Free Prince of Hearts by Margaret Foxe Page A

before everything went black was that she was going to marry Charles Netherfield as soon as humanly possible – if she survived the river, of course.
    And Romanov could rot in hell.
     

Chapter 4
    "You are what?" Dr. Augustus bellowed, though she stood not two inches from him.
    Miss Wren sighed in irritation, tapping her foot against the rocky precipice upon which they were perched. Perhaps having this particular conversation with her employer was better suited to a comfortable drawing room and not the top of the French Alps, but it was too late to take back her words now.
    "I said, I am returning to England, sir, and marrying Captain Standish."
    "What utter nonsense," Augustus scoffed.
    "Nonsense, sir? I rather think our present predicament – that is, being chased through the Alps by murderous thieves – is ripe with nonsense, not the fact that I am going to marry a proper English gentleman."
     
    - from The Chronicles of Miss Wren and Dr. Augustus,1896
     
    London, 1896
    AS expected, Franco had taken his damned time corroborating Sasha’s alibi. Without Rowan to moderate Franco’s grudge, Sasha and Fyodor had seen the weeks drift by behind Council guard, without any great hope of seeing London before the seasons changed.
    Unable to contact the outside world, and without knowing what Rowan had found upon his return to London, Sasha could do nothing but stew in his worry and anger in his Genoese jail cell. Only the very real threat of Council retribution, and his growing suspicion the killer would not fulfill his threats while Sasha wasn’t in London to bear witness, had kept him from escaping his confinement.
    Who knew how long Franco would have dragged things out had another body not surfaced. When Franco had admitted this development to him as he and Fyodor were being released, Sasha had suffered a moment of desperate panic, believing he had misjudged the situation, and the murderer had already killed Finch. But the victim had been found in Scotland, of all places, on a little island in the Outer Hebrides.
    Not exactly a place Finch would have been likely to be, considering the amount of water she would have had to vomit over to get there.
    But the facts were bad enough. The victim had been a local woman, blonde, petite, and bespectacled. The killer wasn’t through, and Sasha knew that it was only a matter of time before the storm hit London. For some reason, the murderer had decided to threaten those closest to him, on top of framing him.
    The murderer had always had a singular vendetta against him – God knew why – but the stakes had escalated in a way that had finally pushed Sasha too far. Sasha’s three hundred year vow to temper his emotions was fast fading. He was losing control. Which scared him more than anything else.
    Such were his rather bleak thoughts as Fyodor drove him home through the dirty streets of London after three weeks in prison and one week in the Outer Hebrides with none other than Franco himself, investigating another crime scene. Franco had not absolved him of guilt, of course. He was stubbornly clinging to his suspicions that Sasha had accomplices working for him, or some such nonsense. But he had at long last let Sasha and Fyodor return to London, unable to convince the High Council to extend the edict, in light of the events in the North.
    Sasha had grown to think of England as his home in the six years he’d lived in London – or as close to a home as he'd ever manage. It seemed an unlikely match for him, having spent the better part of his three hundred forty two years on some part of the Continent, most recently in the cosmopolitan, intellectually sophisticated Vienna.
    By comparison, England, despite its claims to be the center of the modern world, seemed rather ramshackle and quaint, populated by eccentrics and puritans. But he liked those eccentrics and puritans. He liked the friends he made and the work he did. He even liked English weather, having always had a partiality