Beatrice did not scream. She did not panic. She moved with terrifying, practiced efficiency. She dropped the documents back into the satchel and kicked it under the heavy oak table. She then strode purposefully to the stone fireplace, reaching up to the wooden mantel. From the shadows above the hearth, she pulled down a beautifully maintained double-barreled fowling piece.
She cracked the breech, checking the loads, her movements sharp and confident.
"Miss Harrington," Richard breathed, genuinely stunned.
"My father taught me how to shoot grouse at fifty paces, Your Grace," Beatrice said, her voice devoid of any emotion. She snapped the breech closed and handed the heavy weapon to him. "I imagine a traitor in the doorway is a much larger target."
Richard took the fowling piece, the weight of it comforting in his hands. He looked at the woman standing before him. She was clad in simple homespun wool, her hair escaping its pins, her face illuminated by the dying fire. Yet in that moment, she was the most magnificent creature he had ever beheld.
"And you?" he asked.
Beatrice walked to the scullery door and retrieved a heavy iron meat cleaver from the butcher's block. She tested the edge against her thumb, her eyes gleaming with a fierce, dangerous light.
"This is my home," she said softly, walking to stand beside him, facing the bolted door. "And I have already lost one family to these bastards. I will not lose my home to them tonight."
A heavy, violent pounding suddenly struck the oak door, shaking the very frame of the house. Barnaby barked savagely, throwing himself against the wood.
"Open the door, Your Grace!" a muffled, rough voice shouted from the howling darkness outside. "We know you are in there! Surrender the satchel, and we will make your death quick! The woman and the girl can live!"
Richard raised the fowling piece, leveling it directly at the center of the heavy timber door. His heart hammered in his chest, a strange, wild thrill coursing through his veins. He glanced sideways at Beatrice. She stood tall and unyielding, the iron cleaver gripped tightly in her hand, ready to wage war against the monsters who had ruined her life.
"I believe," the Duke of Stanhope said, a dark, dangerous smile finally gracing his aristocratic features, "that we are going to require more ammunition."
The heavy timber of Oak Haven's front door bowed inward under a second devastating blow. The iron hinges shrieked, tearing free from the stone mortar. With a final splintering crash that echoed above the howling wind, the door gave way.
A blast of freezing rain and impenetrable darkness violently invaded the warm sanctity of the farmhouse, extinguishing the tallow candle and leaving only the blood-red glow of the hearth fire to illuminate the chaos.
Three figures surged through the shattered entryway, their faces obscured by the heavy collars of their soaked woolen coats. They brought the storm inside with them, boots slipping on the wet flagstones, steel blades glinting in the firelight.
Richard did not hesitate. He raised the fowling piece, settling the heavy stock against his shoulder with the practiced, lethal calm of a man who had faced the French artillery at Talavera. He pulled the first trigger.
The roar of the gunshot was deafening within the confined space of the farmhouse. A plume of acrid white smoke filled the room, and the lead attacker was thrown violently backward into the mud outside, his chest shattered by the blast.
"Take him!" a voice roared from the threshold—a voice Richard instantly recognized. It was Captain John Mercer, a disgraced former cavalry officer who had vanished from London society a year prior, only to resurface as the syndicate's most ruthless enforcer.
The two remaining men lunged into the smoke. Richard swung the barrel of the fowling piece, pulling the second trigger. The shot caught the man on the left in the shoulder, spinning him violently into the heavy oak table. But the final attacker, a towering brute wielding a heavy naval cutlass, closed the distance. He swung the blade in a vicious arc, aimed directly at the Duke's neck.
Richard threw up the empty fowling piece to parry the blow. Wood met steel with a bone-jarring crack, the force of the strike driving the Duke to his knees. The attacker raised the cutlass for a killing stroke.
Before the blade could fall, a blur of motion emerged from the shadows. Beatrice Harrington did not scream. She struck with the silent, terrifying precision of a woman defending her sanctuary. The heavy iron meat cleaver buried itself deep into the attacker's forearm. The man howled in agony, dropping the cutlass.
Instantly, Barnaby, the blind mastiff, lunged, his massive jaws locking onto the man's ankle, dragging him to the floor in a thrashing, screaming heap. Richard rolled to his feet, grabbing the discarded cutlass and driving the heavy brass pommel into the fallen man's temple, knocking him unconscious.