Flight to the Thorne Hunting Lodge
The travel from Royal registrar’s desk, Thorne Manor to Roadside inn on the King’s Road consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The clock on the mantelpiece had stopped at half past two, a detail Freya would remember for the rest of her life. Lucas did not so much as glance at Cole Langley. His eyes swept the room and found Reid, who stood with a hand already resting on the door latch. Some message passed between them that was too quick for Freya to catch, and then Lucas was moving.
He went to Oliver first.
“Up,” Lucas said, voice low and steady as he lifted the boy off the chair without ceremony. Oliver’s supper spoon clattered to the floor. “We’re taking a journey.”
“Papa, I’m still eating—”
“No time.” Lucas had the boy’s coat over his shoulders before Freya could draw breath. His hands moved with the efficiency of a man who had dressed soldiers and sons. “Reid, the carriage. Now.”
Reid was already gone, the door swinging shut behind him.
Cole Langley remained where he stood, blocking the threshold with his body, folding his gloved hands. He watched the scene unfold with an expression of mild, amused disappointment, as if he had expected better manners from his host. “Somewhere to be, Lord Thorne? I’d hoped we might discuss terms. My father would be disappointed to learn you forsook hospitality so abruptly.”
“Your father can write to me,” Lucas said. He had Oliver on his hip now, one arm wrapped around the boy’s back, and he crossed the room to Freya with a stride that left no room for argument. “Freya, your coat. Nothing else. Leave the luggage.”
Her heart was slamming against her ribs. “Lucas, what—”
“The seal,” he said, and his eyes were the color of a storm. In them she saw something she had not seen in six years: the Wolf, as the soldiers had called him, the man who had carved the Thorne name back out of the mud with his own hands. “You broke the seal.”
It took a breath for her to understand. The marriage lines. The wax seal he had pressed into the parchment while the priest recorded their union. The seal that had hung, unbroken, for six years.
The seal she had broken.
Cole’s smile curved, and she understood the trap. He had planned this. He had known exactly when the courier would arrive and what would happen when the truth poured out. He had not come to threaten them. He had come to watch them run, because running was an admission of guilt. Running was proof that there was something in that broken seal to hide.
Lucas gave her no time to spiral. He slipped his free hand behind her back, palm flat against her spine, and steered her toward the side door that led to the kitchens. “June,” he called, without raising she voice. “We’re going. You have sixty seconds.”
June appeared from the corridor, her travel bag over her shoulder and a plait of gray hair swinging across her back. She had been with Freya since before Oliver was born, and she had never once questioned a midnight departure. She took her place behind them like a soldier falling into rank, and Freya wondered, briefly, how many times June had done this for her former mistresses.
“Leaving so soon?” Cole did not move from the doorway. “The nights are cold on the King’s Road. And it is a long way from anywhere, Lord Thorne. Unless—” his eyes slid to Freya, “—you’re running to where you came from.”
Lucas stopped.
The silence that followed had a physical weight. Lucas set Oliver down and kept a hand on his shoulder.
“I beg your pardon?” Freya said, quietly, before she could stop herself.
Cole’s eyes glinted. “The Waverly lands are forfeit, as I recall. But the house still stands. Empty. Rotted.” He savored the words. “Perhaps you mean to raise a bast—”
He had no time to finish.
Lucas moved like a man who knew that conversation was already over. He closed the distance between them in three quick steps and reached past Cole to pull the front door open. The hinges groaned. Cold night air rushed in, carrying the scent of pine and horses.
“I’m going to tell you this once,” Lucas said, and his voice carried no heat at all. It was the most frightening thing Freya had ever heard from him. “You are standing in my house. In front of my wife. In front of my son. You will leave this doorway, and you will go back to your father, and you will tell him that the Thorne line is not so easily ended. Do you understand?”
Cole attempted to smile, but the corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m only here to offer—”
“Reid,” Lucas said.
The front door opened wider and Reid stood there, one hand on the carriage step, the other resting on the pistol at his belt. He looked at Cole the way a hound looks at a fox that has strayed into the master’s yard.
“The carriage is ready, my lord.”
Lucas turned his back on Cole Langley as if he had ceased to exist. “Freya. Oliver. Now.”
She grabbed Oliver’s hand, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it in her ears, and followed Lucas into the night.
—
The carriage smelled of pine and leather and rain. Reid drove, and Lucas sat with his back to the horses, one arm across Oliver as the boy settled into sleep on the seat beside him. Freya could not take her eyes off the dark road behind them, where the Manor had shrunk to a single square of candlelight and then nothing at all.
“He’ll follow,” she said.
Lucas shook his head. “He won’t. Cole writes speeches, not letters. He’s already rehearsed what he’ll tell his father. We’re hours ahead of him.”
“Then why are we running?”
The words were out before she could think, brittle and sharp. Lucas looked at her for a long moment, and she saw the cost of his composure in the shadows under his eyes.
“Because the seal you broke didn’t just prove we were married,” he said. “It proved the marriage was real. Real enough to make Oliver legitimate. Real enough to put a Waverly heir back in the line of succession.”
“Oliver isn’t a Waverly,” Freya said. “He’s a Thorne.”
“To you.” Lucas looked down at Oliver’s sleeping face. “To Dorian Langley, he’s a threat. A boy who can claim a title the Langley family spent six years trying to buy for themselves. And the simplest way to end that claim is not to argue it in court.”
Freya felt the temperature of the carriage drop.
“It’s to make sure the claimant disappears,” she whispered.
Lucas didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
—
They changed horses twice before dawn, ate cold bread and hard cheese outside a crossroads inn where no one asked their names, and reached the Thorne hunting lodge just as the sun climbed over the mountains. It was a low stone building set into the side of a hill, surrounded by pines so thick that the road vanished behind them like a pulled thread. Reid rode ahead and came back with a nod that said the place was clear.
Freya stood in the doorway of the lodge and took in the single room, the stone fireplace, the bed in the corner with its neatly folded blankets, the oil lamp that Lucas lit with the ease of familiarity. It was smaller than her childhood closet. It was also the safest she had felt in six years.
Oliver ran in circles around the hearth until he found a wooden horse carved by hands that were not Lucas’s. He held it up with a question in his eyes.
“Your grandfather’s,” Lucas said. “He carved it for me when I was your age.”
Oliver turned the horse over, found the initials scratched in the base, and nodded seriously. He set it on the mantelpiece as if placing a sentry.
June busied herself with the kettle and the supply chest. Reid took the perimeter, walking the treeline with his pistol drawn and his head tilted, listening. Freya stood by the window and watched the road they could no longer see.
“There’s a cellar door in the pantry,” Lucas said, coming up behind her. His voice was quiet, mindful of Oliver. “It locks from the inside. Wood supply lasts a week. If Reid gives you the signal, you take Oliver, you lock the door, and you don’t open it for anyone but me.”
“Don’t talk like that,” she said, and pressed her palm against the cold glass. “You promised me this time would be different.”
“Different doesn’t mean safe.”
It was the honest thing to say, and it hurt more than a lie would have. She felt his hand settle on her shoulder, a grounding weight.
“I never lied to you,” he said. “Not six years ago. Not now.”
The kettle began to whistle, a shrill piercing note that split the cabin’s quiet. Oliver made a happy sound and scrambled to help June. Freya let Lucas guide her away from the window and into the work of building a fire, laying a table, making a home out of a safehouse.
—
The inn at Blackwood Ford was a rambling timber structure that had seen better decades. It had exactly eight rooms, four of them habitable, and the innkeeper asked no questions when Lucas paid for the two at the end of the hall. Reid slept in the first, a chair wedged under the door handle. Freya had taken the second with Oliver, while Lucas sat by the window with a glass of water he hadn’t touched and a pistol in his lap.
June had insisted on the third room, saying that age conferred the right to a horizontal bed, and that anyone who disagreed could take it up with the innkeeper.
The night was quiet. No carriages. No hoofbeats.
Freya had just closed her eyes when she heard it: the soft creak of a floorboard outside the door. Not Reid’s footstep—she had learned Reid’s footsteps, heavy and even and never hesitating. This one paused, caught itself, and then came again.
Oliver was asleep in the bed beside her, his breathing soft and even. Freya slipped out of bed without a sound, her heart pounding, and crossed to the door on bare feet.
She put her hand on the key.
And then the door handle turned.
—
Reid came through the wall. That was the only way to describe it—one moment the corridor was empty, and the next he had exploded out of the shadows with a ferocity that made Freya gasp. He caught the man at the door in a headlock, drove him against the wall, and had his wrists pinned behind his back before the stranger could draw the knife at his belt.
The stranger’s face was unremarkable. Brown hair, brown eyes, a nose that had been broken at least once. He wore no livery, no colors, nothing to identify who had sent him.
Lucas appeared in the corridor, pistol in hand, and took in the scene at a glance. “Bring him downstairs.”
The cellar was cold and smelled of potatoes. Reid forced the man to his knees on the dirt floor, and Lucas crouched in front of him with the pistol resting on his knee.
“Who sent you?”
The man spat. It was a vulgar gesture, and Lucas seemed to take no offense. He looked at the man the way a man looks at a broken tool.
“The Langley family,” Lucas said. “Yes. I know. The question is whether you want to give me a name, or whether you want me to guess.”
The man’s jaw worked. “You think you can hide out here forever? Dorian knows about this place. He’s got men already in the hills. By morning—”
“By morning you’ll be tied to a tree eight miles from here,” Lucas said, “with a note pinned to your coat explaining what happens to men who come for my son.”
The man paled.
“Cole,” he said. “Cole sent me. He figured you’d run to the lodge. We were told to wait. To take the boy before dawn and ride for the pass. Present him at court.” A pause. “Say the boy was a fraud. A substitute. Proof the marriage wasn’t real.”
Reid pulled the ropes tight.
Lucas stood and looked down at the man for a long moment. Something in the stillness of his face made Freya cross her arms over her chest. She could see the Wolf in him again, the man who had survived a war that had killed everyone else.
“Reid,” Lucas said. “The cellar at the lodge. You remember how to get there.”
Reid nodded and hoisted the man to his feet.
In the hallway, Lucas pulled Freya aside. “Take Oliver. June’s already packing. We’re moving to the inner chamber.”
“The inner chamber?”
“There’s a passage behind the fireplace,” Lucas said. “It leads to a room with no windows and one door. Reid built it himself. No one knows about it but us.”
They moved through the lodge in silence, Oliver still half-asleep in Lucas’s arms, June carrying a lamp. Reid went ahead, a shadow with a lantern, and by the time the first false light of dawn touched the ridge, they were settled in the inner chamber.
Oliver slept on a cot in the corner. June sat on a wooden chair with her hands folded in her lap, listening. Reid had gone back out to cover their traces.
Freya sat beside Lucas in the dark and let herself believe, for a moment, that they had outrun the trap.
Then Reid keyed the tripwire outside the lodge—a single metallic click, so faint she almost missed it.
Footsteps stopped outside the wall of the passage.
Lucas moved without a word, pushing Freya behind him with a hand on her arm. The chamber had no windows, but they all turned their heads toward the stonework as one.
A moment passed. Then another.
Lucas pressed a dagger to the mercenary’s throat and said in a low, hard voice: “Tell Cole the Wolf will be the last thing he ever finds in the dark.”