There, in the doorway, backed by his guardsmen, stood the Baron Morriere!
Tension hung over the silence of the room like smoke above a battlefield.
"Did you think you'd get away, you fool?" the noble gloated. "Did you think you'd escape Raoul Morriere's vengeance?"
Mark was breathing hard. His face was pale, his eyes over-bright. Deep within his brain words were pounding, with the beat of a giant sledge....
"I shall defeat fate!" those words throbbed. "I shall rewrite history! Not as I wanted to. No. But they shall not have Elaine—"
His hand clashed down, then, as a cobra strikes. Down to the broad bladed knife Jacques Rombeau carried in his belt. All his mind, all his heart, was concentrated on this one thing: Even though lightning should strike him this very instant, he would seize that knife. Whip it out. Bury it to the hilt in Elaine's breast, that death—not Baron Morriere's retainers—might claim her!
But his hand clutched empty air. He stared down in shocked incredulity. Stared down, and remembered—
He had given that knife to the old peasant before he went to Paris! And he had failed to ask it back!
"Look! He reaches for his knife!" whooped the baron. "He would protect his sweetheart!"
The guardsmen behind him joined in his roar of laughter.