian swore.

Clutching Kat to him, dodging fiery bales and falling debris, he sprinted across the warehouse floor. For one wretched moment he thought he’d become disoriented and lost his way in the thickening smoke. Then he saw the open doorway framing a rectangle of gray mist beyond, and he burst through into the cool, lifegiving air of the night.

He’d expected to find Wilcox there on the dock, beside the basin. But the dock stretched out empty before them.

“He must have heard you trying to break through the front doors and gone around,” said Kat, coughing badly.

“Maybe.” Sebastian’s own voice was a pained rasp. Or maybe Wilcox was simply waiting for them at the end of that long dark alleyway that ran along the north side of the warehouse.

“Set me down. I can walk,” she said.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes.” She pushed away from him so that her feet slid to the ground. Then she said, “Sorry. A miscalculation,” and fainted dead away.

Swinging her up into his arms again, Sebastian turned south, away from the alley and the dangers that might lurk there. He’d thought the pile of crates at the juncture of the two buildings only partially obstructed the dock, but he saw now that he was wrong, that the way was blocked completely. He had no choice but to go north.

By now, the flames were shooting from the warehouse’s upper story. One by one, the windows began to shatter, the night filling with the sound of breaking glass as the splintered shards rained down around them. Sheltering Kat with his own body, broken glass crunching beneath his boots, Sebastian ran. As he ducked past the mouth of the alleyway, he saw it filled with smoke and leaping flames from the burning building beside it. If Wilcox had been there, waiting, the heat and breaking glass would have driven him back.

The fire roaring behind him, Sebastian kept to the strip of narrow dock running along the edge of the basin. Passing the row of ancient brick warehouses, he worked his way north. The black waters of the basin reflected the leaping flames, while the fog caught the glow of savage orange until it seemed that the very night around him was afire.

He could see another passageway ahead, leading off to the left, that he hoped would take him inland. Then his heel caught on an uneven plank and he stumbled, going down as his wounded leg gave way beneath him in a spasm of pain, white hot and nearly blinding.

He sank to his knees, Kat still held, insensible, in his arms. He was aware of the distant heat of the fire and the ache in his seared lungs as he struggled to suck in air. Gathering his strength, he was about to push up again when he heard the click of a pistol’s hammer being drawn back, and Wilcox’s voice saying, “Bad choice, Devlin.”

Chapter 62

Martin Wilcox stepped out of the smoke-swirled darkness, a flintlock pistol gripped in one hand. His driving cloak was gone; soot stained the starched white linen of his cravat, and falling cinders had singed the Bath superfine of his inimitably cut coat. But his voice was still oddly pleasant, almost conversational.

“It all comes down to choices. Doesn’t it, Devlin?” he said. “The choice you made to stay in London and stir up trouble, for instance, when any reasonable, prudent man would have fled abroad. The choice you made to come here tonight and walk into my little trap. And then there’s the choice you faced just now. By sacrificing the girl, you might have escaped me. But that’s not a choice a man like you could live with, is it? It’s what makes you so fatally predictable.”

Sebastian felt the planks of the dock rough beneath his knees, the cold air blowing in from the basin cool against the film of sweat on his face as he watched Wilcox walk up to him. “And what of your choices, Wilcox? Your choice to kill Rachel York rather than pay for whatever she was offering to sell to you. Was that so wise?”

Wilcox kept coming until he stood just feet away, the pistol held straight-armed before him. “Ah, but you see, I thought our dear Rachel had made an unwise choice herself. When I heard she’d gone to meet Hendon that night, I assumed she’d found a higher bidder for her wares. So I followed, expecting to recover the evidence of my little insurance scheme. Instead, what do I find but your mother’s most interesting affidavit. It was a surprise, believe me.”

“Insurance scheme—?” Sebastian began, only to break off as he suddenly understood. “Of course. The story you carried to Hendon last year about an embarrassing sexual peccadillo was an invention, designed to extricate yourself from an awkward situation. How long have you been caught in Leo Pierrepont’s web?”

Wilcox’s habitual smile never slipped. “Three years. I’m the one who tipped Pierrepont off as to our intentions in Spain.” He said it as if he were proud of it.

“So that’s the reason you tracked down Rachel’s maid, Mary Grant? To recover whatever evidence Rachel took from Pierrepont that would have proved your involvement with the French went back much further than anyone supposed.”

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