It was done.
The single most difficult, excruciating assignment of his miserable existence—he’d set Chloe free.
And never before had he felt more miserable.
Seated in his office, just as he’d been since Chloe left, Leo steepled his fingers, rested them under his chin… and just stared.
Even the pain of losing Daphne Smith hadn’t cleaved him in half. Not like this. That had been a whirlwind courtship. He’d not shared any parts of his past with Daphne, but had kept a safe barrier. When he’d sent her away, the knowledge that she was safe had been enough.
In this case, with Chloe… it wasn’t enough. Greedily, he wanted every gift she’d held out. He wanted to give up the Brethren and have a marriage with Chloe and golden-haired girls with her spirit and smile. He grimaced. Mayhap not girls. Little girls grew into women, and women were prey to scoundrels like him.
And yet, there was the Cato case… which, if the information Holman had unearthed and turned over to Leo’s care was accurate, represented a greater threat. For it would mean there were members within their midst who’d stood to profit from the assassination of Lord Liverpool…
It would mean there were traitors among the Brethren.
It was an earth-shattering discovery… and still, for the peril it represented, he could think solely of his wife—and how sending her away shattered a heart he’d not even known he was in possession of.
A knock sounded at the door.
He let his hands drop to the arms of his chair. “Enter,” he called out, a nonsensical hope that she’d defied his orders and returned instantly crushed.
Holman stood framed in the doorway. “Viscount Rowley to see you, my lord.”
Just like that, every thought of Chloe slipped to the back of Leo’s mind as every sense went on alert. “Show him in and then shut the door,” he ordered.
“As you wish.” His assistant went rushing off.
Leo pulled open the center desk drawer and withdrew a stack of folded notes. Then, retrieving the folders from the locked nook built within the left side of the unit, he took out the towering files contained within. He positioned everything neatly before him, just as Holman reappeared.
“Lord Rowley,” he announced.
“Rowley, to what do I owe the honor of this unexpected visit?” he drawled, reclining in his chair.
Leo caught the tightening of his superior’s mouth at the blatant show of disrespect.
“Tennyson,” Rowley greeted like one making his hello to a favored friend and not the agent who’d roused his fury for the length of their service together. But then, the viscount had always displayed a veneer of civility that fit with his image of respectable lord.
Ducking his head, Holman beat a swift retreat, closing the door in his wake.
As soon as the door shut, Rowley’s façade cracked. “Mine isn’t a social visit. I’d rather keep company with the slime in the streets than you, Tennyson.”
“Business, then.”
Rowley pulled the pistol out of his waistband.
All Leo’s nerves went on alert. He made himself go motionless.
Crossing over, the viscount laid the weapon on the edge of the desktop and slid it forward, so the gleaming metal was mere inches from Leo’s fingertips. Rowley sat. “Tomlinson must be getting old, ceding control of your household to a young pup like Holman. Or your judgment has faltered. Which is it, hmm?” he asked, folding his hands atop his belly.
Leo weighed his words.
Before he could reply, Lord Rowley made a clucking sound that set his jowls jiggling, giving him the look of a farmhouse rooster. “Come, come, dear boy. Where’s the bluster and bravado you’ve shown? You’re always ready with a snappy response. Hardly ever thoughtful.” He jabbed a finger at Leo’s desk. “You owe your placement to your uncle. But then, everyone within the Brethren knows that.”
Leo scoffed. “Do you believe I give a damn what you or anyone thinks about me?”
Rowley drummed his fingertips in a grating rhythm. “Tell me, where is Lady Tennyson?”
His body tensed, and it took every lesson he’d been handed as a member of the Brethren to not lose his masterful control. “Why don’t you say what it is you came to say?” he warned.
“Hmm.” Leaning forward, Rowley picked up the gleaming pistol and passed it back and forth between his hands.
Leo sharpened his gaze on the deliberate movements meant to intimidate. He’d faced far greater threats and foes than the bastard before him.
“I credited the papers and gossip as rubbish. I assumed your marriage was nothing but an orchestrated attempt to maintain your position… but it seems there was merit to the claims. You’ve been tamed by a proper English lady.”
Leo’s fingers could have left marks in the wooden arms of his chair as the viscount stoked a volatile rage inside him.
The viscount abruptly stopped. He returned the gun to Leo’s desk, pointing the handle directly at him. “You could not abandon the damned case, could you?” Rowley asked crisply.
At last, they’d stopped playing this game of cat and mouse. “You arrived sooner than I’d expected.”
“You pieced together the truth about the Cato Street Conspiracy faster than… oh, hell, I trusted no one would gather the details, and certainly not you.”
After Peterloo, none would have dared look further than insurrections against the government. Leo flashed a cold grin. “I realized I was only looking at the surface. That there was more there.” Chloe’s tenacity in uttering those words over and over had taken root in his brain in a way that had allowed him to see the obvious facts he’d been missing. One who’d made a fortune off the slave trade, Rowley would have always had reason to resent Lord Liverpool’s push to abolish it. “Cut into your profits, did he?”
The viscount pursed his mouth. “What was it to him whether a man deals in the sale of savages?”
Leo didn’t so much as flinch at that ruthlessness. It was the level of avarice and evil he’d confronted countless times in his career. “And he is coming next for your slaves altogether, isn’t he?” he taunted, reveling in the splotchy color that filled his superior’s cheeks.
“The king and Parliament had their scapegoats in those commoners, and the Brethren were content to close the case. I could have been free of that damned Liverpool.” The viscount wagged his finger the way one of Leo’s too-stern tutors used to. “You could not leave it alone. But no matter, after tonight, you will cease to be a problem for me.”
Keep him talking.
“Lord Liverpool saw the slave trade abolished. Murdering him wouldn’t see it restored.”
“No, it won’t. But my business ventures in India and the Caribbean are at risk as long as he pushes forward legislation that defies common business sense.”
“You mean slavery,” Leo jeered. “Your businesses are built by the work you force others to do without any recompense.”
“Oh, the hilarity.” Rowley laughed uproariously, the tinge of madness sending his mirth spiraling. “You of all people preaching to me about morality.” He dusted tears of amusement from his eyes. “I’ll not debate with you on a matter of logic that is beyond you. You need to be dealt with.”
Ice scraped his spine. “Murder me,” Leo stated. “You’re referring to my murder.” Of course, that end had been inevitable since he’d stumbled upon his superior’s complicity.
“It didn’t have to be this way.” Rowley tacked that on, almost as an afterthought. “I didn’t want to kill you,” he admitted. “Oh, I gladly wished you dead and will be happy when you’re, at last, in the ground, but I wouldn’t have sullied my hands with your death.”
“But you will now,” Leo noted calmly. From the corner of his eye, he measured the distance between him and the gun on his desk.
“Pfft, please, I already told you. I don’t plan on wasting the effort it would cost me to lift my hand and put that deserved bullet between your eyes. Why, I even threw my wife at you, but your uncle saved your post… once more.”
“So that is why your wife was so bloody tenacious.” Leo chuckled, biding his time, waiting. “To think that all along she truly was just a whore.”
“Attempting to get a rise out of me?” Rowley arched an eyebrow. “I don’t give a jot who she spreads her legs for.” He paused. “Unlike you.”
Leo’s spine went ramrod straight. Do not take that bait. He’s trying to unsettle you. “You foresee this meeting ending with my death, and yet, you don’t intend to do it yourself?”
The viscount tossed his arms wide. “Don’t be silly. You are going to see to the honors yourself.” He waved four of his fingers at the instrument in question.
Leo glanced from the viscount to the gun and then back to the viscount. Mad. The man had gone utterly mad. “Just why would I do that?” he drawled.
“Because if you don’t,” Rowley all but purred, “then while I keep you company, I’ll send a loyal servant on to deal with your wife. Her brother has surely deposited her by now.”
Leo started.
“Didn’t believe I knew you’d scuttled her off with Waverly as a companion?” He chortled. “I know… everything. And your lack of cooperation will result in her death.”
Terror held him in its unrelenting grip at Rowley’s gleeful threat. Every last fear he’d carried—the one that had kept him a bachelor and then had him send Chloe away—assailed him. On the heels of that came a belated, chilling realization…
Rowley had infiltrated the ranks of the Brethren. He was commanding agents within.
“You appear more amenable,” Rowley noted.
“You expect me to put a bullet in my head?” he asked, searching for time. “To spare a woman?”
“Your staff talks. You have been unable to keep your hands off the pretty thing. And you sending the chit away speaks enough to how you feel about the lady.”
Rowley had him.
Refusing to be bested by Rowley without the fight he craved, Leo yawned. “You’re an even more shite agent than even I’d credited if you haven’t given a consideration to how that shot would bring down my household, and with my staff knowing you were the last to meet me.”
Rowley straightened. “Enter,” he bellowed as he commandeered control of the exchange and Leo’s office.
Leo shot his stare to the entrance of the room. All his muscles went taut as Holman entered.
Studiously avoiding Leo’s gaze, the bespectacled gentleman hovered in the doorway. “You summoned, my lord?” he demurred, his head bowed.
“Close the door behind you, Holman. Though, everyone’s been sent away, haven’t they? Tomlinson’s been taken care of. The maids and footmen dismissed for the evening.”
Slowly unfurling to his full height, Leo growled. “I would expect such treachery from you, Rowley. But you, Holman?” What a bloody fool he’d been.
The younger man dropped his eyes to the floor.
“Do you truly believe Holman is content to be nothing more than a glorified clerk for you of all people?” Rowley drawled, removing another pistol from the waist of his trousers. “Is that what you craved when you were near his age? Or did you wish to be in the field?”
A thick curtain of rage descended briefly over his vision. “Holman?” Leo growled.
His assistant swallowed audibly, looking one sharp demand from Leo away from bursting into tears. “D-do you require my services?”
The slap of betrayal earned a bellicose laugh from the viscount.
Fueled by rage and a knowledge that the summons he’d sent would arrive too late, Leo barked at the man he’d taken under his wing. “Traitorous bastard,” he hissed. He made a grab for the gun but Rowley leveled his pistol at Leo’s head.
“Stop,” Rowley warned.
Leo seethed; his fingers twitched with the need to grab the weapon so close at hand. There could be no doubting that his superior would fire. Dismissing him, he leveled his efforts on his apprentice. “You will never be anything within the Brethren or the Home Office, Holman.”
“It is not about that,” his clerk whispered.
Fury pulled the words from him. “What is it about?”
“Lord Rowley said you are a traitor. I—”
“Shut your mouth, Holman,” the viscount snapped.
Sticking his chest out, the man Leo had hired and groomed faced Rowley. “You are not presenting the facts correctly,” he said, his cheeks flushed. “You provided me evidence of his lordship’s—”
With a tired sigh, Rowley fired at Holman. The loud report of the gun thundered around the office.
Holman’s lips formed a small circle of surprise. And then, soundlessly, he pitched to the floor.
“Not another step, Tennyson,” he barked, freezing Leo midstride. From the corner of his eye, he evaluated Holman’s prone, awkwardly bent body, his face pitched to the floor. A small pool of blood had already begun forming. “One of us will be walking out of this office, and I intend for it to be me.”