The Highlander (41 page)

Of their father's.

They'd inherited the same capacity for violence and domination, and it vibrated through the air between them now, underscored by many more painful things.

“Fuck yer reasons,” Liam seethed. “Ye only do something if it benefits yer own purposes.”

“Not this time,” Dorian replied. “Argent and I intervened at the behest of our ladies, and let me assure you that it was more a nuisance than a benefit.”

Liam stepped around the Blackheart of Ben More and made for the auburn-haired giant at the door. “I doona have time for yer excuses. I have greater wrath to inflict before I get to any business between us.”

“You've arrived at my very reason for being here, Liam,” Dorian remarked. “If I've mastered anything in this lifetime, it's the art of settling a score.”

There were precious few men tall enough to look Liam in the eye. Christopher Argent was one of them, and they stared each other down with all the menace of two ruling stags about to connect antlers.

“I've defeated entire armies who had a mind to stand between me and where I intended to go,” Liam warned from low in his throat. “I suggest ye step aside.”

If Liam was fire, Argent was ice, and though his chilly blue gaze sharpened, he made no move to advance or retreat.

“I owe the vicountess,” Argent said in a voice devoid of anger or defense. “She helped to save my fiancée's life, and because of her bravery, she suffered. Terribly.”

Liam blinked as that information permeated the anger and the haze of his head wound. “What do ye mean?” he demanded, hating all these secrets and yet dreading any more revelations.

“Lady Philomena spoke out against one of the St. Vincents who'd threatened Millie and her child,” Argent said. “And once the debacle had been dealt with, the vicountess had vanished.”

Liam was unused to Mena being referred to by a title, but it made such sense. She'd been a ceaselessly gentle lady, so proper and erudite. The perfect tutor to prepare Rhianna to become a noblewoman.

Because she'd been one herself.

Argent's ice-blue eyes narrowed with distaste, though Liam thought it had more to do with a memory than him. “We found her months later half starved and beaten in Belle Glen Asylum. The treatments were equally heinous. We arrived just in time to snap the neck of the orderly who was attempting to rape her.”

“His were the bruises she wore when we sent her to you, Liam,” Dorian said gently from behind him. “But prior to her incarceration there, we'd witnessed the evidence of her husband's violence.”

Liam's stomach knotted and he felt as though he might be sick. His estimation of Argent rose exponentially at the news that he'd killed Mena's attacker, though he wished to bring the bastard back to life so he could kill him again.

Slowly this time.

Liam turned on his brother. “Ye should have told me,” he said. “I would have protected her had I known.”

“Her family had her declared criminally insane through the high court,” Dorian stated evenly. “You being such an esteemed agent of Her Majesty's, and our father's
legitimate
heir, I couldn't be sure that you wouldn't turn her over to the crown before I could clear her name. Though we are blood, I know nothing other than that, unlike our own father,
you
love your children. If the Demon Highlander would do anything to protect them, then the safest place for her was at their side. Besides, who better to teach my niece to be a lady than a viscountess?”

“I need to see them.” Liam lurched for the door again.

“They're safe.” Dorian put a hand on his shoulder. “And they know that you are, as well.”

But Mena wasn't.

Dorian assessed him with an eerily astute gaze. “I never imagined that you'd even pay her any mind, let alone…” He let the insinuation drift unspoken into the air between them.

Let alone fall in love with her.

“How long have I been out?” Liam asked, looking to the window. No light rimmed the drawn heavy drapes, telling him it was night.

“A few hours,” Dorian answered. “They kept you sedated while they stitched your wounds. Luckily for you, the bullet passed clean through you, and lodged into a column.”

Hours? That gave Lord Benchley all that time to exact his punishment on Mena. The possibilities set his blood on fire with rage.

He brought his face close to Argent's. “Either ye help me, or get the fuck out of my way.”

A cruel mask settled over his Viking features as he glared at Liam. “That's why we've come.” Argent stepped aside and swept his hand at the hallway. “To settle a debt.”

Dorian fell into step with Liam as he surged forward and in the direction of the hospital exit.

“First,” the Blackheart of Ben More suggested, “let's find you a bloody shirt and those goddamned boots you were bellowing for.”

*   *   *

The hour approached midnight when Ravencroft, Argent, and Blackwell advanced through the terrace like reapers in search of the damned.

The house still belonged to Gordon St. Vincent's father, some earl or other. The Viscount Benchley resided like a bachelor in a handsome town house in Knightsbridge, though it was set back from Hyde Park in a less fashionable neighborhood. A slight but telling concession to the St. Vincent family's dwindling circumstances.

Blessed little household staff slumbered below stairs where they'd picked the service door lock, lurked through the kitchens, and crept up to the main floor. What was once a handsome and stately home had fallen into shocking disrepair. All was dark but for a faint glow of lantern light creeping from a grand room at the front of the house.

Liam found himself alone in the hall as the once-plush rugs muffled the sound of his heavy footfalls. Soft masculine conversation drifted to him, followed by a feminine reply. It took a moment for Liam to process the false, high pitch of the woman's tone and recognize that it was not Mena's. His shoulder burned like the very devil, and his head still ached, but he'd lived through more dire circumstances than this … he'd killed through them, as well.

Lord Benchley's voice was unmistakable, as was the sickeningly sweet aroma of the cloying smoke filtering from the room.

Opium.

Blackwell and Argent advised serpentine stealth to achieve their objective, but try as he might, Liam had never warmed to that particular method. Fingers curling into fists, as though he already held the viscount's neck in his hands, Liam kicked the door to the study open with such force, it shattered.

He'd have thought the sound Gordon made had come from the woman if he hadn't seen evidence to the contrary.

Both occupants of the room were slow and unsteady, even in their panicked state. The effects of the opium exacerbated now, as fear pumped the substance more hastily through their veins. They were locked in a passionate embrace, halfway toward congress on a dingy couch of indeterminate color. On the table in front of them, various mysterious forms of paraphernalia sprawled between half-empty bottles of liquor and uneaten food.

The woman, an exotic beauty, rolled off Gordon St. Vincent's lap and sagged onto the couch, her breasts exposed by her drooping bodice. She was in such a stupor, she didn't even move to cover herself.

“What is the meaning of this, Ravencroft?” Lord Benchley slurred more than demanded. “I saw you shot.” He wore the same fine suit he'd sported at the rail station, but now it was disheveled and soiled with God only knew what substances. His hair, fashionably curly with long sideburns, was rumpled in the extreme and slick with some sort of pomade, or maybe with his own oily filth. It was too dark to tell.

That this reprobate, this disgusting, pathetic fuck, had ever put his hands on Mena evaporated the last of Liam's scruples, and left the acid taste of dread and hatred in his mouth.

“Where is she?” Liam snarled, fortifying himself against the stench of opium smoke, unwashed bodies, and sex hanging in a pall over the dim room like a toxic cloud.

“You mean, my
wife
?” the viscount sneered.

“I mean, yer
widow
.” Liam stalked toward the shabby couch upon which the two were draped like limp and dirty linens.

The sight of the wan lamplight gleaming golden off the sharp blade seemed to clear some of the murky smoke from their eyes.

Gordon rose unsteadily, and instead of retreating around the sparse furniture, he scrambled over the back of it, placing the couch and the woman between him and the murder etched on Liam's features. He fled toward the door on the far wall and flung it open, uncovering the still, cruel form of Dorian Blackwell.

His cowardice allowed him to recover quickly, and attempt a hasty escape to the French doors that opened onto a veranda. Wrestling them open with fingers made clumsy with drink, vice, and fear, he screamed again as Argent slithered from the darkness beyond and crowded him back inside.

“All
this
over Philomena?” Gordon said as though he couldn't keep his thoughts and his speech separated. “That sallow, barren, miserable bitch?”

“I'll use this blade to dig the answer from your throat before I end your life,” Liam threatened darkly. “Where. Is. She?”

A faded dressing robe hung limply from Benchley's shoulders, and his trousers were unbuttoned, but remained aloft around the beginnings of a swollen belly brought on by too much ale and other excess.

“S-she's not here.” Gordon stumbled back to the couch and gripped it as though it were the only thing holding him aloft as the three lethal men converged on him and the sloe-eyed, trembling woman. “I had the men Father hired take her back to the asylum.”

Liam advanced, ready to strike him dead and race for the asylum when the hooker cried out. Apparently, she'd finally gathered her wits enough to pull her gaping bodice over her breasts. “Don't 'urt me,” she begged. “Let me go, and I dinn't see no'fing.”

Dorian took a coin from his jacket and pressed it into the hooker's hands. “Fly away, little bird,” he commanded gently. “But if I hear of any chirping…”

“Everyone knows better than to sing a word about the Black'eart of Ben More.” Her fist closed over the coin, and she didn't even pause to collect her shoes as she shuffled away as fast as her muddled limbs would allow, another wraith lost to the night.

Liam seized the sniveling viscount by the lapels of his robe, and hauled him to his feet using only his one good hand. “Why did ye take her only to dump her at an asylum?”

“Because she's mine. She's
my
wife, and as long as I'm alive, she'll belong to me. I must make her pay for what she's done, I'll take it out of her flesh if I have to, but she'll not bring more shame and humiliation on my family.”

“Your family doesn't need any help in that regard,” Argent remarked wryly.

Liam clenched him harder, unable to fathom the depth of this small man's cruelty. “If ye felt no affection for her, why marry her in the first place?”

Gordon obviously mistook Liam's meaning, as he seemed to find hope in the question. “I liked her well enough, at first,” he admitted. “She was from country gentry. Good breeding stock, my father said. Women with hips like that are supposed to be built for birthing sons, but Philomena never even conceived.”

An ugly jealousy reared in Liam's chest, and he had to drop the man back to the couch to keep from crushing him with his bare hands. Gordon again misread the action as mercy, and his tongue loosened.

“She was so soft, so unspoiled, so agreeable and malleable, unlike the grasping debutantes in London. Philomena was
good
. Endlessly, eternally, optimistically kind. I found it charming at first, but in the end, I fucking hated her for it.”

Every muscle twitched, every drop of blood sang with violence as Liam contemplated breaking every bone in the man's body.

Slowly.

“Steady on,” Argent said in a low drone.

Turning away, Liam began to tremble with the force of his emotion.

“You fell in love with her, didn't you, Ravencroft?” Lord Benchley correctly assessed.

Liam remained silent, unable to give voice to the force of his emotion. “The Demon Highlander. She made you want to be a better man, didn't she?” he commiserated with pathetic disgust. “Did she look at you with those bloody big eyes and force you to see your every weakness and every flaw reflected in their depths? I hated
myself
when she looked at me like that, like
I'd
disappointed
her
. Like she still believed I would improve,
hoped
I would be a better man. I began to crush that hope, and revel in doing so.”

“But she was never mad,” Liam stated, still unable to look at the man without killing him. The void was growing, his humanity was slipping, and he needed to finish this. He knew exactly what the viscount was referring to. He'd seen his own demon reflected in Mena's eyes, and he'd wanted to exorcise it. For her.

She'd made him want to be a better man … and he
loved
her for it.

“She was sweet, but she was willful. Her father, the poor sod, educated her for some unfathomable reason, and what she needs is amelioration. It's why I sent her to the asylum. She'd become too erratic to manage, and Lord knows I tried.”

“Ye were violent with her.” Liam fought to keep the violence from his own voice.

“I only struck her when she needed correction, at first.” Gordon leered, as though in a room of like-minded comrades. “Sometimes you have to whip your spaniels to teach them things, a wife is no different. But after this latest stunt, I think a heavier hand is needed. I'm going to teach her a lesson she'll never forget.”

Liam had heard
enough
of the truth. Every word was like acid dripping on his heart. The images too terrible to abide, too horrific to ignore.