“Was anyone hurt?” he asked with a calmness that belied the rage stewing inside him.
“Don’t know. Diana went with the first team out. Second team was on cleanup.”
“And they left you here for me. Alone.”
“It was fifty-fifty you’d make it out of the prison alive.” She coughed, and her eyes bulged. “Please, you said—”
“I made no promises,” he whispered. “And you’vegiven me nothing.”
He was acting with intentional malice; he held no remorse about what he would do to protect Diana.
The Stag’s eyes squeezed shut. “They won’t go far. They won’t risk the trains or ships until they know what’s happened to you, and they won’t know until I miss my signal drop.”
“Where?” Ian growled.
“Lucca,” she choked out before her eyes rolled back and consciousness left her.
Ian’s relief was so acute he hardly registered the approach of clipped footsteps across the floorboards.
His eyes flicked to the shadow who’d joined him. “You took long enough.”
“I’m bang on time.” Sunderland squinted at the woman. “Is she dead?”
“Unconscious from a tincture of cannabis and valerian root. In ten minutes, she'll come around without so much as a headache. ” Ian brushed his hands as he rose. "She said the rendezvous point was Lucca.”
“I have a carriage waiting at the mews. On loan, of course. We’ll be in Tuscany in a few hours. Did she say anything about the gunpowder?”
Ian shook his head as he herded Sunderland out the door. He didn’t care what weaponry the Stags possessed.
He’d battle an armada to find Diana.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Asthewagonpulledonto the road, Diana tested the ropes binding her wrists together. They were snug. The enforcer had never worked lines on a ship, or she would have known that tying a knot that tight ultimately weakens the rope. It only took some friction with the jagged boards of the cart at the pressure point of the loop to loosen the knot.
When Birdie forced the horses into a canter, the wagon swerved. Diana used the motion to cover her movements as she tucked her legs up to her chin, pulled her feet into her stomach, and wiggled her bound hands to the front.
If her sore shoulder hadn’t been screaming so loudly, the smack on her thigh would have made her yelp.
“Settle down or next time, I’ll use my knife,” the enforcer threatened.
“Widow said no rough handling,” Birdie countered in a bored tone. “We can subdue her, but only if she comes at us, and you won’t do that, pet, will you?”
Her captors settled back into their seats. They didn’t talk, which Diana resented, both for the lack of information she could have overheard and the fact that conversation would distract them from her subtle movements beneath the blanket to remove the gag and blindfold, and finally, the ropes. The mounting pain in her arm was making it increasingly difficult to focus.
When a crack of thunder sounded in the distance, the horses whinnied and jostled. Birdie and the enforcer argued with each other about how to keep the beasts under control.
Two louder rumbles heralded the approach of the storm.
On the third roll of thunder, the horses reared.
Diana prayed Ian would keep his vow to find her, and she leaped from the wagon.
As a torrent of rain belted against the tiled roof of the Luccapensione, Ian recited every obscenity he knew.
“Your education at the docks has given you a spectacular vocabulary, Holt,” Sunderland drawled. “And don’t stare at me like you’ll rip my throat out. My favors don’t extend to staving off rainstorms. Consider it a sign from the divine that you need to get at least a few hours of sleep.”
They’d spent the day tearing apart the town and the surrounding villages but found no trace of Diana. Ian’s mood darkened with every dead end.