Kathryn sat first. Then Grey joined her on the settee, wrapping his arm around her in a casual and loving fashion. The touching gesture brought back that thick feeling to Nick’s throat, which had him wondering what the devil had made him so bloody missish lately.
“Saint Brides asked a favor, and the fiend dangled a bribe so tasty under my nose I simply could not say no,” Nick said, sitting himself in a chair opposite them.
“A mission?” Kathryn asked. “But I thought you had retired.”
“I had.” Nick smiled and shrugged. “He offered to put me up at the Soubise.”
Grey grunted, his dark brows drawing together.
“Surely, the Soubise isn’t the reason you left England?” Kathryn asked.
“Have you ever seen it?” Nick teased, wide-eyed. “It’s gorgeous!”
Kathryn crossed her arms and raised a brow at him.
“Apparently, that’s a no,” Nick muttered at his peril. He chuckled when she narrowed her eyes at him. “Well, there may have been something else.”
“Did you find them?” Grey asked, his gray eyes fixed intently on Nick.
There was no point in feigning ignorance. They had known each other since childhood. After all they had been through, there wasn’t much they could hide from one another, including a vendetta against the Frenchmen who had lured Nick’s father into committing treason.
“No,” Nick answered simply.
Grey nodded. “I am sorry to hear it.”
Nick shook his head with a smile. “Don’t be. The trip wasn’t all for naught. I acquired a son, after all.”
“Ah, yes.” Kathryn smiled. “You didn’t bring him?”
“I would have if it had been possible to wake the lad,” Nick said. “You should have seen him when we drove into London. I believe he was under the impression, if his eyes opened wide enough, he would not miss a thing.”
Nick could see what was coming when Kathryn put all her attention into smoothing her skirts. He swallowed the urge to blurt out whatever nonsense came to mind just to knock her off course. Instead, he hid his dread behind his usual half-smile and waited.
“He must be exhausted after such a long journey,” she said, deceptively demure. “Without a woman slowing you down, I imagine the boy was in for quite a manly ride. It is just the two of you, I understand?”
Nick nodded politely, but control was proving to be a difficult thing to hold on to. His smile was slipping.
“It is admirable of you to take in an orphan, Nick,” she said softly, the admiration apparent in her eyes. Concern lurked there, too. “But surely, you don’t intend on raising the boy on your own?”
“I do,” Nick said. “I have. He and I shall get along just swimmingly here as we did in France. Just the two of us.”
“You still refuse to marry?” Kathryn’s brow knit. “Is that how you expect to punish your father? The man is dead, Nick. The only person being punished is you.”
“Kate”—Grey lightly squeezed his arm around her—“it is none of our affair.”
She gave him an imploring look, but Grey shook his head, his lips hardened into a thin line. It was the first time Nick had ever seen Kathryn submit to anyone, especially Grey. At some time in the last five years, those two must have come to a truce. Or perhaps it had something to do with that happiness they had found together.
Grey expertly turned the subject to the changes sweeping England over the past five years, everything from Parliamentary acts to redesigned theaters. There were dozens of alterations Nick couldn’t wait to see for himself. He had sorely missed his country’s capital.
After thirty minutes, Nick felt himself relax back into a comfortable state as the chatter drew his mind away from thoughts of what he could never offer André or Céleste… of the possibility that Kathryn might be right.
The possibility that he was wrong.
He shook it off, along with the unwanted feelings conjured by the familial bliss he had stumbled upon when he had first arrived. It was too late to be wrong. Céleste was engaged. He and André were in England. Things were exactly as he had planned.
All except him. He wasn’t as planned. The black, painful feelings swirling around his insides weren’t as planned. The doubt wasn’t as planned.
* * *
Winds howled across the treacherous moors. Dark clouds intermittently blocked out the moon, casting darker shadows over the landscape.
During the short breaks between clouds, Nick could see the land open up to him: rolling clumps of heather and rock, small streams, and random copses of trees.
The trees would be where they would find him.
Grey was mounted beside Nick, also looking out over the moor, his gray gaze narrowing as he came to the same conclusion as Nick.
“There,” Grey said, pointing to what could easily be considered a small forest.
Nick nodded his agreement. The Yorkshire Ghost or ghoul or whatever it was would be hiding out there.
A haze floated over the land, obscuring rock and crevices where a hoof could easily be lodged and its rider thrown.
Nick urged his horse into motion, feeling somehow detached from his actions. He made every movement willingly, yet somehow, he was aware he would be unable to act differently if he wanted.
Then he realized. The nightmare. It was happening again, and just like every other time, he had no control over it. He had the same thoughts, moved in the same way, felt the same paralyzing fear. He knew what was coming, but he couldn’t stop it.
They rode a zigzagged path down into the valley, over rocks and heather. One misstep and their mounts could lose purchase. If they weren’t caught under the weight of the horse, they might go tumbling down the rest of the way to the bottom or smash their brain locker against a rock and be out for good.
They made it all the way to the trees without so much as a slight falter in step, just as Nick had known they would. Just as they had done on that day nine years ago.
They tethered their mounts to a tree and stood, staring into the blackness of the forest, knowing full well what awaited them inside.
Both were recounting the words scribbled into the dossier. They had balked at those words before they had come and seen for themselves: half-eaten people left in bins, fresh bones popping up in nearby coaching inns, more and more townsfolk disappearing without any explanation. Their target: a ghost eating people on the Yorkshire moors.
To be fair, who would believe such nonsense?
They believed it now, though not the ghost bit. It was most definitely a man they were after, and they had tracked him to this section of the moors. The time had come for them to eliminate the target as they had been trained to do. That was why they were there, why Matthews had turned to them when local law enforcement had applied to the Home Office for help.
Nick glanced down at his hands, almost invisible in the darkness. They shook.
He tightened them into fists as he looked at Grey, whose eyes shown silver in the moonlight, dark determination glinting in their depths. Grey had always been a bit more inclined to the darker portion of their work.
Nick forced a smile. “We came all the way out here. We should at least say hello.”
Grey returned his smile, his lips curling in dark anticipation before he walked into the trees.
Nick followed close behind, his pistol ready at his side. Grey would have his in his holster, but he was quick enough if he needed to use it. Nick was quick, too, but he would rather not take any chances.
They soon came upon a bit of a clearing. It was still wooded, but with a good ten feet between each tree. On the other side of the clearing was a shrine, or what looked like a shrine. Three trees close together had metal hooks with skin, organs, and bones hanging from the branches like ornaments. At the base of the trees were piles of bones, picked clean and gleaming in the darkness. Even Grey seemed appalled at the sight.
Though it wasn’t half as gruesome as a battlefield, it reeked of something more sinister and i
nherently evil.
These were victims, unsuspecting townspeople, not soldiers fighting a war they were trained and readied to fight.
The stench when they approached was overpowering and nauseating. Nick had to fight the urge to cover his mouth and nose with the back of his sleeve.
Nick had begun to move past the macabre display when Grey reached out to hold him back. Then, holding a finger to his lips, he nodded to a place beyond the trees.
The back of Nick’s neck pricked, the tiny hairs standing on end. He didn’t want to look. He wanted to wake up. He wanted desperately not to relive this episode yet again. He tried, but he couldn’t change the course of the nightmare.
It always happened just as it had in reality.
Nick did look, and what he saw was burned into his memory.
It was a man in naught but a once-white shirt and torn tan breeches, his thin, stringy hair falling to his shoulders. It was too dark to make out what it was he was crouched over. It was in the process of being ravenously consumed, whatever it was.
Grey moved forward, his pistol in hand, but his first step landed on a thin bone. It cracked under his weight, and the both of them watched as the crouching man’s posture changed.
Nick’s jaw clenched and his stomach tightened as a pair of black, dead eyes slowly lifted and locked with his. Whatever the man was eating was thrown aside as he stretched out his arms and bared his teeth, hissing at them.
“What the devil?” Grey muttered.
The man sprung up and sprinted at them, erratically dodging trees and rocks. Grey fired, and a red blotch appeared on the man’s sleeve. Still, he ran at them, seemingly unaffected.
Nick moved back and aimed, but his foot caught, and he fell to the ground.
Then the madman was on him, clawing, biting, hitting. His teeth were sharp points, as though he had a mouthful of canines. When they bit into him, they ruthlessly tore through skin, and he felt the blood trailing down his arm. His pistol had been tossed aside during the struggle, so he struck out with his fist to unlatch the sharp teeth from his arm.
It was impossible to keep the claws and teeth both off him at the same time. They were everywhere.
“Get off me!” Nick heard himself yell through gritted teeth as he grabbed wrists and then let them go to dodge another bite. “Off!”
It felt like this went on for hours when, in reality, it couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds. Enough for Grey to pull out his other pistol and get a good shot.
Nick knew, beyond the haze of fear and panic, that this was a nightmare. He had already been through this. He had lived. He knew Grey’s bullet would soon pierce the madman’s head. Nick would be sprayed with brains and blood, and then he would wake up.
Only, this dream wasn’t quite the same.
Nick heard the click of Grey’s pistol as it cocked. In the same instant, the face above him froze, and Nick’s breath caught.
“Grey, no!” Nick called out, but only a hoarse cry tore from his throat, utterly unintelligible.
A sob was building in his chest. He had to swallow past the lump in his throat as he watched his father’s face hovering above him, pain and remorse clearly visible in eyes the exact shade of blue as Nick’s.
“Why?” Nick asked brokenly as tears gathered in his eyes. Why did you leave me? Why didn’t you love me enough—trust me enough—to tell me? To let me help you?
“I made a mistake,” his father said.
He was about to say more, but the explosion of Grey’s pistol rent the air.
“No!” Nick screamed, a spray of blood dotting his face and torso. “No! No!”
Tears blurred his vision as he rolled to where his father fell to the ground beside him. He turned the body over to see his father’s face one last time, but the face he found was not his father’s or the madman’s.
It was Nick lying there with his brains splattered across the moor.
His heart raced, and his breathing grew heavier as he stared at his own lifeless body. Then there was a smoking pistol in his hand, and the moor was transformed into a study, the study where his father had been found.
It should be his father lying in a puddle of his own blood, not Nick. Nick’s life hadn’t ended that day.
Had it?
He needed to wake up. Now.
The earth shook then, and Nick lost his balance, falling backward. Paintings were swaying and falling to the floor. Vases, glasses, and the decanter of brandy were all teetering until they tipped and shattered against the dark floorboards. Above the rumble and shattering of glass, he heard André’s voice calling him. Then the shaking grew more violent, and the floor was swallowing him up.
Slowly, Nick opened his eyes to a dark room and a concerned-looking boy leaning over him, grabbing him by the shoulders and rattling Nick’s teeth. It wasn’t an earthquake, after all. It was André shaking the living hell out of him.
“Wake up!”
“What the devil are you doing?” Nick mumbled groggily, running his hand over his face to wipe away the sweat. “Trying to kill me in my sleep?”
“You were yelling,” André said. “You were having a nightmare again.”
“How do you know?” Nick asked. “I might have been dreaming of bedding a beautiful goddess.” He would certainly have preferred dreaming of his Parisian goddess, but no good would have come of that.
“Do you usually let out blood-curdling screams while bedding goddesses?”
“How should I know? How often do you imagine I get the opportunity?” Nick returned, pushing André off him. “Off to bed with you. The activities I have planned for tomorrow will either excite you to the point of exhaustion or bore you to death. Either way, you will need your rest for it.”
Nick was taking André to Tattersalls. Nick would give him a tour and have him mounted atop one of those quick devils stabled there. Maybe Nick would buy one for him.
But before all that, Nick had to pay someone a visit, and it was long overdue.
* * *
Nick had managed to get another hour or two of sleep in before he gave up and ordered his bath. The sun had risen just minutes before he was soaking in the hot, scented water. An hour later, he was dressed and mounted, choosing the fresh open air over the tight spaces of an enclosed carriage.
A morning breeze cooled his face and ruffled the short tuffs of hair curling from underneath his hat and at his nape. No one was out this early except the occasional worker hurrying to their shop and a few gentlemen making their way home after a night of dissolute entertainment and debauchery.
He turned into Hyde Park, keeping his mount at a slow walk until he reached the willow at the edge of the Serpentine. There, he tethered his horse and sat with his back up against the rough bark.
He settled his hat beside him and rested an arm on his bent knee as he looked out across the peaceful water. Not a single person was promenading along the water’s edge or plunging in for an early morning swim.
Nick leaned his head back against the willow, closed his eyes, and breathed in the cool morning air. This was where his father had taken him before his mother had surrendered to the illness. They had come almost every day while in London and had thrown stones across the water or sat under the willow, talking.
“A mistake,” he muttered, remembering the nightmare. He knew it wasn’t his father, but his own subconscious calling it a mistake.
Of course it was a mistake. The man had committed suicide when Nick could have hidden him away in Europe, sparing him from the gallows. He had died before giving up the names of his co-conspirators.
Nick had rebuilt the estates, the fortune. That bit had been easy. What was impossible was finding his father’s French friends without so much as a description, much less a name.
It would have been easy for him to ignore the rest of the nightmare, ignore the fact that he had seen himself with the hole blown through his brain. He could easily have dismissed it as another bizarre act of the imagination, like most dreams
.
He would do precisely that if it hadn’t somehow rung true. A part of him had died that day. His youth, certainly, along with his delusional and naively heroic vision of his father. He had also lost his future, or the one he had expected to live, at any rate. He had lost control of the direction of his life. He had lost his chance to build a family of his own.
He had lost.
And for what? Because his father hadn’t deserved the legacy he had thrown away, the one Nick had rebuilt. Because a traitor’s title ought to be forfeit to the crown.
But it hadn’t been. The Home Office had known about his father’s treason, and Nick had inherited, anyway. They had employed Nick in the most confidential position for years after the fact, as though his father’s mistake had been fixed. As though his death had been punishment enough.
But it wasn’t! Nick had been hurt and abandoned by the only family he had left. He had been destitute for years, making himself an assassin in order to pay off the crippling debt his father had left him with. He would never know the happiness Grey and Kathryn felt with each other.
“Is that how you expect to punish your father? The man is dead, Nick. The only person being punished is you,” Kathryn’s words echoed in his head.
He shook them off. She couldn’t understand. He wasn’t punishing himself; he was making sacrifices for justice. His father had been a traitor and a coward. He didn’t deserve a legacy.
The man is dead, Nick.
He knew his father couldn’t know Nick had rebuilt the estate. He didn’t believe the dead could see the life they had left behind amongst the living. He knew it was a judgment of principle, of honor.
So why the devil did it feel so bloody foolish all of a sudden? What made it futile, extraneous, and illogical after years of it making perfect sense?
The only person being punished is you.
By gad, that woman had a way of ripping open a man’s mind and tearing him to shreds.
He hated to admit it, but perhaps that was it.
To Win a Scoundrel's Heart (The Lords of Whitehall Book 2) Page 24
