Page 76 of Baron Bolt

Damian went back a half step as if the room had struck him. His knee folded. Six feet four of him came down onto the drawing-room floor with a weight that jumped the fire irons in their stand.

Ophelia was moving before the echo died.

She had no memory of leaving the chair. She was simply in motion, skirts fisted. The madman was ahead of her. The spent pistol falling. Both hands reaching toward the man on the floor. Shrieking something about mine, about beginning again, I made it once, give it to me, I will open it and begin. Bent over her husband with his stained fingers spread.

Ophelia arrived and kicked him, with the whole of her body behind it, squarely between his legs.

Her slipper was a flimsy thing. She wanted her half-boots. She put her hip into it as her father had once taught her to put her hip into slamming a carriage door on a bailiff, and it sufficed. The breath went out of the foreigner in a note higher than the storm. He folded over himself like a bad hand thrown in and went down to his knees, mouth working, eyes bulging, hands cupped around his ballocks.

“You do not touch him,” she heard herself shout.

Rochat sucked in air and began to scream. Not in pain, or not only. It was about the work. The work. Mein Werk. He would have it back. He would. He got one knee up.

That was when the big servant crossed the room.

The other man had not moved in an hour except to stand where he was told. He moved now the way she imagined he moved the dead. Without haste or waste. He took his shrieking master by the collar and the wrist and bore him down flat to the floor as easily as folding linen. A knee in his spine. Both thin flailing wrists gathered into one broad hand. He held him there while the man howled into the carpet.

“C’est fini, maître.” The servant’s voice was low and final, a door closing. “Il est parti. Il n’est pas à vous.”

Ophelia knew French.

It’s finished, master. He is gone. He is not yours.

The master screamed something in German.

The servant bore down and lifted his head and said it again, in English this time. Each word set down slowly, so that she heard it, and the master under his knee heard it, and the man bleeding under her hands would hear it, and there could be no mistake.

“He walked away, master.”

A beat.

“He is not yours.”

Ophelia was already on her knees.

The wound was high on the left, where the shoulder met the chest. Welling dark and dripping in the dim light. New ruin lapping at the edge of the old.

She pressed both palms flat over it, over new blood and old scars together, and bore down with all her weight. She would not let him leave. She finally had her Damian and he could not leave.

The blood came up hot between her fingers, and his heart shoved at her hands. Slow but sure.

His eyes were open. Both blues found her, hazed and astonished. Behind her the madman wept and raved into the carpet. The servant held him.

The storm was moving off. Thunder gone long and grumbling over the far hills. The rain easing out of its fury against the glass into the ordinary rain of this county. The kind that fell all day on the meadows and made them green.

“Damian Archer.”

Her voice cracked straight down the middle and she did not care. Her hold on herself was gone. She was done to her last card.

“Look at me. You will listen to me now, because you have been a fortress, claiming I cannot, and I have just heard the whole truth of it from a lunatic on my drawing-room floor, and here is what I have to say to it.”

She leaned harder on the wound. He made a low sound. Good. Sounds were life.

“I do not care what stood up off that slab. I know what walked into this room tonight and put itself in front of a pistol for me, and it was a man, and it was my man. My husband. I love you. Do you hear me? I love you. I love you, you great buttoned-up impossible creature, and I was too busy playing my hand close to say it, and you were too busy being dead to ask.”

The tears were coming now, dropping off her chin onto his ruined shoulder. Salt into everything.

“So. You died once already but you did not stay dead, and I approve of your decision. But you will not—” she bore down “—you will not die now. The stakes are too high. There are two of us at this table, and one more coming who will want to know his uncle-papa, and I do not lose, Damian. Ask anyone. I play to win!”