Paris, France, 1798

Sunlight streamed in through the half-moon window in the sickroom, but the cheery brightness did nothing to improve the mood of James Spencer, Duke of Abermont. The placid weather mocked him. On the day that his sister lingered on the last edges of life, rain ought to pour from the heavens, and thunder should roll through the sky in protest of twenty-one-year-old Louisa forsaking her mortal coil.

James sighed. He sat by her bed in the sickroom. Nothing mattered anymore. Not the success of the hundred missions launched since he’d taken over from his father as the head of the Clocktower, a covert organization. Not the slice of his knife across the throat of the enemy agent who had tortured Louisa and left her for dead.

Once, he’d viewed his work as a spy for the Crown as an extension of his natural patriotism. For generations, the Spencer family had been involved with espionage. While other families prided themselves on breeding exceptional sheepdogs or on their award-winning fruit preserve recipe, James and his four sisters had been trained from childhood onward for one purpose alone: to serve as Clocktower agents.

Three sisters, from now on.

No amount of revenge would bring Louisa back. She lay stricken in that bed, propped up on five pillows. Arden, his youngest sister, had managed to clean most of the blood and bile off her pale heart-shaped face. That was nothing compared to the gore beneath the bandaged wound on her right side, or the deep imprints of a whip across her chest.

His breath came in irregular pants as he stood, forcing himself to the side of her bed. It wasn’t right that she’d die here in Paris, without the rest of her family to say goodbye to her. It wasn’t right that she’d die at all.

Anguish constricted his throat as he dipped a clean cloth in the basin and mopped it across her brow. For a second, her features were not contorted in pain. Then sweat pebbled her face, dripping down to the blistering burn mark on her sharp, angular chin. The bastard had used a branding iron on her when she would not answer his questions.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, wiping the cloth across her brow again. “It should have been me they took. Not you. Never you.”

Her eyelids fluttered at the sound of his voice, but did not open. The laudanum in her system left her blessedly sedated. It was better this way. Better than hearing her screams as the doctor attempted to clean her wounds. Better than how she’d looked in that darkened hovel last night, strapped to a table so that she would not move during the butcher’s “interrogation.”

His hand faltered. He pulled back from her, dropping the cloth into the rubbish bin with the other bloodied linens.

“I should never have let you go, Lou.” He used the nickname she’d hated as a child, but had come to embrace in the last few years. “How bloody, bloody stupid am I? I should have known better. Anytime the Talons are involved, it’s a bloodbath. I could have stopped this. I could have saved you.”

The mission had seemed straightforward: capture the spy Nicodème, a rising star in Bonaparte’s cadre of ruthless assassins, the Talons. Nicodème had a known tendre for tall, willowy brunette women.

Send me, Louisa had said. I fit the profile. No one in the Talons has ever seen me. He’ll never suspect my identity.

James had acquiesced, as long as Arden accompanied her.

“As soon as we found out Nicodème wasn’t alone, I should have pulled you.” He’d run mission control from the Duc de Valent’s old mansion, secretly acquired by the Clocktower after the duc’s imprisonment and execution in the September massacres.

He dropped down in the chair again, propping his elbows on his knees, his head cradled in his hands. The same hands Louisa had once grasped with her smaller fingers to tug him along the garden path at their home estate, Abermont House.

The same hands that had sought retribution for Louisa’s torture. Dragged the steel blade of his knife down in a slant across Nicodème’s neck, effectively severing the artery and making him bleed internally.

Her tormentor was dead, but Louisa wouldn’t last the night.

She stirred. Moaned, an indecipherable sound so unlike her usually melodic voice. Louisa was a talented high soprano—her cover in this mission had been an opera singer, another of Nicodème’s weaknesses. God, how he wished she could be again like she’d been last week, practicing the song she’d planned to perform at the concert held by one of Bonaparte’s generals.

Louisa lived life to the fullest—always laughing, always smiling, always finding joy in the moment.

She’d seemed invincible.

She cried out again. The sound lanced through his chest. The laudanum had begun to wear off.

Soon, she’d have no relief from the pain.

He went to the door, opening it and calling for Arden. In a minute, she appeared from the room next door where she’d been conferring with the doctor.

“Lou’s waking,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him inside the room. “She needs another dose.”

Arden stopped him before he could reenter the room. She hesitated, something he had not seen her do in the fifteen years since his father had taken her in as his ward.

“What did the doctor say?” But he already knew the answer. Louisa’s wounds were too severe for her to recover. Yet he asked anyway, as if through the power of his own desperate hopes he could surmount her fate.

Arden’s shoulders slumped as she reached for the door. “We should say our goodbyes.”

The control he’d struggled so hard to maintain shattered, as Louisa’s brittle bones had broken under Nicodème’s cruelty. He could not form words. He could not do anything but stand there in the hall in front of Louisa’s makeshift sickroom, and suck in one breath after another.

“She would have gone no matter what you said,” Arden murmured. So many times had Arden understood him without words.

Yet his sister could not absolve him of this responsibility. He might not have been the one to physically harm Louisa, but he had sentenced her to death the second he’d approved her part in the mission to apprehend Nicodème.

He came back inside the chamber, approaching Louisa’s bedside again. “I didn’t stop her. I didn’t try to stop her. What kind of leader allows his sister to go into the fray?”

“She’s always known her own mind. She wouldn’t have listened, no matter what you’d done.” Arden came up on the other side of the bed, taking Louisa’s hands in hers. “She knew Nicodème was hurting innocent women, and she had to stop him.”

Remembering the stream of Nicodème’s blood down his blade gave him no comfort. “The bastard won’t hurt anyone ever again.”

Louisa stirred. Slowly, her eyes opened and her gaze traveled from side to side.

“I can’t hold on,” she whispered, her raspy voice a far cry from the confidence with which she’d always spoken. “Jim?”

He took her other hand. “I’m right here.”

“Protect them.”

He squeezed her hand. With that one last request, life shuddered out of Louisa. A silent, sad end to the indomitable girl who had blazed through life louder than cannon fire.

He remained by her side. Her body went cold. He held her hand until the servants came to clear out the room, and still he did not let go. Not until Arden tugged him away, forcing him to down a shot of brandy so he could speak again.

Protect them.

Louisa’s last words would become his personal crusade. From this day forward, he vowed he’d protect his agents with his very life. No one else would die because of his mistakes.

It was the only way he knew how to go on.