What Angels Fear

Chapter 63

From where he stood at the edge of the dock, Sir Henry Lovejoy watched the Viscount climb the rough ladder from the water below. As he reached the top, Devlin looked up, his uncanny eyes gleaming yellow in the reflected fire’s light.

The two men stared at each other, Devlin’s breath coming so hard and fast that the coarse cloth of his water-soaked, bloodstained shirt shuddered with each lifting of his chest. It was Devlin who spoke first.

“The boy, Tom? Where is he?”

“Quite safe. I intercepted him just outside your father’s house in Grosvenor Square. That’s right,” he added, when Devlin’s eyebrows twitched together. “I overheard your instructions to the lad back at the Rose and Crown.”

“And?”

Lovejoy cleared his throat. “I found Wilcox’s note in his pocket.”

“The note was unsigned.”

“Yes. I admit I initially found it difficult to credence the lad’s rather long and tangled tale. But he’d had the forethought to liberate his lordship’s pocketbook, which lent considerable weight to his story.”

Levering himself up onto the dock, his wet clothes clinging to his lean frame, the Viscount went to crouch beside the crumpled, bloody form of the woman. Lovejoy didn’t move. “Is she . . .”

“No.” Her blood streaming over his hands, Devlin lifted the woman gently into his arms. The wind caught her long dark hair, blowing it loose across his face. She stirred, her voice a hoarse murmur, and he nuzzled his lips against her ear, whispering reassurances.

Then his gaze lifted, again, to meet Lovejoy’s. “How much did you overhear? Just now.”

And Sir Henry Lovejoy, that hardheaded stickler for the processes of the law and the sanctity of truth, who had arrived at the basin’s edge only in time to watch Wilcox’s head first disappear beneath the black waters, smiled tightly and said, “Enough.”