Demon's Bride (22 page)

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Authors: Zoe Archer

Tags: #Romance

BOOK: Demon's Bride
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Why now? What was the cause? It was never a peaceful place, but something was stirring up poison.
Across his back, his flesh grew heated. Unease tightened his belly.
Despite the heat on his back, the room itself felt chilled. And no wonder. The fire had gone out. It had been blazing not a few minutes prior. Now it was cold, its embers faintly smoking.
He crossed and pulled the tinderbox down from the mantel. Using a flint, he lit some tinder, and so brought the fire back to life again. He crouched, watching the flames for a moment, their shift and dance.
Turning his head, he saw Anne gazing at him. They stared at each other, mute.
At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to tell her everything: the gift he had received from the Devil, the true threat that Whit represented. No more secrets between them. Only the truth of themselves.
Yet even if she
did
believe him, he could not predict what her response might be. Disgust, horror. Terror. All possibilities ended with her fleeing. None with her cleaving to him, swearing eternal devotion.
She must never know. Her innocence had to be preserved.
He stroked his hand down the side of her face. She leaned into his touch, but her gaze stayed fixed on his.
“That trick you showed me last night,” she said. “With the man’s finger—breaking it so he would let me go. I want you to show me more.”
He knew dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to hurt a man. Part of his less-than-genteel education. Ladies did not know how to jam their thumbs into a man’s throat or ram an elbow in a man’s groin. He did not care if Anne was a lady. Keeping her safe—that was all that mattered.
“We’ll start later today,” he said. “After you get some rest.”
She clasped his wrist. “Show me now.”
Before he could speak, another tap sounded on the door. It must be the breakfast he’d sent for. He straightened up from his crouch. “Enter.”
Munslow opened the door, but he did not have a tray with him. “Beg pardon, sir. Lord Wansford is come calling.”
“My father?” Anne glanced at the clock on the mantel, which showed the hour to be barely past seven. “He is never up this early.”
“I would’ve told him you weren’t taking callers, sir, but he seemed insistent, and you and the missus
are
awake.”
Leo frowned. Of all the times to deal with his father-in-law, the morning after escaping a deadly rampage ranked at the bottom of a very long list. Still, if he was here this early, it must be important.
“Give Mrs. Bailey a moment to retire, and then show him in.”
Anne rose. “I want to stay.”
“Show him in now. And bring that coffee.”
The footman bowed. “Yes, sir.”
When they were alone, Anne looked at her reflection in the pier glass over the mantel. During the night, the pins had escaped her hair, and now it spilled over her shoulders and down her back in tangled caramel waves. She briefly fussed with her hair, but the struggle did not last long. “I look like I was in a riot.”
He came to stand behind her and gathered up the mass of her hair so he might press a kiss to the back of her neck. “You were. And you look beautiful.”
“Like a ruffian.”
They stared at each other in the glass, their mirror selves. His own hair was undone from its queue, stubble roughened his cheeks, his clothes were torn, and his hands curved over her shoulders showed red, raw knuckles.
“A well-suited couple,” he said, and as he’d hoped, she smiled.
The footman’s reflection appeared in the mirror. “Lord Wansford.”
A moment later, the baron stepped into the study. He visibly started when he saw not only Leo, but Anne, both of them looking ragged.
“Good God,” Wansford exclaimed. “Were you accosted by bandits?”
“There was a riot at Drury Lane last night.” Leo did not bother bowing. “It’s in the papers.”
“We do not receive the newspaper,” murmured Anne.
“
He
doesn’t get the paper,” Leo said. “
We
do.” He drew a breath. “Tell me your business, Wansford. It’s late, or early, and my wife and I are tired.”
The baron tugged on his threadbare waistcoat, pulling it across the expanse of his belly. From his pocket, he pulled a coin. “I came to bring you this.”
Leo stared at the penny for a moment. His mind was both acutely sharp and also misty, but he recalled his purpose. From the corner of his eye, he saw Anne frown. She clearly did not expect Leo’s coin-collecting “pastime” to extend to her own family.
He was too weary and tense to provide an explanation. Instead, he strode across the study and plucked the coin from his father-in-law’s hand.
A falling sensation as the vision pulled him in. It was dark, and oppressively close. On every side was solid rock. Veins of glinting ore threaded through the rock, and by the light of flickering lanterns he recognized the ore: iron. A mining tunnel. Grimy-faced men wielded picks, the sound a relentless
chip-chip-chip
as they hacked the ore from its prison. No sense of day or night in the tunnel, or any time at all passing, for there was always iron, and more iron to be pried free from the earth.
Someone shouted as a tremor passed through the thick stone walls. The tremor grew. It turned into a hard buckling, rock sifting down in larger and larger chunks. Men yelled, shoving each other in their haste to flee. But most could not escape. The walls collapsed. The ability to breathe vanished. The lanterns went out, and everything became darkness and sound and choking airlessness and the grind of rock upon the fragile bodies of men.
“Leo?”
A touch upon his arm, and he snapped back into the room. No crushing rock. No darkness and the screams of those trapped. Only his study in Bloomsbury, with its paneled walls and indifferent furniture.
Anne gazed up at him with concern, her hand upon his forearm. Her father also stared at him, anxious.
Leo dragged air into his lungs and pushed back the suffocating remnants of the vision. It lingered, though, in black tendrils wrapped through his mind and body.
He offered a smile to Anne. “Only tired.”
“You have your coin,” said Wansford, “for whatever reason. Now will you invest in that iron mine on my behalf?”
Leo opened his mouth to tell the baron that he would
not
sink money into a venture that would suffer a catastrophic collapse. “The weather continues to be damp,” he said instead.
Wansford gave him a puzzled frown. “Usually it is, this time of year. But what of the mine?”
Again, Leo tried to speak, to warn the baron against the mining venture. “Will you stay for breakfast?”
“I’ve taken mine already.” Wansford scowled. “See here, Bailey, you must say at once whether you will serve as my intermediary. You agreed to it already, and I shall look unkindly on it should you renege now.”
“Perhaps we ought to get some rest,” suggested Anne, “and we can resume this conversation at another time.”
“It must be today,” her father said. “For it is the last day the venture will accept investors.”
Leo heard their voices as if from a great distance. Words formed in his mind, words he intended to say, and yet as much as he fought, he could not get them into his mouth and spoken aloud. It felt like a vise, crushing him, and his vision swam.
He must tell Wansford to avoid the investment, but for some reason, he could not speak. The room tilted as he staggered to his desk. Anne’s concerned voice floated around him, yet he grabbed a sheet of foolscap and a quill. A dip of the nib in ink, and he readied his hand to write his warning.
The sharpened nib touched the paper. He moved his hand, willing the words to move from his thoughts to his pen.
ABCDEFG. There are ships at anchor in Portsmouth. O, what a jolly lad is he.
Spattering ink like black blood, the quill fell from his fingers. He stared at his hand as though it belonged to someone else. Powerless in his own body.
Anne appeared at his side, a pleat of worry between her brows. She looked at the sheet of foolscap, the nonsense he had scribbled there, and her face paled. “I should summon the physician.” She ran her hands over his torso. “Perhaps you suffered an injury last night. You need to be attended.”
“I’m fine.” But he wasn’t. The Devil had given him a gift, a gift that he had always exploited to his own benefit. It had never failed him, not once. And indeed, it worked perfectly this morning. Save for one critical element: he couldn’t warn Wansford about the mining disaster.
He had never needed to caution anyone before. Never knew this one fatal flaw in his gift. Now he did.
As he stared at his wide-eyed wife and her father, coldness seeped through him. If this vital failing existed in what he once thought infallible, what other damned defects existed in his agreement with the Devil? Of a certain, they must be there. Any investor knew that one flaw led to another, and another. Until what had once appeared to be a perfect opportunity became merely the presage to disaster.
 
She did not want him to go out. Something clearly was not right with her husband. Not illness, precisely, but a profound sense of
wrong
, as if he found himself inhabiting another man’s life. Surely it was on account of their exhaustion. Yet he would not remain at home.
“I have to get to the Exchange.” Standing by the glass in their bedchamber, he shrugged into a coat of dark blue wool. His hair was still wet from his bath, yet he had not shaved, and he looked as dangerous as a primed pistol, ready to fire.
“Then I will come with you.” She plucked at the ribbons fastening her wrapper. A few minutes was all she required to change from her dishabille into something suitable for the outdoors.
His hand stayed hers. “I need you to stay here.”
“Because it is scandalous if a lady goes to Exchange Alley?”
He scowled. “Don’t give a damn about scandal. I only want you safe.”
“The safest place for me is with you.”
Yet he shook his head. “Not after last night. Not with London verging on chaos.” He stepped back, and she felt the strained brittleness of the connection between them. “You’re safer at home, behind these walls. Munslow is here, and a dozen footmen. No one will be able to hurt you.”
His concern touched her, though a little, venomous voice whispered,
Is it the rioters he fears, or Lord Whitney?
She had no answer. She could not explain what had transpired in the study with her father, the strange humor that had gripped Leo. He had spoken of inanities, written nonsense—alarming in and of themselves. But most frightening was the look on his face, the confusion and angry powerlessness. So utterly unlike him.
Something
was
happening, something strange and terrible, and yet nowhere could she find meaning.
Leo brushed a kiss across her mouth, and she saw it again, fleeting, in the gunmetal of his eyes: doubt. A doubt that unnerved him deeply.
“I’ll return soon. And when I get back, we’ll begin your fighting education.” Then he was gone, his footsteps sounding in the hallway, down the stairs, and finally out the door.
The fire in the bedchamber sputtered, and died.
God, why could she not keep a fire lit? She grabbed a china figurine of a drowsing shepherd, and threw it into the fireplace with a frustrated cry.
A moment later, a footman appeared at the door, drawn by the sound of shattering porcelain. “Madam?”
“An accident. But don’t send a maid to clean it. Not yet.”
The footman bowed and retreated. Anne sank down to the carpet, exhausted, despairing. She felt herself in a cavern. All around her was darkness, and she had neither candle nor lantern to light her way. Her only option was to stumble forward, hoping she did not fall and suffer a fatal injury.

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