Page 154 of To Catch A Rogue

"And just to be certain you could not snake your way out of this one," Sergey hissed, "I brought several friends with me." He gestured to Valentin Kosova, the Captain of the Imperial Ravens, who guarded the tsarina. "We all know the captain is incorruptible, and favors me not. He heard everything I heard. You are done, Vladimir."

"You are done, Balfour," Gemma whispered.

"You are done," Barrons murmured.

"You think you have won?" He bared his teeth at them and switched to English. "You're too late. The order has already gone out. Malloryn dies within the hour, and you will never see him alive again." He strained beneath the grip of the guards pinning him to the floor. "Jelena will send you his head in a box."

Gemma rested her hands on her thighs. "Ah, yes, your message. Your red smoke. It seems you've been distracted in the past few hours, Balfour. You haven't looked to the skies. If you had, you would have seen a column of red smoke rising over Saint Petersburg. It is the signal frommyteam, telling me Malloryn has been retrieved safely. You've lost. You've lost everything."

And soon he would lose his head.

Rage filled his eyes.

"Traitor!" Sergey called in Russian, striding forward with his sword held high. "You scheme against Her Imperial Majesty! And you shall pay."

Balfour glanced down, as if in thought.

He seemed far too composed for a man who’d recently had all his schemes blow up in his face.

"Let the new dawn rise," he called in Russian, his voice ringing through the court.

"And the sun set on the old regime!" came another yell from somewhere in the crowd.

Gemma spun around, but men were surging through the crowd, drawing swords and attacking the congregation of Blood. Barrons grabbed her arm, drawing the rapier at his side as he and Ingrid pressed into a tight formation around her.

The Imperial Ravens swarmed around the tsarina, several of them lifting their mech arms and pointing arm cannons at the crowd.

There was a flash of pale hair out of the corner of Gemma's vision, and she caught a glimpse of Dido casting off her brown wig and throwing something to the floor.

Acrid smoke erupted, filling the throne room.

Gemma couldn't see a damned thing.

Her eyes stung and she could barely stop coughing.

"We have to stop him from escaping!" Gemma snapped, drawing the knife from her sleeve as she rubbed her eyes. "He's going to use the distraction to get away!"

"Wait!" Barrons warned. "We cannot afford to be separated."

Not with so many dissidents suddenly attacking the Blood. Ingrid turned as one of them rushed at her, grabbing him by the wrist as he lunged to skewer her and driving the full force of her verwulfen strength into a punch that hurled him off his feet.

"Barrons is right," Ingrid gasped, bronze eyes flaming to life in the thinning smoke. "It's too dangerous."

Damn it. Gemma surged forward and paused in the wreathe of smoke, looking for him.

"Gemma!" Ingrid cried.

But she caught a glimpse of Balfour across the ballroom, separated from her by too many dueling blue bloods. Dido crouched by his side, her knuckles slick with blood as she cut down any who approached them.

Balfour smiled darkly and saluted her as if to an old foe. "Until we meet again, Miss Townsend."

He vanished in the smoke and the clash of weapons, and Gemma cursed to herself as she was forced to fall back.

* * *

"Ava! Ava?"

"Liam?" Ava pushed to her feet in the cold stone cell and rushed to the bars. She pressed her face between them, trying to see up the cellar stairs.