Page 64 of Taken to the Grave
“I was only coming for the girl,” Stevens said. “We can let her go, and if she cooperates, tells the foot patrolmen she ran off and nothing more, it will head them off.”
“There is no ‘we’, Stevens. It’s too late. I don’t know how you got involved here, but it ends now.”
“I don’t want to kill you, Marsden.”
Hugh saw the truth of that in the man’s eyes. He’d dug himself in too deeply with this place, with Abbey. He was trapped. “You’re not a murderer. Put your weapon down. I’ll speak on your behalf, explain that you helped free Miss Bertram.”
He shook his head, panicked laughter erupting from his throat. “I’ll end up like Givens.”
“You’ll end sooner than that, with a bullet in your chest, if you don’t put down that pistol.”
Beyond the room, a woman’s voice sounded. It streaked through him like a bolt of electricity.Audrey. She was shouting to be released.
“But if you help me, Stevens,” Hugh went on, his pulse rising as he realized Audrey was likely being led to this room, to the cages. “If you can be the officer I know you truly are, I will use all my leverage to make certain you don’t hang. You have my word.”
The officer looked torn, his nerves shredded, as his eyes skipped between the other door, the cages, and Hugh.
Before he could give any answer, the coming commotion surged through the door across the room. A brawny mandragged Audrey behind him, wrenching and thrashing to free her arm from his grip. She saw him and went still.
“Hugh!” she cried.
Stevens swiveled on his heel. “Martin, let her go.” He aimed his pistol toward the man—and at Audrey.
“Don’t shoot, you idiot!” Hugh shoved the officer’s arm aside. But Stevens’s had already fully cocked the hammer, and at the slightest pressure of his finger on the trigger, the pistol went off.
A mirror on the wall shattered, and Gwendolyn screamed as the man holding Audrey flinched and crouched. Audrey, however, did not. Using her captor’s distraction to her benefit, she swept her arm across a table and gripped a metal candelabra holding three burning tapers. Hot wax extinguished the flames as she bashed the man in the head and tumbled out of his grip.
“Audrey, get down!” Hugh shouted, and she did—throwing herself back out through the door just before Hugh fully cocked his flintlock and fired off his first shot. The man swiveled from the impact of the bullet and crashed onto the floor.
“Stevens—” Hugh turned toward the officer, but he was no longer there. The coward had fled.
“I knew you were here somewhere, Neatham.”
Audrey reappeared in the study, her arms up, her hands splayed. Hammond Abbey practically stepped on her heels, his pistol trained on her back. “Your doctor friend wouldn’t say where, not even when I broke his fingers. True loyalty, that.”
Thornton.Damn it.
“You bastard,” Hugh seethed. A strange, new feeling of futility and doom closed in around him. But he couldn’t allow it to gain traction. If he did, he would be finished. And not just him, but Audrey, Thornton, and even Gwendolyn.
Abbey pulled an aggrieved face. “Our erstwhile Bow Street officer. Couldn’t leave the detecting behind. Toss your weapon aside, if you will.”
Audrey’s eyes filled with an expression he couldn’t read. He thought it might be regret. Maybe even fear. But when she rolled her eyes up, to look at the empty cage hanging above her and Abbey, and then pointedly shifted her attention to a spot behind Hugh, he realized she was plotting something. He presumed that she was looking at the panel of levers. What was she thinking? All he knew was that Audrey hadn’t yet given up. So, neither would he.
Hugh kept his grip on his pistol. “I don’t think so, Abbey. Release her.”
Abbey scoffed at the suggestion and urged Audrey forward a few more steps, using her as a shield.
“How bored you must be as a lordling if you would rather continue to play at inspector,” he said. “My members here understand that dead feeling inside. You have it all, and yet nothing just the same. Excitement, that’s what they want. You’re not unlike them.”
“I am nothing like them,” Hugh gritted out.
“No, you’re not, are you? Stevens said you’re the kind that wouldn’t bend, even under a steel hand.”
“Stevens isn’t the traitor you think he is,” Audrey said. “He tried to shoot Martin.”
Abbey laughed. “That weasel? I never would have expected it of him.”
“If he isn’t heading off the police, how much time do you think you have?” she pressed on, her eyes again going to the levers and then the cages behind Hugh. His muscles tightened in anticipation of something, though he didn’t know exactly what was going through her head.
