Chapter 7
By the time Ronan finished logging the intelligence, showering off the grime of the rail yard, and changing into a fresh dark suit, the grandfather clock in the grand foyer chimed eight in the morning.
He walked toward the sunlit breakfast room with an easy, swaggering stride. His body felt fantastic—energized, buzzing with the lingering high of yesterday’s victory. He couldn't wait to see Alistair’s face when he laid out the saboteurs' confessions. Maybe now, with the ambush foiled and the perimeter secured, Alistair would finally breathe. Maybe he would finally smile.
Ronan pushed open the frosted glass doors of the breakfast room.
The morning sun flooded the conservatory with bright, golden light, glinting off the silver tea service set upon the white linen table.
Alistair was already there, seated at the head of the table.
He was fully dressed for the day in a pristine, ivory silk dress shirt and a dark velvet smoking jacket. But the moment Ronan’s eyes landed on him, the triumphant grin froze on Ronan’s face.
Alistair looked like a corpse propped up in a chair.
His skin had taken on a terrifying, grayish translucence, as if every drop of blood had been drained from his body. His dark hair was disheveled, several strands falling across his forehead uncombed—a breach of decorum Ronan had never once seen in five years.
His right hand was wrapped in a thick wool blanket resting on his lap, while his left hand hovered over a porcelain teacup. The hand was shaking so violently that the spoon rattled against the saucer like dry bones.
"Alistair?" Ronan stepped into the room, his voice dropping all trace of swagger, replaced instantly by sharp, cold worry. "What's wrong? Did the fever come back?"
Alistair slowly turned his head toward him.
His eyes were bloodshot, sunken deep into dark hollows of sheer, agonizing exhaustion. When he saw Ronan standing there—broad-shouldered, radiating health, entirely untouched by violence—a strange, broken sound escaped Alistair’s throat.
"You... cleared the rail spur," Alistair whispered, his voice cracked and hollow, like dried leaves scraping across asphalt.
"Yeah. Two scouts. I handled them," Ronan said, crossing the room in three long strides, his eyes scanning Alistair frantically. "Miller is processing them now. But never mind that—what the hell happened to you overnight? Did you sleep at all?"
Alistair didn't answer. He tried to lift the teacup to his lips, but his fingers seized up in a sudden, violent spasm.
The porcelain cup slipped from his grasp, shattering against the marble tabletop and splashing hot Earl Grey across the white linen.
"Alistair!"
Alistair gasped—a wet, strangled sob of pure agony.
His eyes rolled back into his head as his body folded in on itself like a collapsed marionette. He pitched violently forward off his chair, his left arm crashing down across the table's edge and the sharp, scattered debris of the broken china as he tumbled toward the floor.
"Alistair!"
Ronan lunged, his reflexes taking over before his brain could comprehend the disaster. He dropped to his knees, sweeping one massive arm behind Alistair's shoulders and the other under his waist, catching the nobleman against his chest inches before his head struck the hard marble.
Alistair was burning with a terrifying, ferocious fever.
As Ronan gathered him close, his breath hitched.
The ivory silk of Alistair's left sleeve was shredded, and dark crimson was welling up rapidly through the torn fabric, staining the linen in sharp, bleeding tracks across his forearm.
Through the thin cloth of his clothes, Ronan could feel Alistair’s body convulsing with silent tremors. But as Ronan's arm tightened against Alistair’s ribs to support his limp weight, the nobleman let out a sharp, agonized shriek of pain—a sound so wretched and primal it tore straight through Ronan’s soul.
"Don't... don't touch... the ribs..." Alistair choked out, his eyelids fluttering weakly, his pale lips flecked with a tiny drop of crimson foam. "Hurts... God... Ronan... it hurts so much..."
"Julian! Call Julian right now!" Ronan roared toward the corridor, his voice cracking in sheer, hysterical panic.
He looked down at the unconscious man in his arms.
Beneath his fingers, Alistair's silk clothes were growing warm and wet with blood—spreading across the torn sleeve, the sudden, terrifying hemorrhage refusing to clot against the linen. Cold terror seized Ronan's throat as he held his master's shuddering frame, completely at a loss as to why a fainting spell and a shattered teacup could leave an aristocrat bleeding as if he had been torn open on a battlefield.
Dr. Julian practically threw Ronan out of the conservatory.
The old physician had moved with a frantic, desperate speed that defied his frail posture, barring the double doors with his own body and shouting over his shoulder for the head housekeeper to bring boiling water, sterile clamps, and the iron lockbox from the dispensary.
"Out, Ronan! By God, step back!" Julian had wheezed, his face ashen, hands trembling as he knelt beside the fallen lord. "You cannot be in here for this! You will kill him if you crowd him!"
"He's bleeding from his arm! Those are lacerations, Julian—four clean tracks, just like—"
"He shattered a bone-china cup into his own wrist when he collapsed, you blind idiot!" Julian barked, his voice cracking on a high, ragged note. "His blood does not clot properly! You know the fragility of his vascular tissue! Now get out before his heart gives out from the strain!"
The heavy oak doors had slammed shut in Ronan’s face, the brass bolt sliding home with a finality that made the wood vibrate.
For two hours, Ronan had paced the corridor like a caged wolf. He had stared down at his own unblemished forearms, rolling back his sleeves, rubbing the smooth, unbroken skin until it burned red from friction. *Shattered porcelain.* The explanation made sense. Porcelain shards were sharper than scalpels. A man with a blood disorder, fainting onto broken china, would bleed like a slaughtered lamb.
It made sense. It had to make sense.
Because the alternative—that somehow, impossibly, the razor wire strung across the rail spur had bitten through Alistair’s flesh instead of Ronan's—was the raving madness of a sun-blinded soldier.
When the conservatory doors finally opened again, Alistair was upright.
He sat in a high-backed wheelchair, a dark wool blanket draped across his lap and pulled tight over his left shoulder. His left arm was concealed entirely beneath the folds, heavily bound and pinned against his chest. His face was the color of skimmed milk, his lips tinged with a faint, ghostly lavender, but his dark hair had been meticulously brushed back, and his neck was once again encircled by a starched, high-standing collar of immaculate white linen.
"Ronan," Alistair said. His voice was barely a thread of sound, yet it carried that familiar, immovable aristocratic authority. "Stop pacing. You are wearing out the parquet."
Ronan crossed the distance between them in two violent strides, dropping to one knee before the chair. He reached out instinctively, his large, warm hand hovering over Alistair’s blanketed knee before settling firmly on the wool.
"You're not going," Ronan growled, his hazel eyes wild with fury and terror. "Tell me you're not going to that damn gala tonight. Tell me you called the provincial governor and canceled."
