Farah stood on the round dais in her dressing room long after Madame Sandrine had left, staring at her figure in the long mirror.
A velvet, late-spring evening settled into her Hampshire valley, turning the emerald fields into black squares of shadow. Only a dark blue stripe of light remained on the western horizon, and Farah had left the doors to her balcony open to let in the soft breezes to tease her hair.
The lavender lace sheath she wore brought out a violet tone in her eyes that she’d never before seen. Her hair spiraled around her arms in wild ringlets, reflecting the light from the candles with an almost luminescent glow. As nightgowns went, this one was rather scandalous. Though the neckline was high, the diaphanous fabric clung to her every line and curve, even accentuating the press of her nipples against the slight chill in the mobile air around her.
Though she slept and rose alone, generally eschewing the use of a ladies’ maid, she couldn’t help but try on the lovely undergarments that Madame Sandrine had brought with her to Northwalk along with several newly commissioned gowns. She only modeled them for herself, but she liked the sensual feel of the fabric against her skin. The glide of the hem on her ankles. She could imagine a masculine hand gathering the fabric in his grip to uncover the flesh beneath.
Lord, but her mind drifted to such things often these days. She supposed once she’d tasted the pleasures of the flesh, it became more difficult to live without. Farah knew, of course, that not all sexual encounters were as intense and climactic as hers had been, and she realized it would be excruciatingly difficult to allow anyone but her husband into her bed.
She wanted him. More than she wanted a child. More than she wanted her title. She wanted her Dougan back. Not only that, she wanted the sleek, predatory criminal Dorian Blackwell. She missed his cool arrogance, his sharp wit, and the way his eyes tracked her.
Watched her.
She wanted him to see her in this gown. Wanted to tantalize him by standing in front of the candles and pulling it across her skin while he watched, wondering when his control would snap and waiting for him to pounce like her jaguar.
The fantasy caused her thighs to clench and a moist warmth to rush between them. She really did look like a fairy in this gown. She wanted to show him that, too. That she still could be his fairy. That she could teach him how to love, just like she had once before.
A click interrupted her thoughts, and she whirled in time to see a shade move in the darkness beyond her candle. Who would lurk in the shadows of her rooms? “Dorian?” she called.
“You still haven’t accepted that your bastard husband has forsaken you?” The voice from her nightmares stepped from the shadows. “Pathetic.”
Reacting on impulse, Farah lunged for the bellpull that would bring a footman running. A revolving click stopped her cold.
“One more step and I paint those mirrors with your blood.”
“Warrington,” she gasped. She’d known he’d been released, and that he’d disappeared, but she’d been told by Murdoch that he’d been found dead.
“How did you get in here?” She’d been facing her door, and the balcony was two stories high. The stone walls were flat with no trellises to climb.
His eyes were two dark pits of rage in his large, ruddy face. “I’ve lived in this house longer than you’ve been alive, you spoiled bitch.” He took a threatening step forward. “This is my home.”
“This was my father’s home,” she argued.
Warrington scoffed. “But I know all her secrets.”
Farah’s eyes swung to the bed, her arms crossing over her breasts in an attempt to cover herself. Her limbs felt weak, her neck frozen and unable to move as terror locked her muscles into place. “What—what do you want?”
“I want what’s mine!” he raged, advancing on her until the metal pistol pressed against her temple in an icy kiss. “I want what your father promised me.”
He meant her. Panic stabbed deep into her belly, nearly doubling her over.
“You’d better escape before my husband returns,” she threatened, hoping she’d improved upon her lying skills somewhat. “He’s a dangerous man. I won’t send him after you if you leave now.”
Though he had to be inching toward fifty years, Warrington had retained a powerful build, if not a bit softer and heavier than in his youth. Farah remembered that he’d fought with her father in the war, that he’d saved her father’s life. Was that why Robert Townsend had kept him around? Out of gratitude?
Now that he’d stepped into the dim light, Farah could see that his skin looked worse than it had months ago. Sores covered one side of his neck, and his breath smelled foul. Like rot and death.
She cringed as he lowered his face to hers. “That disfigured bastard you married can’t stand the sight of you. He doesn’t love you. He’s not coming to save you. No one will even notice you’re missing until it’s too late.”
The truth of his words terrified her more than the gun at her head. She’d turned in for the night. Even if the maid, Margaret, peeked in to check on her, she likely would just assume Farah had gone to use the necessary before bed.
No one would look for her until Warrington had done his worst.
“I cannot give you what you want.”
“I know that,” Warrington snarled, his eyes rolling in a way that made her doubt his sanity. “Don’t you think I know that?” Clawlike fingers grasped her arm and pulled her toward the east wall against which her large wardrobe stood. “I will die before getting what I want, but at least I’ll claim the vengeance I deserve.”
Farah struggled, knowing that if she went anywhere with him, her life would be forfeit.
A soft knock sounded on her door. “My lady?” Murdoch called.
“Get rid of him,” Warrington hissed, shoving the gun so hard against her, it wrenched her neck.
“I—I’ve turned in, Murdoch,” Farah called, her voice surprisingly steady. “I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“Ye’ll want to know this,” Murdoch pressed. “I’ve a telegram from Argent in London … It’s about your husband.”
“Murdoch, please, I can’t be bothered. Don’t come in here!” she cried, praying that he would find the urgency in her voice strange and send for help.
A second ticked by before her door exploded open, shattered by the strength of Murdoch’s burly shoulder.
Warrington fired, and Murdoch fell.
Farah screamed. She tried to jerk out of Warrington’s grip, but his hand clasped about her arm like an eagle’s talon. Blood spread from Murdoch’s side, seeping into the gray wool of his vest. He was breathing, gasping for air, the shock of the bullet having knocked the wind from his chest.
“Murdoch,” she cried. “Murdoch, can you hear me?”
The pistol was shoved through her curls and against the back of her head. “You’ll come with me, or the next bullet goes in his eye.”
Panic faded, and a cold sort of calm resolution stole through Farah’s veins. Murdoch couldn’t leave Tallow, not when they’d just found each other. The gunshot would bring the household, and the next person through that door would be Warrington’s next victim.
“I’ll go,” she said. “Just don’t kill him.”
Warrington jerked her toward the wardrobe, opened the latch with one hand, keeping the gun trained on her, and hurled her through her new dresses until she tumbled out of the false back, barely maintaining her balance.
The other side of her papered wall and velvet drapes was nothing but cold stone lit by a few sporadic torches. It was like stepping back in time two hundred years.
“What is this?” Her tremulous voice echoed down the dank stone corridor, interrupted by only a few other openings, presumably from different manor rooms.
Warrington gave her shoulder a rough shove forward. “Walk,” he commanded.
The cold of the stones and close, arid stench seemed to reach through the thin fabric of her gown. Farah hugged herself and plodded forward, the dank, uneven earth beneath her slippers making sounds she dare not identify.
“Northwalk Abbey was built in the sixteenth century by a papist earl,” Warrington informed her conversationally. “It’s said he hid condemned Catholic priests here, and smuggled them out of the country by way of Brighton.”
“Surely you didn’t bring me here for a history lesson,” Farah said imperiously. “Where are you taking me?”
Warrington’s gun jabbed at her shoulder. “Just like you entitled monarchists. Don’t even know where your titles come from. Don’t acknowledge the innocent blood that’s been spilled so you can have your castles and your tenants.”
“That’s not me,” Farah argued. “I only want what my father intended for me to possess. What makes you more entitled to it than I?”
They came to an abrupt drop, a steep set of wooden stairs that led down into a dark abyss. Farah glanced over her shoulder at Warrington, who kept the gun trained on her as he took a torch from the wall. “Climb down.” He gestured to the stairs with his pistol.
Farah stared into the dark. She didn’t want to go down there. What if she never came back out?
“Move, or I’ll set those pretty ringlets on fire.”
She could feel the heat of the torch on her skin as he thrust it toward her. Gathering her gown above her knees, she gripped the rough wooden banister tightly as she took the first step.
The light from his torch followed her down, and Farah could hear the heavy bouts of his breath as they descended.
The smell hit her first. Death, filth, and excrement. She held a hand to her mouth to contain her gag reflex. The torchlight touched a pile of animal bones she’d rather not identify. Then the rough pallet of filthy blankets, and finally, the old bucket he must have been using as a chamber pot.
Her stomach heaved, and Farah swallowed against the sting in her cheeks and the saliva flooding her mouth. “You’ve been living here?” she asked, horrified. “All this time?”
“I told you, Northwalk is my home.” He placed the torch in an ancient metal sconce, never once looking away from her. “Your father, Robert, promised it to me.” He spat the name. “Promised you to me, so that I may be part of its legacy.”
“Why did he do that?” Farah asked the question that had been on her mind since she’d been old enough to understand. “What did you have on him to get him to acquiesce?”
Warrington spat on the ground, his eyes becoming wells of black hatred in a face that was ghostly white for lack of sun. “You would think so, you useless bitch.” He stepped toward her, and she backed away, her heart pounding wildly. “I was eighteen when you were born, and had already been licking your father’s boots for a year. Did you know that in the queen’s army it’s money not aptitude that makes you an officer? Your father was a privileged earl who’d only ever shot at foxes and peahens, and I’d been infantry since I was fifteen, having lied about my age. I had to shine his shoes, brush his coat, pin medals he never earned. And all the while, I pretended to love him like a brother. Convinced him he couldn’t do without me.”
This shocked Farah. “You mean—he betrothed us because…”
“Because I convinced him I could love, protect, and adore a spoiled git like you.” He stood in front of her now, the pistol pressed into the tender flesh beneath her jaw. Farah could feel it as she swallowed, and morbid, terrified thoughts crowded out all else.
“I didn’t know all this,” she whispered, trying not to focus on which was worse, his breath or the smell of the bucket in the other corner. “Please,” she beseeched him with her eyes. “It doesn’t have to end this way. I can give you the money that you would have been promised as my dowry. You can start over somewhere on the Continent or America. Stake a claim on land that’s your very own. Have something no one can take from you.”
“It’s too late for that!” he screamed in her face, the vibrations echoing off the stone walls and being absorbed by the dirt floor. “Too late for me,” he said in a quieter, flat tone, trailing the nose of the pistol down her neck, past her collarbone, and resting it in the valley between her breasts. “Too late for you.”
“It’s never too late,” she told him. “As long as you’re alive, you can choose to live. To be happy, even if it means starting over.” She truly believed that. Though she felt as though she could see her chance at life draining away along with the last of the sanity in his eyes.
“That bitch I married gave me a whore’s disease. The doctors say I’ll be dead within a month, but it’ll steal my mind before it takes my body.”
With every breath, Farah’s chest pressed against the pistol, now warmed by the heat of her skin. The sensation terrified her, paralyzed her body, but her mind raced for a way to survive.
He had nothing left to lose. He lived only for revenge.
“I was going to rape you,” he informed her in a voice as soft as death. “I was going to make you waste away with me, rotting from the inside. But it seems that I am no longer able, the syphilis has stolen the use of my cock.”
Grateful for that small mercy, the threat had bile crawling up her throat, and a moan of disgust escaped her lips.
The weight of the pistol left her ribs as he backhanded her across the mouth so hard she had to blink against spots of blindness and regain her bearings. When her vision cleared, the pistol was inches away from her forehead at the end of his outstretched arm. She could only focus on it or his face, but not both.
“Don’t act like you’re better than lying beneath the likes of me,” he snarled. “You may be a countess by birth, but you’ve already wallowed in the mud with the lowest kind of filth. You’ve corrupted that perfect body with his touch and shamed the Northwalk title and the Townsend name by becoming a Blackwell. It would disgust me to lie where he’s already been.”
Farah wiped a trickle of blood from the side of her mouth. A cold rage blocked out the pain and sharpened her vision, even in the dim light. “Do not speak ill of my husband,” she warned in a voice so hard it didn’t even sound like her own. “You’re not even fit to lick his boots, not worthy to speak his name. He’s better than the law, more powerful than any lord, and more of a man than you’ll ever be.”
Warrington’s lip curled, unveiling teeth barely rooted in a rotting mouth. “Too bad he’ll never hear you say that. I imagine Dorian Blackwell will always wonder what became of his pretty wife. For he’ll never find your body down here. We’ll rot away together, buried in the same grave for eternity.” His finger tightened on the trigger, the pad turning white with the beginnings of pressure. “Good-bye, Lady Northwalk.”
