Grey shrugged. "So everyone keeps assuring me. And yet, I'd always believed it would be you."

The tavern's nearby side door creaked open, and noise and dim light spilled out into the alley. Grey glanced up, then faced Ethan once more, furtively stowing his pistol. "That's a kill shot, old friend, and we both know it." He cast Ethan his disconcertingly sympathetic smile. "You had to have been thinking about a woman earlier with an expression like that." He turned to lope away, saying over his shoulder, "I hope she was worth it."

Ethan rolled to his side for his gun, biting back an agonized yell, but Grey had already disappeared.

Though Ethan couldn't see who'd exited the tavern out the side door, he could hear them.

Grimacing to the clouded night sky above, Ethan listened as the MacReedys soddingdebated whether to help him or not:"I'll no' get dragged into trouble."; "We do owe him."; "He's turned into a blackguard."; "Think he might've deserved the shot?"

"Warn my brother," Ethan grated to them, blood spilling from his mouth, but they ignored him. His body was beginning to shudder with cold. "Listen to me…." They didn't.

He had failed Hugh utterly. Never had Ethan been so careless, walking into the street without even a cursory scan of the vantages surrounding him. He was dying, and he had only two thoughts—getting a warning to his brother…and the fact that he'd never get to see that damned little witch again.

Ethan perceived hands under his arms, and braced for the pain as they lifted him, but he still blacked out….

He had no idea how long he'd been unconscious, but when he came to, he was in a bed, with a shaky-handed surgeon removing the bullet while others held Ethan down. He roared with agony as the man plucked metal and charred cloth from the wound then splashed whisky into it.

Before he began stitching, the doctor tossed back half the bottle down his own throat. "I did what I could," he said when he finished.

"Will he live?" the MacReedy whelp asked.

In and out of consciousness, Ethan caught the doctor's parting words: "Let's put it this way. If he recovers from a wound like that and the fever to follow…I'll quit drinking."

Chapter Twelve

"I'm beginning to wonder if anyone has even noticed the blackguard's missing," MacReedy the elder said. "It's possible no one's coming for him."

"Aye," the whelp replied in a distracted tone.

"Bugger off, you weak-kneed old bastard," Ethan growled, ready to claw at the gaudily papered walls after five weeks of being trapped in the MacReedys 'lodge. "You think I canna hear you?"

He could. Every day as he lay bedridden, slowly recuperating, Ethan could hear the sounds of their leisure—the fan of cards shuffled, or the taps as MacReedy emptied his pipe or their dominoes connected.

Tap…tap…tap…all bloody day long, until Ethan thought he'd go mad.

Why has no one come for me?He felt like an unwanted dog tied to a tree, then forgotten.

"Go to hell, MacCarrick!" the whelp replied.

"Where do you bloody think I am?" Clenching his fists in the blanket, he surveyed "his" room. Most closets boasted more space. "You're brave now, but by God, when I'm on my feet again, I'm going to make you eat your goddamned teeth."

A few moments later, MacReedy the elder stepped into Ethan's small room, eyes grave. "Son, I'm no' going to talk to you about that language again." The first time had been after Mrs. MacReedy's ill-fated attempt to read psalms to Ethan—he haddeclined in language so foul he'd thought he'd heard something burst in her brain before she'd skittered from the room and fainted. "Debt or no', I'll be tossing you out," MacReedy said calmly before stepping out once more.

The debt. Always back to the debt with this family. They knew they owed Ethan because he had delivered the completely unbelievable lie that Sarah had slipped instead of jumped, ensuring that she would have no suicide stigma and would receive a Catholic burial. Ethan had also ensured that he would be shadowed for more than a decade by rumors of his pushing her to her death.

MacReedy knew Ethan hadn't lied to protect Sarah's memory for her family; in fact, Ethan blamed them for forcing her into the marriage. And he'd been sure to let them know it every time he encountered them, which fortunately hadn't been often.

Yet now Ethan was trapped in their home.

When he'd awakened from two weeks of delirium, he'd immediately tried to rise, frantic to leave this place and find out what his careless actions had wrought. Was his brother safe? Had Grey gotten him, too?

Ethan had promptly ripped open his wound and blacked out. The consequent stitch repair by the shaky physician had earned Ethananother week's worth of fever and guaranteed he'd been even weaker than he had been the first time he'd come to.

Every bloody time he tried to rise and leave this place, he ripped open stitches and passed out. With his height and the size of the cramped room, he invariably knocked his head in the fall, making his total time trapped in bed at over a month and counting.

He'd been forced toask MacReedy to find out if Hugh and Jane had left for Scotland. Ethan had also had to pay the whelp to wire London to report his situation.

MacReedy the elder had learned that Hugh had indeed left the lake house the very night Ethan had been shot. At least there'd been one good thing about Ethan catching that bullet—Grey's waiting to kill Ethan had allowed Hugh to begin his journey north into the Highlands, putting Hugh firmly in his element.

Ethan was confident that his brother was safe for the time being. The problem was that Hugh would be holed up on Court's estate in utter seclusion with the woman he wanted more than anything on this earth—now his temporary wife. At worst, the curse was real, and Hugh would be risking her death and torment. At best, Hugh was still secretly an assassin, massive and stony and awkward around people, such an unfitting match for the celebrated beauty, who loved to socialize.

Not to mention that Hugh took his orders to kill from Jane's own father….

But in the condition Ethan was in, there was nothing he could do to help his brother. The inaction ate at him. He burned with urgency. With nothing to do but think, he stewed, alternately dwelling on his failure and on Madeleine.

Though Ethan had ruined her chances with Le Daex, Ethan couldn't say that she wouldn't find another after so many weeks had passed. She was tempting, and if she was provided with a large enough dowry, a man could be moved to overlook her lack of virtue.

Ethan had shown mercy to Grey and look what had happened. He would not make the same mistake twice by allowing Sylvie to go unscathed.

When he was finished with Grey, Ethan would lure Madeleine away from Sylvie back to one of his more obscure estates, with an offer of security in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Or, if she proved stubborn, he was not above promising marriage, with no intention of going through with it.

He wondered if her parents had warned her about a scarred, black-haired Scot, but he doubted it. Sylvie lacked the imagination to make the connection. Van Rowen had been eaten with shame and guilt over the incident and likely wouldn't have spoken of it before his death six months later.

In any case, it wouldn't matter if the girl had been warned. Ethan would have her one way or another. He'd been disfigured—the exquisite daughter offered up would appease him. Once she was in his possession, he'd use her until he tired of her.

Then he would throw her out, thoroughly ruined, on her pert little arse, saving countless foolish noblemen from Sylvie's clutches.

Madeleine had told him that his kind used and gave nothing back.