Page 61 of The Devil Baron

Rafe had been lulled into a comfortable, warm world with Victoria during the past few days where the only thing that existed was her. It’d been so easy to lose himself in her. In her laughter and kindness and in her body. So. Damn. Easy.

A soft world. Not the harsh world he lived in.

It was time he got back to his purpose.

This family of Victoria’s wasn’t dumb. Not that he expected them to be. Anyone that had taken down his father had to have skill and brawn and smarts and luck on their side.

Even with all that going for them, they had overlooked killing Bockton’s son. Him.

A mistake.

For the time was at hand. It had taken years and forced him to find a partner to help take the lot of them down. But it was now time for darkness.

Roe, Desmond, Reiner, and Lachlan.

Four men that needed to die. Three of them for him, one for his partner. But first, each one had to be destroyed, piece by piece. That was the way. It always had been.

Pound of flesh, by pound of flesh.

That was what his men, his empire would be expecting of him, and he’d better deliver justice to them or he would lose everything.

Hence, his current search for Victoria. It wouldn’t do to lose her to some rogue attack in the woods at this juncture.

At that thought, the blood started to simmer in his veins.

It wouldn’t do to lose her at all.

She was his. His from the moment he’d pulled her up onto his horse—no, earlier than that—from the moment he’d looked up at her standing on the terrace at Wolfbridge.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunk.

He barreled his way through the dense shrubbery at the end of the trail, the opening only half as wide as him.

Victoria. By herself, her back toward him. Standing at the far end of a long, rectangular expanse of dormant grass surrounded by thick evergreen shrubs. Her cloak sat balled up in a pile on the frosted ground behind her, and she stood in the cold in a green woolen dress with black leather trim about the bodice and waist, the chill not seeming to seep into her bones.

Her arms up, her fingers gripped a bow with an arrow notched in place as she pulled back the string. Her fingers shook as she yanked it back farther, almost to the snapping point.

Shaking not because of the cold, because of anger.

He could sense that even with the distance between them.

Her fingers released and the arrow flew steady to the opposite end of the enclosure, embedding into the middle black circle of a rolled hay target.

Scary, how spot-on it landed.

By the time he looked back to Victoria, she’d already pulled another arrow back, fury on her face as she let it free. Another. And another. Arrow after arrow until her quiver was empty and she stomped down the alley of frost-speckled dormant grass to retrieve arrows.

“Why so angry?”

She jumped as she passed him, her focus so concentrated on sending one murderous arrow after another into the target that she hadn’t once looked to her left where he’d been standing watching her.

Her hand on her chest, she shot him a glare and continued stomping toward the target. Removing the quiver from being strapped about her body, she set it by her feet and started yanking arrows out of the target.

He followed her, stopping an arm’s distance away. She was armed, after all. He’d hate to have to tear an arrow aimed at him out of her hands and wrestle the bow from her grip.

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