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What had happened?

“My lady wanted me to tell you it’s Lord Timothy,” the nursemaid said in the next moment, sounding breathless. “She said he’s come to take the children.”

The world turned to ice.

He jerked his gaze to his sister. “Auntie Goose, will you and Alice please look after the children until I return?”

She nodded at once. “Of course.”

“Wherever you’re off to, I’m coming with you,” Mal declared at his side.

Apollo had never been prouder to call him friend.

“Good man,” he said. “I just may need your help.”

He hoped to God that he was being overly cautious, that his worry was misguided. But as he extricated himself from the children and rushed to Phee’s aid, he very much feared the opposite.

The door to the nursery flew open with so much force that the latch hit the plaster on the wall behind it, sending it raining down.

“Where are the children?” Lord Timothy demanded.

Ophelia lifted her chin and held his gaze, prepared to do battle for the sake of Reggie and Catherine if she must. “Not here.”

She had spent the time waiting for him to appear looking for a weapon, lest she need one, and thank heavens for the fire poker by the hearth. She had it clasped behind her back now, the metal cool and hard in her palm.

He snarled. “What do you mean they are not here? What have you done with them, you scheming jade?”

“I have sent them somewhere they will be safe,” she answered with as much calm as she could muster, given the fury emanating from her brother-in-law.

“They will be safe with me.” He stalked toward her, menace seething from him.

She eyed him warily, her grip tightening on the fire poker. “I don’t believe they will, and as their mother, I must protect them.”

“This was a mistake,” he told her, his expression cold, his eyes going dark as the night sky in the absence of stars.

Her heart pounded faster. “I don’t think it was. Reggie and Catherine don’t belong with you.”

“I meant for you, my dear. Because now I’m going to have to take care of you.”

Terror clawed at her throat. “What do you mean…take care of me?”

“You are in my way, just like your son. I was going to take care of him tonight and the girl child, too. They were going to drown in an overturned carriage. It would have been peaceful and so quick. Not at all slow and painful like poison.”

Her mouth was dry, and she could scarcely form words, her stomach threatening to rebel at the casual way he spoke of murdering her children. And then she heard his last sentence again. Slow and painful. Like poison.

“Like Corbett,” she said, the awful truth suddenly abundantly clear.

Lord Timothy smiled. “I had no choice. He started threatening to cut me off, and I knew it was his time.”

“What do you mean, his time?” she asked, sick to her stomach yet needing to hear the truth.

“To die,” Lord Timothy elaborated.

The room spun around her. “It wasn’t gastric fever as the physician thought, was it? You poisoned him.”

“I didn’t want to be caught. The police are aware of these things, you see. For the arsenic, I could only use a small amount, derived by soaking flypapers. I only dared administer a bit at a time in his wine. Until eventually, it was over.”

“Dear God,” she breathed. “You killed your own brother.”