My only means of escape is to be other than I was. You know I have a secret. A terrible secret. You can’t imagine the depth of it. The scope of it. You don’t know who I am … what I’ve become. To tell you would be the end of me.
Mena’s words haunted Liam as he stomped around his private room at St. Margaret’s Royal Hospital.
He did things to my body, to my soul. I let him. I had to.
She’d had to let him because she’d been fucking married to him.
His head pounded every time he stood upright. His shoulder burned like someone persisted in needling him with a branding iron, even though his left arm had been secured to his chest with a sling. He had enough thread in his hairline and his chest to stitch a quilt.
But none of that mattered. It barely registered. His wounds were more annoyance than pain. They slowed him down when there was so much to be done.
Everything had been ripped open and was falling apart, and he needed to be out there triaging the bleeding damage, not holed up here like a goddamned invalid.
Just when Liam had been certain Jani had become family rather than foe, the boy had chosen the worst possible moment to exact his revenge. His children were probably worried out of their minds, stuck with a grandmother they’d only visited a handful of times. Had Gavin been able to deliver Hamish to the proper authorities?
And Mena …
Mena was in the clutches of that smarmy fuck-wit who’d struck her, shackled her, and dragged her away.
Her. Husband.
Christ.
Liam pressed his palm to his throbbing temple with his right hand and kicked the edge of his hospital bed. She’d lied to him in the most fundamental of ways. Not just about whom she was, but what she was. A viscountess. A fugitive.
A madwoman? Liam couldn’t quite believe it. He’d lived with a madwoman before. Had seen the toll, physically and mentally, that insanity took on a person. Mena had seemed desperate, secretive in the extreme, but never mad.
But did he truly believe that? Or was it his own fervent wish that made it seem thus?
He had to know the truth. All of it. Not only to question her, but to see her, and touch her. To know that she was all right. His anger at her, at the whole fucking mess, was knitted tightly with the love that still burned in his heart, and concern, not to mention an intense frustration at his own ignorance. If Lord Benchley had struck her in front of everyone, what had he done to her once they were alone?
His stomach gave a mutinous surge at the thought.
Every moment counted in this situation, and every second apart from her was pure torture. She had much to answer for, but dammit, she’d give him those answers in person.
“Someone bring me a bloody shirt!” he bellowed into the stark and curiously empty hallway. His trousers had been replaced by some flimsy gray cotton pants tied by a string, and his upper half was bared to the chilly hospital air. “Where are my goddammed boots?”
The little mouse of a nurse had disappeared when he’d woken violently, and nearly struck her with his flailing limb mere minutes ago. She’d whimpered something about lying still while she fled to find a doctor. Now there was no one to be seen.
Lie still? Didn’t they ken who the fuck he was? He hadn’t become the Demon Highlander by holding still.
Whirling around, he searched the sparse, clean room for a trace of his belongings and found nothing but a bed, a chair, a table on the far wall with various medical implements on it, and an ugly stand next to the bed upon which a lone glass of water sat.
He reached the table in two long strides and opened its only drawer, finding it empty. Bits of red began to creep into his vision as his heart thudded against his chest, marking the rise of his temper. An image of Mena’s pleading, tear-filled eyes swam across his murky vision.
She’d begged him to save her, and he’d let her down.
I’ll die first.
Dear Christ, what he if was too late?
His hand connected with the glass, and it went flying across the room, shattering on the far wall.
He wasn’t staying here a moment longer, he’d walk the gray autumn streets of London in these flimsy trousers if he had to. He needed to find Mena.
Now.
He turned on his bare heel and had to reach for the bedpost. Not only to counteract the dizziness, but to offset the astonishment of finding his doorway filled by the last person he ever expected to encounter here in London.
Let alone his hospital room.
“You look as though you’ve been to war, Ravencroft.” Dorian Blackwell, the Blackheart of Ben More, stepped into his room with the unconcerned bearing and lithe prowl of a cat, assessing Liam with his one good eye. One that was as obsidian as Liam’s own. An eye patch covered the other, hiding an egregious wound. “I’ve only been shot the once,” he continued conversationally. “But I remember that it smarted like the very devil.”
“What are ye doing here?” Liam growled by way of greeting.
“I have … friends at every train station and on the hospital staff.” Dorian shrugged. “They keep me informed of any interesting goings-on in the city, and I’d say the attempted murder of a marquess and the arrest of a fugitive viscountess certainly fit the bill.”
“Spies, ye mean?”
With a dismissive gesture, Dorian moved closer. “Technically, I’m your next of kin hereabouts, though very few know it. It’d be ungentlemanly of me not to check on my injured brother.”
Christopher Argent’s wide shoulders silently filled the door frame Dorian had only just vacated, and the large, pale-eyed assassin stood like a cold sentinel, never making a move to invade Liam’s room.
Dorian was right to have brought muscle. Liam might only have use of his one arm, but he was still tempted to choke the life from the reigning king of the London Underworld.
“Ye sent her to me,” Liam snarled, letting go of the bedpost to advance on his criminal half brother. “Ye knew who she was, what she’d done, and ye sent her to look after my children. Do ye have any idea—” Liam’s teeth clenched together with the force of his tumultuous emotion.
Dorian Blackwell had lied to him. But in doing so, he’d sent Mena, the only woman who could have possibly defeated the Demon Highlander. For a man who was used to charging entire battalions, he’d not been prepared for her to come at him sideways. “I’ll make ye answer for that,” he vowed, stepping up to Dorian.
Though Liam did have a slight height and width advantage, Dorian stood his ground, unperturbed. He was leaner in that feral, hungry way predators were lean, and it lent him a cruel grace.
“I had my reasons, brother, and you’ll want to hear them.”
Brother.
There was no denying Dorian Blackwell was a Mackenzie. He bore the same broad angles to his forehead and jaw, the same sharp lines etched below his cheekbones. His ebony hair and onyx eyes were an exact replica of Liam’s own.
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.
He had thought he knew what rage was. An inferno of uncontrollable lust for violence and blood. In the past, it had painted the world with a pall of crimson, and flashed fire through his body until his skin burned as though covered in molten steel.
What he felt for Gordon St. Vincent was the antithesis of that. It was a void of ice and darkness. A calculating, glittering shard of dense, hellish hatred lodged in his soul.
A welcome sin.
He snapped, and suddenly he had his knee against the viscount’s chest, driving him into the couch as he planted a fist into the man’s nose, shattering it beyond repair.
His demon reveled in the feel of the bone and cartilage giving way beneath his fist, and in the choked and pained sounds exuding from the man, as blood exploded down his robe in a great gush.
“She’s not at Belle Glen, Liam,” Dorian murmured from where he stood behind the couch facing him. “I liberated that hellhole the day I helped her to escape. I worked very hard to have your governess emancipated as a ward of the crown, and she is safely with Farah and Millie at my home.”
Liam turned his wrath on his brother. “Why did ye let me believe she was in danger? What sort of bastard are ye?”
“The sort who built his fortune, his entire life, on secrets. The sort who built his name on a lie so our father wouldn’t try to have me murdered again,” Dorian murmured, his good eye burning with its own dark fire. “We may be bound by Mackenzie blood, Liam, but not trust. Not yet. I needed to be certain you wouldn’t take your famous temper out on Mena. She’s suffered enough. And you needed to hear the truth of your woman’s desperate circumstances from the man who caused them. You don’t know me well enough to trust my word, and I knew trusting her would be difficult for you.”
Liam paused. The veracity of Dorian’s reasoning washed over him with chilling precision.
“I knew this was where you’d find the truth.” Dorian pointed to Gordon, whose red, bleary eyes blinked up at them from an opium- and terror-induced stupor. “This human heap of rubbish told you everything you needed to know. And now, you can do what needs to be done in order to claim the woman you love.”
Liam blinked up at his brother, and found the same demon he saw in the mirror every day staring back at him. Suddenly there were things he wanted to say. Apologies he wanted to make for sins that were not even his own.
But first.
He drew his dagger from his boot.
“D-don’t do anything you’ll regret,” Gordon begged, putting a weak and ineffectual hand out. The man would have been mindless from the pain of his mangled face if not for the heavy amount of narcotics coursing through him.
“I’m a lord of the realm,” St. Vincent slurred from behind teeth stained crimson with his own blood. “There will be inquiries. When they find my body, they’ll know it was you. There were too many witnesses on the train platform. They saw how you wanted her.”
Dorian Blackwell made a dark sound. “What makes you think there will be anything left of you to find?”
“Only the blood you’re dripping onto this couch,” Argent added blithely.
Liam nodded to them both before pointing the dagger at the viscount’s face. “My name is William Grant Ruaridh Mackenzie, I am the Demon Highlander, Laird of the Mackenzie clan of Wester Ross, and ninth Marquess of Ravencroft. When we meet in hell, ye’ll know what to call me. I made a vow to my woman that if I ever got my hands on ye, I’d put my dirk through yer eye.”
And so he did.
