Love and Fury: The Coltrane Saga, Book 4 by Patricia Hagan Page A

with passion. With trembling fingertips, he closed them.
    He got to his feet, holding her tight against his chest. He staggered through the mud, carrying her out of the street. People spoke to him, but Colt stared straight ahead, hearing nothing.
    He took her all the way home. As he carried her up the steps of her house, someone saw him coming and ran to hold the front door open. Inside the house, he passed the parlor, where women were crowded around Juliette Bowden, who lay unconscious on the divan, having fallen into a deep faint.
    He moved on up the stairs and when he reached the second floor, went through the first open door and laid Charlene carefully on the bed.
    Then he turned and, wordlessly, left the house and walked back into town. People he passed shrank away from the man whose eyes burned with hatred, and a lust for revenge.
    John Travis Coltrane had one thought: Charlene’s killers were going to pay. And God help anybody who dared try to stop him.

Chapter Six
    Briana de Paul sat before the stone fireplace, knees drawn to her chest, chin propped on her hands, staring pensively into the soot and ashes. A warm spring wind blew in through the open windows behind her, bringing the sweet fragrance of lilacs, but she barely noticed. Neither did she glory in the golden sunshine spilling on the floor.
    It was four weeks since she’d seen Charles. He had been taken to the Paris hospital by a doctor who was, as great good fortune had it, leaving the Monaco hospital for greener pastures in Paris. If he hadn’t pitied Charles and seen to a carriage for the boy, Briana would have had to carry her brother herself, she mused.
    Her own journey, a week after Charles left, was a great deal harder than she’d known it would be. She’d begged rides in donkey carts and walked when she was forced to, pausing only for exhaustion or bloody blisters.
    Charles was in a charity hospital, in a crowded ward, surrounded by critically ill and dying patients. Her heart constricted when she saw him, lying on stained sheets on a rickety cot, his body crumpled like something broken and tossed aside to die.
    When he looked up with pain-filled eyes and saw her standing beside the cot, his face lit up. His sister was the only light in Charles’s life. Briana bathed him, begging clean linens from a sour-faced nurse. Charles was even more wasted than when she’d last seen him. The hospital food, he told her, was only scraps, so she went out and begged for centimes until she had enough to buy a pot of soup from a street vendor. Begging was humiliating beyond anything she’d imagined, but she was not going to let her pride stand in the way of Charles’s well-being.
    The doctors were not unsympathetic to her financial plight. They had arranged, after all, for Charles to be cared for as a charity case. But charity wouldn’t pay for the expensive surgery. He could remain in the hospital, and they would try to ease his pain, but, they explained, free surgery was out of the question.
    Briana tried to elicit their sympathy. “We are talking about a little boy,” she said tearfully, “a little boy who is surely going to die if you don’t try. Surely you don’t need money so badly that you can just turn your back on him.”
    They emphasized that a principle was at stake. If they gave their services to Charles, how could they charge other people?
    She lost control then. She screamed at them, calling them vultures who preyed on suffering. “God gave you your skills, and you use them to live like kings while a little boy lies dying! How can you stand to live with yourselves?”
    They turned away from her. They’d heard the same insults, shrieked by hundreds of others who were equally destitute, equally desperate.
    Briana had left Charles and gone back to Madame deBonnett, who was still giving her shelter and a job, however meager the wage. To remain in Paris meant attempting survival on the streets, and that was dangerous. It was not uncommon for