Gambled Away: A Historical Romance Anthology

by Rose Lerner

  And when he’d grabbed her around the waist, one hand reaching for her breast—she pulled out her knife. The one just above her boot. The one her father gave her, with the pearl handle.

  Without a second thought, she pulled out her knife and she pressed it just slightly to his belly.

  Because despite her fear. And her stomach.

  She took care of herself.

  Mother had been so proud of her.

  Oh, she’d forgotten the lesson of that knife.

  As if when Park took that knife from her hand he took that lesson with him.

  She sat on the steps of this house while everyone around her prepared to fight on her behalf. James. Annie. Steven. Delilah, even.

  And she could not even stand on her feet.

  “He might have a man with him,” she heard James say to Steven where they stood keeping watch at the front door. “Guy. I don’t…I don’t know what he’ll do, if he comes. He’s dangerous.”

  “I’ve got him,” Steven said in an utterly confidence-inspiring way.

  “Is that a horse?” James asked, his voice sharp. Helen lifted her head, panting though she was sitting still.

  “That’s a horse.”

  The front door opened, there was the cold swirl of air and the sound of a horse thundering to a halt outside the house. And then the door shut and it was silent again.

  Get up, she told herself. Get up. She used the bannister to pull herself upright, but the steps moved under her feet. The world swam.

  Leaning heavily against the bannister, she took the steps like a child.

  She would go to the kitchen, ask Annie and Elizabeth, the freed slave who rented one of the rooms in the boardinghouse, for boots. A warm coat.

  But she could hear the kitchen was silent. Perhaps Annie and Elizabeth were standing in the exam room, watching the drama unfold out the window.

  The back door opened. Helen could see it from the bottom step of the staircase. It shut quickly. Silently. As if someone were trying to stay hidden. To sneak in.

  The hair on the back of her neck lifted in silent warning. An alarm system long forgotten. Something, some change in the air, told her it was trouble coming in the back door.

  Charles or maybe Guy, she didn’t know. But she turned and went up the stairs as fast as she could.

  The derringer, get the derringer.

  But then she felt him, a cold draft against her back and the sudden bite of a cruel hand in her hair.

  “Make a noise and I’ll kill every bitch in this house.”

  It was Charles.

  With one hand in her hair and the other holding a gun to her head, he dragged her up the stairs.

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  He threw her into the room and she fell against the bed.

  “Where are your things?” he asked.

  Turning, she got her first good look at him. His face was a giant bruise—black and purple. He walked carefully, as if his ribs were bothering him.

  Worse, he was a mess. Unshaved, and his suit was the same he’d worn the night of the card game. The gray wool was blood-splattered and his shirt was rumpled and damp.

  That, more than the Remington in his hand, seemed dangerous.

  “Did you hear me?” he asked, his hair falling over his face in a limp flop. “We need to leave this town. Where are your goddamn boots?”

  He was pulling open drawers, shaking the contents out with one hand. A hairbrush clattered to the floor. She imagined Annie or Elizabeth would hear that and come up. That terrifying thought galvanized her. Pushed her to her feet.

  Adrenaline steadied her hand and gave strength to her legs.

  She would die making sure that he didn’t hurt anyone else in this house.

  Charles reached for the bedside table and she stepped sideways to get in his way.

  He glanced up at her. The white of his left eye was red with blood, and she’d seen a lot of awful, macabre things in the war—but that… it sent chills down her back.

  “Helen,” he said as if she were a slow-witted child. “Get your things. We’re leaving.”

  “Where’s Guy?” she asked.

  “I don’t have the slightest.” He gave her a push and she resisted. He smirked at her. “What’s in the drawer, Helen?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” He pursed his lips. “How about I call up one of those women? See if they want to go through that drawer for me.”

  She yanked open the drawer and her hand found the cool steel of the barrel of the gun, but Charles backhanded her sideways. She fell toward the bed and her arm caught the lamp on the table and she brought it crashing onto the floor with her.

  “Jesus,” he muttered. He grabbed James’s derringer from the drawer and tucked it into his pants. “Now look at you. You’re covered in kerosene.”

  The smell burned in her nose. Her hand was bleeding from the shards of glass on the floor. She got up on her knees and heard the crunch of glass under her weight. She imagined her blood mixing with the kerosene.

  Beneath the bed, the dome of the lamp had split into two heavy shards.

  She glanced up at him, to see if he’d noticed, but he grinned at her, sick and awful.

  He was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. A sickness in her life that had ruined everything.

  “I could light a match and be done with you,” he murmured, and from the pocket of his vest he pulled a book of matches.

  * * *

  It was Guy on the horse. Not Park. And it was not a relief. Not at all.

  “Is he here?” Guy asked, all but jumping off the black stallion he rode. The frozen grass crunched under Guy’s boots. Beside James, Steven lowered his rifle, smooth and slow, leveling it at the man’s chest.

  “Park?” James asked, and Guy nodded. “We haven’t seen him.”

  Guy swore in French, rubbing a hand over his face. The man looked haggard, but a night in jail could do that to anyone. And no one knew where he’d spent last night.

  “He won’t leave without her,” Guy said. “And he’s checked out of the hotel.”

  “Guy?” James asked, stepping forward. “If you’re here to try and get her back for that man. I’ll put a bullet through your heart right now.”

  Guy’s eyebrows lifted. “I had no idea you were so bloodthirsty.”

  “Helen-”

  “Ah, you are bloodthirsty on behalf of Helen. That’s good.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “I’m going to kill Park with my bare hands. That is my intention.”

  Kill him? James shared a quick glance with Steven, who only shrugged, the rifle as steady as ever.

  “I don’t-”

  “Understand?” Guy asked. “It is not for you to understand.”

  “And Helen?” James asked.

  “What of her?”

  “What are your intentions toward her?”

  Guy sighed, staring up at the Western sunrise. The pink and gray clouds promising a new day. “I have held her prisoner. I have put poison in her veins. I have hurt her, when I was asked to. I think the better question is, what are her intentions toward me?”

  “You think she’ll try and kill you?”

  “I think she has that right.”

  The front yard was silent. The chimneys of Denver in the distance began smoking as the city woke up.

  “Is anyone guarding the back door?” Guy asked.

  James’s stomach fell to his boots.

  “Fuck,” Steven said, just as there was a crash from inside the house.

  * * *

  “Do it,” Helen breathed, watching Charles play with that matchbook. He wouldn’t really strike one—he was only creating another drama. It was what he ate and what he breathed, deadly little dramas with her as the star. “Put us both out of our misery.”

  “Both of us?”

  She glanced down at the pool of kerosene that was now surrounding his feet. He lifted a boot, and the kerosen
e dripped from its soles.

  “How poetic, Helen,” he sneered, stepping out of the kerosene, wiping his boots on the rug in front of the wash basin. “But I have no desire to die with my whore.”

  At his distraction she grabbed the largest of the shards of glass and pulled herself to her feet, falling into him and knocking him off balance.

  It was not her strength but the power of his surprise and perhaps his bruised ribs, that made him fall back against the door, slamming it shut just as someone was trying to get inside the room.

  “Helen?” It was Annie, but Helen didn’t pause. She didn’t think. She had imagined this moment a thousand times in the last eighteen months.

  She slipped the long, sharp wedge of glass right into the tender skin of his neck just above the collar of his coat.

  It went in like a needle through linen. Far too simple, really, for such a thing.

  Warm blood poured down over her hand and he blinked, wide-eyed and wild. He was gasping and choking and she did not stop.

  Revenge had her in its teeth, and she would not stop until he was dead.

  “For my mother,” she breathed, still pushing the glass through his neck. The smell, coppery and rich, filled her nose and her mouth. She could taste Charles Park dying. “For my home. For the opium and the goddamn bird cage. For all of it. For everyone you’ve hurt.”

  He lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger, but the bullet shot far from doing her harm. No, he was dying and she stared into his eyes, watching him go, pushing the glass until there was nothing left to push.

  Blood bubbled from his lips and his pupils went wide and then, all at once, he was slack against her and the door and the weight was too much for her to hold up. She stumbled back and he fell to the floor. The second the pressure was off the door it was pushed open, shoving Charles’s body out of the way, smearing the lake of blood into the lake of kerosene.

  Revenge vanished just as fast as it had come, leaving her Helen again, in a sweaty, blood-soaked nightgown.

  What a mess, she thought. What a very bad mess.

  James and Guy charged into the room, weapons drawn. Annie and Elizabeth were in the hallway, wringing their hands and looking terribly worried, while Steven stood in front of them, protecting them from what might be within.

  I’m sorry , she thought, but couldn’t make her lips form the words. I’m sorry. This is such a mess. I broke a lamp and killed a man. What a terrible guest I am.

  Oh, that nearly made her laugh. She stopped herself just in time.

  “Oh my God,” James breathed, looking down at Park.

  “I did this.” Her knees gave out and she fell to the floor among the glass and kerosene and blood. “I did this.”

  James bent, checking Charles for a pulse. For any sign of life. Don’t bother, she nearly said. She’d watched the life drain out of him. The man was dead. His blood still warm and now sticky on her hands.

  When she pressed her fingers together they stuck that way.

  She felt terribly blank. Still, inside. As if it were her own heart that stopped. Her lungs that no longer breathed.

  I killed a man.

  And she had no regret. No horror. No shame.

  She would do it again.

  Guy turned to look at her and she struggled back up to her feet. He reached out to help her and she swatted his hands away. “Don’t touch me.”

  He nodded, silent, watching her as if waiting for her to do something. To decide something.

  “I should kill you, too,” she spat, no longer quite so blank. Anger, trembling and vicious, flooded her stomach.

  Again he nodded, and she stepped forward across the glass and smacked his face. She was weak, but it was satisfying. Her bloody hand had left a terrible imprint on his face. “Why?” she demanded. “Give me a reason why you treated me the way you did or I will kill you just as I killed him.”

  Guy swallowed and glanced away as if the mess were of more interest.

  “Tell me!” she screamed, her voice raw.

  “He had my wife,” he said, still staring at the broken lamp as if he could mentally put it together. “She was kidnapped, sold into slavery-”

  “How?” Helen asked, not sure if she could believe him.

  “Annette is black,” Guy said. “Was…was black. Her mother died in New York City and Annette traveled down to bury her body. I begged her not to go. But…” He coughed and cleared his throat. Again and then again. Just cry, she wanted to say. It does you no good to hold it all in. But finally Guy found his voice. “I have been looking for her for three years. Park was the last man who owned her.” He said the words as if they tasted like shit in his mouth. “He told me she was alive at the end of the war and that he would help me find her.”

  “He lied,” Helen said, because only an idiot would believe Park.

  “He lied,” Guy agreed and finally looked up at her and the heartbreak in his eyes was palpable and complete. A searing reality in the room. Helen backed away as if he were a fire that burned far too hot.

  “So,” Guy said. “You can kill me. You have that right. I did terrible…terrible things to you because I was too scared to believe my wife was dead.”

  “Everyone in this room has had horrible things happen to them. Everyone has lost someone,” she said. Everyone has done things they regret. Things that left scars.

  Guy would not get her sympathy for that.

  They’d all survived the war, clinging to whatever parts of their souls remained.

  Guy nodded. Behind him, James was watching her with his beautiful eyes so full of concern and all the other things he could not hide. All those things she denied and pushed away, denounced and belittled because there was no way for those things to survive in her life.

  But her life was different now.

  Charles is dead.

  The smell of the room suddenly overwhelmed her and she felt bile in her throat, bitter and thick. She looked away from Guy and his heartache. Away from Park and her bloody revenge.

  The world was spinning and she closed her eyes, hoping to make it stop. The bed was under her hands and she thought maybe she’d just lie down for a second.

  “Hey.” It was James. He grabbed her by the shoulders and she opened her eyes. He looked very concerned about something. “There you are.” He smiled at her and she wanted to smile back, she did. But there was simply too much in the way of such a thing. She might never smile again. “Let’s get you out of here and into a bath.” James lifted her in his arms and she’d never felt anything quite so nice.

  Everyone parted to let James pass, all these people who’d come to her aid. Who’d fought on her behalf. In the absence of the fear and the hate she’d been living with for so long she felt something very much like gratitude fill up the blank and empty spaces in her heart. Those withered places she’d been convinced would never feel again.

  “Guy,” she said, and James stopped in the doorway.

  “You don’t have to deal with him now,” James whispered, his mouth near her ear. “The sheriff-”

  She shook her head and met Guy’s eyes over James’s shoulder. Perhaps it was the fact that she was surrounded by people with hands out to help her that made him seem so alone.

  But he was completely alone.

  “Go,” she said. “Go far away. Take whatever money Charles has on his body and leave. I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  His black hat dipped as he nodded, his face once again as impossible to read as it had ever been.

  “Please,” she said to James. “Take me out of here.”

  “That was very kind of you,” James said, carrying her down the stairs to his room.

  “It was not kind,” she said.

  She’d seen the glimpse of his heartache, and it was enough.

  He would suffer all the rest of his days.

  And her suffering was over.

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  Two days later, James deemed Helen well enough to ans
wer all the sheriff’s questions.

  He was reluctant to rush things with the sheriff, but Helen insisted she wanted it over, and she was not a woman to be told what to do. Or to be coddled and shielded from the world. The last two days, as the drugs and the shock left her system, it had been like watching a butterfly emerge from a cocoon. Only the butterfly was made out of iron.

  And the butterfly did as it wanted.

  So she sat in the downstairs parlor, pale and fierce, wearing an old gown of Annie’s, answering all the sheriff’s questions.

  After an hour-long conversation, the sheriff said there would be no further inquiry into Park’s death.

  “From what I’ve seen, the man should have been put down some time ago,” he said, and James turned away to hide his sigh of relief. “We’ve seen nothing regarding this Guy fellow—if we hear anything we’ll let you know, and we’ll get Park’s trunks delivered here tomorrow morning,” the sheriff said.

  “His trunks?” she asked, as if this had not occurred to her. It hadn’t occurred to James either, to be honest. The last week had been a sleepless spin.

  “Personal items and the like. Unless you don’t want them?”

  “No!” she cried. “I want them. Have them delivered as soon as you’re able. If that’s all right-” She glanced over at Annie, standing beside James at the fireplace.

  “It’s fine,” Annie said. Everyone had tried to make Helen feel as comfortable as possible, but it was obvious the situation was wearing on her. She kept apologizing for the mess she’d made with Park. For the trouble with the sheriff. Being a house guest with no money and no means was beginning to grate on her.

  Annie showed the sheriff out, and Helen excused herself to her room.

  James watched her go and told himself not to go up there. It was getting harder and harder to hide his feelings. To stop the words from spilling from his lips. He pretended to simply be a doctor when in her company, an act they both participated in.

  Please, he thought, please don’t let me love her.

  But he feared it was already too late.