Blood and Betrayal
The travel from Ashford Hunting Lodge, deep in the northern woods, snow beginning to fall to Ashford forest and the River Wye, night of blood and fire consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The gunshot cracked again, closer this time, splintering bark from an oak not twenty yards away. Killian’s hand closed around Nova’s wrist, pulling her upright before her knees could buckle. The starlight that had felt so intimate moments ago now painted the clearing in shades of exposure—they were silhouettes against silver, and Silas Covington’s men rode with lanterns.
“Inside,” Killian said, his voice stripped of all softness. “Now.”
Oliver was already awake, standing in the lodge doorway in his nightshirt, small fists pressed against the frame. He had not cried. He never cried when the thunder came. Nova reached him first, scooping him against her chest as she turned back to see Beckett emerge from the treeline at a dead sprint, rifle cradled across his body.
“Five riders,” Beckett said, slamming the door behind him. “Silas is leading them. They’re not here to talk.”
Killian crossed the room in six strides, shoving aside the rug that covered the trapdoor to the cellar. Nova had never known it was there. Of course she hadn’t. He had built this lodge with escape in mind before she had ever set foot in it, before he had ever imagined she might need to flee through it.
“The passage leads to the river,” he said, heaving the door open. “There’s a boat moored under the willow break. I had it stocked two months ago.”
“You planned for this,” Nova said. It was not a question.
“I planned for everything except you,” he said, and the words hit her like a physical blow. He meant them as a wound, she realized. He meant them as an apology she had not asked for.
Beckett was already loading the fireplace poker with powder and shot from a pouch at his belt. “Your Grace, the passage—how long will it take them to find it?”
“If they’re looking for a fight, they won’t look for a hole in the floor.” Killian lifted Oliver from Nova’s arms and lowered him into the darkness below. The boy did not whimper. He simply looked up at his father with those steady grey eyes—Killian’s eyes—and waited. “You go first. Keep him moving. Do not stop for anything.”
Nova lowered herself into the crawlspace, the dirt floor cold and damp beneath her palms. Oliver took her hand without being asked. Above them, the first window shattered.
Glass sprayed across the floorboards. Beckett fired through the frame, the report deafening in the enclosed space. A horse screamed outside. A man did not.
“Go,” Killian said, and dropped into the passage behind her, pulling the trapdoor closed. The latch clicked into place, and darkness swallowed them whole.
The passage was narrow, barely wide enough for Killian’s shoulders. Nova crawled with Oliver pressed against her side, her palm scraping against roots that had pierced the earthen walls. She could hear Killian behind her, his breathing controlled, measured—a man counting his steps in the dark because counting was the only thing keeping him from turning back.
Above them, muffled by feet of soil, the sounds of the lodge being torn apart filtered through. Furniture breaking. Boots on floorboards. Beckett’s voice, calm and taunting, buying them seconds that felt like hours.
Then a single gunshot, flat and final, and the shouting stopped.
Nova’s hand flew to her mouth. Oliver kept moving. He did not know what that sound meant. He would learn, someday. He would learn what it meant that a man named Beckett had died so a boy could crawl through mud in the dark.
The passage sloped downward, then leveled out. Killian pushed past her at the terminus, working the lock on a wooden grate that opened onto the riverbank. The air that flooded in was cold and wet, smelling of silt and reeds. The moon had slipped behind a band of clouds, and the River Wye ran black and fast below them.
“There,” Killian said, pointing to a flat-bottomed boat tied to a half-submerged willow. “Get in. Stay low.”
Nova lifted Oliver over the gunwale, then climbed in after him, her skirts heavy with mud and river water. Killian untied the rope with hands that did not shake, pushed off from the bank, and took up the oars. He rowed with his back to the current, facing the shore they had just left.
The lodge was burning.
Flames climbed the eastern wall, catching the thatched roof and sending a column of smoke and sparks into the night sky. Against that orange glow, silhouettes moved. Three riders. Four. One of them dismounted and stood at the water’s edge, watching the river.
Even at this distance, even in the dark, Nova recognized the cut of his coat. The way he stood. The calm arrogance of a man who had just killed and was not done killing.
Silas Covington raised his hand. Not in farewell. In promise.
Killian’s knuckles were white on the oars. “He doesn’t know about the document.”
“He knows we have something,” Nova said. “He wouldn’t have come otherwise.”
“Then he’ll come again.” Killian pulled harder, angling the boat toward the fog bank that clung to the far bend. “And next time, he won’t miss.”
Nova looked down at her arm. She had not felt it until now—the burn, the wetness. A graze, just above the elbow. The bullet had torn through her sleeve and the first layer of skin, leaving a furrow that welled with blood she had not noticed spilling.
She pressed her hand over it, and the pain arrived like a delayed guest, sharp and insistent.
Oliver’s small fingers touched her wrist. “Mummy, you’re bleeding.”
She kissed the top of his head. “I’m fine, my love. Mummy is fine.”
But she was not fine. She had never been shot before. She had never been hunted before. She had never watched a man burn to death in a house that had held her wedding night, her son’s first steps, the only peace she had ever known.
And she had never seen Killian Blackwood’s hands shake.
He tore his cravat from his neck in a single motion, the white linen catching the firelight as he wrapped it around her arm. His fingers worked quickly, efficiently, but they trembled—fine tremors that she felt through the pressure he applied to the wound.
“I should have killed him years ago,” Killian said, his voice barely audible over the water. “I should have burned that family to the ground before I ever met you. I was a coward. I thought if I waited, if I built enough distance, they would forget I existed.”
“They didn’t forget.”
“No.” He tied the cravat off with a knot that would hold. “They were waiting for me to have something worth taking.”
The fog closed around them, thick and cold, swallowing the burning lodge until it was nothing but a smudge of orange light, then nothing at all. The river widened, and the current took them, carrying them downstream toward a destination Killian had chosen weeks ago without telling her. A safe house. A new name. A life that had already been planned for a future she had not known she was running toward.
But the silence did not last.
They rounded the bend, and the fog parted just long enough for Nova to see the second boat. It was smaller than theirs, sleeker, and it sat low in the water with two men at the oars and a third standing in the bow.
Silas Covington was not on that boat.
But Quinn was.
They had bound her hands and gagged her, and she knelt in the bottom of the hull with her chin raised and her eyes dry. Even bound, even silenced, Quinn looked at Nova with something like defiance. Like she was telling her not to stop. Not to turn back. Not to trade the river for the rope.
The smaller boat did not pursue. It held its position, waiting, as Killian’s boat drifted into the fog.
Then a voice called out from the darkness—not Silas, but one of his men, reading from a letter that fluttered in the wind.
“His Grace Killian Blackwood. For the safe return of Quinn Ashford, deliver the Covington ledger to the stone bridge at Crofton. Noon. Three days hence. Come alone, or she dies. Bring anyone, or she dies. Fail to appear, and she dies. And when she is dead, we will find the boy. We will find the woman. And we will make them wish they had never known your name.”
The letter finished. The boat turned. The fog swallowed it whole.
Nova’s breath came in ragged bursts now, her arm throbbing beneath the makeshift bandage. Oliver had curled into her lap, his small body shaking despite his brave face. He had heard every word. He understood enough.
Killian set down the oars. The boat drifted. The fog pressed in from all sides, and there was no shore in sight, no light, no sound but the lapping of black water against wood.
He sat motionless for a long moment. Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper—the same paper he had shown Nova in the lodge, the same columns of figures and signatures that could bring down the Covington empire. He held it in his hands, turning it over, studying the ink as if it contained every answer and every cost.
“Killian,” Nova whispered.
He looked at her. His eyes were dry, but the skin around them was tight, and the muscle in his jaw pulsed once, twice, before he tucked the document back into his coat.
“I know,” he said. His voice cracked on the second word. “I know what I have to do.”
As the boat slipped into the fog, Nova cradled Oliver, who whispered, “Mummy, you’re bleeding.” Killian tore his own cravat to bind her arm, his hands shaking. Behind them, the lodge burned like a torch. “He has Quinn,” Nova sobbed. “I know,” Killian said, his voice raw. “And I will trade my soul for hers. And yours. And his.”