Let the Night Begin by Kathryn Smith Page A

hearing throughout the levels of the church. Rats scurried far below. Bats fluttered high above. Was that a tap dripping?
    â€œDo you smell that?” Reign asked.
    She held up her hand to silence him. And then she heard it—the faint beating of a human heart.
    Olivia bolted out of the pew toward the sound. It was behind the pulpit. The coward was likely cowering there, hoping she’d take the warning and just leave. Reign was behind her as she moved, reaching the very front of the church a fraction of a second behind her.
    But it wasn’t the young priest behind the pulpit. It was Father Abberley, the elderly priest who had been so kind to her the night before. And he wasn’t cowering, he was lying on the floor, his head in a pool of blood.

Chapter 4
    â€œD o you think he’ll be all right?” Olivia asked as they entered her suite through the tiny balcony’s French doors.
    Reign shrugged and straightened his coat. “I hope so. The doctor seemed to think he would be.” A doctor glassy-eyed, though, from dipping into his supply of laudanum or some other equally as potent drug. Personally, Reign would be surprised if the old priest lived to see morning, which was fast approaching.
    â€œSometimes doctors lie.” She yanked the doors closed. Olivia wasn’t stupid. “Maybe he was lying. There was a lot of blood.”
    She felt responsible. That was the reason for all this fussing over the priest. “He took a cosh to the head, Liv. Those always bleed like a bastard.” He didn’t add that the wound was bad. In his own violent past he had seen many such wounds and there was no doubt in his mind that whoever attacked the priest, didn’t care if the old man lived or not. In fact, Reign suspected the old man had been meantto die—a fact that made him more than a little uneasy.
    â€œAre you going to tell me what happened?” As distraught as she was—or appeared to be—he was more concerned about why the old man had been attacked—and Olivia’s part in it. She had recognized the priest, called him by name. Thank God, I’d followed her, otherwise she probably would have taken the old man to the hospital herself, and wouldn’t that have been an amazing thing to see—a woman carrying a full-grown man like a child in her arms.
    She turned to him. “That was you following me, wasn’t it? You were the man on horseback.”
    He nodded. No point in denying it, and he wasn’t about to apologize for it. He would have been an idiot not to follow her. His only thought was that he should have been better at it. Olivia was up to something—something that required his participation—and he hadn’t survived six centuries by not knowing all he could about his enemies.
    Olivia was his enemy whether he liked it or not. Until she was back in his bed and his life—until she trusted him and proved that he could trust her—he wouldn’t treat her as anything else. For all he knew she might be planning to kill him, and this time she might be luckier than she had been thirty years ago.
    He didn’t blame her for despising him—hell, he deserved it. But he wasn’t going to make it easyfor her to have her revenge. As for his decision to help her…well, that was complicated. He owed her some kind of penance, and that’s what he’d tell himself whenever he wondered why he had agreed. It was much more palatable than thinking she had some sway over him.
    He was not going to think about that. “How could the kidnappers track you to St. Martin’s?”
    â€œI went there last night,” she informed him, long fingers massaging her brow as she paced a small section of carpet. “That’s how I knew Father Abberley. When I went there tonight there was another priest. I don’t think he was really a priest at all.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    She stopped pacing. “He told me where to