I was tired. For the first time, I found myself contemplating what peace a tomb truly could bring.
What a coward, I was.
I chewed the bitter medicine of my failure and it did not taste at all different than the tar that made it easier to swallow.
It seemed an eternity before a gentle rapping came upon the door I’d left open behind me. When I did not acknowledge it, that rapping came again—echoing pleasantly in my senses.
I turned, and the room turned softly with me.
A Chinese girl, wearing the loose tunic and trousers I’d come to associate with the Veil’s house servants. Her eyes were nearly black in the shadows filling the hall. I recognized her. One of the girls who had bathed me. She spoke some words, then, in broken English, “You look for master?”
I liked her voice. Pleasant enough already, but under the dreamy influence, it seemed lush and full—a multitude of ghosts that spoke at the same time she did. Unfortunate accent turned to the prettiest bells.
I did not bother to correct her assumption of Hawke’s status to mine. “I look for master,” I agreed.
She wrapped her arms about her thin chest, looking over her shoulder briefly. When she turned, she tilted her head, a strand of loose ink bleeding from behind her ear to grace her cheek.
She was plain, but in the sweet melody of my opium dream, she was pretty enough for song. Her skin was soft to look at and touched by a hint of pink at the cheeks, and her nose small and pert over bow lips. I imagined that her hair was long in its twist, for I had not yet met a Chinese person whose hair was short.
When I did not follow, she stopped and looked at me with some impatience. “You follow now.”
I wondered as I obeyed whether all of the Veil’s people were so officious, or if it were only my luck to meet them that were.
I followed this dictatorial girl with a servant’s efficiency, said nothing as we stepped into passages reserved for her ilk. A good servant was only seen when necessary, and I knew that the Menagerie’s structures were riddled with corridors behind the walls. I had not known that the main estate would be the same.
She walked quickly, but with neat, precise steps. In minutes, we stepped out of the bare, lamp lit halls and into the cold.
She pointed, a ghostly hand nearly swallowed by her gaping sleeve. “Follow path. I wait here.”
“Wait?” I followed the line of her finger, but saw only a pale path disappearing into the dark. “Why wait here?”
Another spurt of Chinese followed my question; a phrase that earned my narrow focus. “Tù zi wĕi ba cháng bu liăo.” Unlike the Veil’s mocking warning, this servant delivered each syllable with straightforward statement of fact.
I frowned. “Why do I keep hearing this? What does it mean?”
She folded her arms, tucking her hands into the opposite sleeve. “The tail of rabbit can not be long.”
Bemused, I shook my head. Pretty as she made the lilting bells seem, it meant nothing to me. “What nonsense is that supposed to convey?”
She looked at me, the weight of her stare a patient demand. “Go,” she said, in place of answer.
Part of me insisted I obey, that I follow that dark path and see what adventure waited at the end. The other part of me bristled at such easy orders from a servant, and a foreign one beside.
It seemed so much easier to ponder these small conflicts.
Still, I hadn’t expected her to turn a friendly bit of help my way. After the previous debacle involving the Veil’s attempt to enslave me, I had not expected her to be anything but an enemy.
I frowned at her. “Forgive my rudeness,” I said slowly, “but were you... Did the Veil punish you?”
Her eyes met mine, dark as the night around us. Then she shook her head, not in denial, but in confusion. “So sorry,” she said. “No good, English.”
Fine. Though I wanted to pry, to make my intent known, I went, because the instant the question left my lips, I wanted to take it back. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t care to know that the Veil had harmed innocent people for failing to do a task I would not allow them to do.
I left her standing in the dark and did not look back.
I passed trickling streams carved and inlaid with smooth, polished stones, topiaries and gardens fading into winter’s slumber. I followed a stone wall, tracing the cobbles for a time until I realized that it was no wall I occasionally touched but the side of a structure with no windows.
When I found the door, I studied its thick metal hinges, the heavy weight of the braces bolted into it, and the wide keyhole.
This old-fashioned type of lock is the best for a student of the black art such as myself. The heavy iron tumblers would hold the door well, but the largeness of the mechanism made picking it rather easy.
I did not stop to consider why Hawke might be behind a closed door in what appeared to be a stone fortress, small as it was. I did not think that he may be occupied—with a woman, or with business, or anything of the sort.
It did not occur to me to knock, for I had ceased to imagine myself a thing of logic and become an arrow of focus in the darkness.
Opium lifted my heart from its terrible slump, and though I walked as if in a dream, I was once more unbreakable. Untouchable.
I pulled two pins from the crown I’d made of my braided hair and did not care when the blackened plait dropped to my shoulders. I’d lost most of the pins I had left. I would need to beg more of the sweets, but not now.
Now, I focused on doing what it was I did best.
It took precious little time. The lock clanged loudly as the tumblers slid into place, and I withdrew the pins I’d used to successfully force the issue. Pocketing them with the remains of my opium, I laid one hand flat against the metal door and pushed. Warm light spilled out to caress my booted feet.
The door did not screech, as I expected. The hinges were well-oiled, and the weight held firm by the stone frame it was affixed to. This was a mighty portico, built to withstand assault.
Was this where the Veil lived, then? His very own fortress?
I should have been more careful. I should have stepped out the instant I thought of the matter more carefully, turned my back on this foolishness.
I did not. If Hawke was in there, then I would force him to rescind the order that would see others punished for my efforts. I would demand he offer resources to find both the Whitechapel murderer and monstrous collector.
I would see this ended.
Smiling without humor, I flicked my braided hair to hang at my back and strode inside, eager to surprise the Veil and his puppet at their prideful feast.
I could never have been more wrong.
The room was a single chamber, painted red and gold by the fire leaping inside a large iron hearth. While a part of me registered the warm air, the fragrance of spice and burning coal, I could not have given name to any of it were I to try.
My gaze, my senses, my shock was claimed by the centerpiece of this elegantly furnished domain.
Hawke hung from a twisted knot of thick chains, his arms extended over his head, his feet limp above the stony floor. He faced the fire, presenting me with his taut back; an athletic vee of muscle wrenched into rigid tension. His crisp white shirt glowed obscenely bright against the fire-gilded tint of his swarthy skin, pulled tight against his flesh with the strain of the shackles banded around his wrists.
The Midnight Menagerie’s ringmaster had always been the center of attention. Now, obscene in his chains, he served a rather more literal center function.
His hands had become dark stains over his head, nearly purple from the constriction of his own weight against metal braces. Black hair covered his face, a raven’s wing curtain, as if he were asleep or unconscious.
How much pain was he in? How long had he been strung high for display? And for whom? The Veil’s spokesman? Someone else?
Who would dare?
Reaching back, I pulled the door shut, lest a passing servant find it
and run tales to the Veil.
The metal panel clanged loudly.
Hawke’s head rose. His hair slid from his shoulders, down his white shirt in a pin-straight sweep. He did not attempt to turn, or to look behind him to see who it was intruding on his imprisonment.
He said nothing.
I did not know what to say.
First, I’d witnessed the scars upon his back, painful and wicked. Now, I found him in manacles.
Who would dare to break a tiger already caged? For what reason could they possibly?
Purpled fingers stretched, wrapped around the chains forcing his arms so high. It set his shoulders shifting, rippling with strength I could not imagine. To be held aloft for so long, and still force one’s body to obey one’s will? All but impossible.
I approached on near-soundless feet. “Why are you chained?” I asked, and the chamber took my voice and bandied it about between hollow walls. Even the lavish furniture, as polished and masculine as that in his quarters, could not wholly soften the stony prison.
He did not answer. The fingers wrapped around iron links tightened.
Did I know that I played with fire?
No. Not entirely. The opium I’d taken softened all such fear, and I was untouchable.
But I did know guilt. Where I had hoped to cultivate resolution, there instead came remorse.
It was a thing that grew in one, nurtured on the terrible circumstances that forced my hand, again and again. I knew guilt for all who had come to harm for my sake, and as I studied Hawke’s still figure—stretched taut and silent in the middle of a lavishly appointed nick—guilt once more bit.
The risk was not in feeling it. The risk came with the need to take more tar, smoke more of the pipe, drink even more of the laudanum to ease that guilt.
I wanted to eat all of what I had left. Now.
Sweat dampened my palms beneath the gloves. The breath in my lungs thinned, and I inhaled so deeply that my collecting corset tightened against my expanding chest. “I did this,” I said on the exhale, answering myself with a certainty that did not ring of anger or deserved apology.
It fell empty and hollow between us, me and the prisoner I had put there.
The chains clinked gently. “Leave.” Hawke did not shout. He did not snarl. With only a single word, he laid before me an order that left no doubt I would obey.
I refused. I closed the distance between us, circled around him to look up into his eyes.
They were blue. Violent, wicked blue, same as the heart of the flame within the hearth. They blazed into mine, and I gasped a note that was as much question as bewilderment.
I had seen these eyes before. The first time, when I’d found him roasting in the Veil’s meeting chamber, I thought I’d dreamed them. Now I stared into that wicked blue flame and could not reason why they had changed again.
Was it my doing? Were my senses truly so far gone on the tar that I could paint Hawke with such outlandish fantasies?
He closed his eyes as if to clear them, his midnight lashes a thick fan. “You should not be here.”
I shook my head, as much to shake loose the webs making it difficult to reason through as to deny his influence. “That has never stopped me before,” I assured him.
When those dark lashes parted once more, his eyes were same colors as I’d ever known, tawny in the light and slashed in the blue I’d only just dreamed they’d been.
Readily solved, then. I was dreaming. Blissed out, more like.
There was no other explanation for it.
“Don’t be a fool,” Hawke said tightly, as if the words labored to escape his straining chest. His arms tightened, and the chains rasped and clinked in response. “Leave me.”
If it occurred to him that he was shackled, held from the floor and powerless to force me to obey, he did not indicate it by so much as a flicker. His features were the same implacable stone I had come to expect, hauntingly beautiful in a way that only the truly deranged might appreciate. His beauty conveyed authority and power; cruelty where the sane might require none.
I understood myself to be among those considered deranged. Certainly, as the tar I’d eaten turned firelight to gold and warning to wicked menace, I had no call to reach up, gently place my gloved fingertips over his chest.
The muscle beneath flexed. Hawke’s jaw hardened to near impossible edges.
“This is my fault,” I whispered.
“This is my doing,” Hawke replied flatly, and his gaze conveyed a fury that should have frightened me. Perhaps it would have, were it not for the opium—or the belief that I was as untouchable as he. “You must leave me. Now.”
“No.” A single syllable it was, but it cracked between us like the lash of a whip.
“Damn you, for once—” He closed his mouth, cutting off his angry demand, until the cruel shape of it thinned. He closed his eyes again, hiding whatever thoughts my refusal engendered within him.
I turned, spied a chair I could use and hurried to drag it back to Hawke’s side. I climbed it easily, stripped off my gloves when I found the locks that would require finer manipulation to pick. It placed me on level with his head, forced me to stretch to reach the locks.
The position put me so close to him that I could feel the heat of his body, an inferno too hot for normalcy and too hard to ignore as I balanced my weight against him. His mouth was too close to my temple while I strained to reach. His breath stirred the fine hairs curling about my ears.
If he so much as twisted, I’d fall.
“Cherry.”
My name again, my given name, sweet as my namesake on his lips. But it was not said sweetly; it growled. It shook, a tremble of breath and snarled effort. The shock of it rent through my concentration. With my hands wrapped around the first of his chains, I jerked my head back, eyes wide to find his pinned not on my gaze, but my mouth.
My lips tingled, as if he’d touched me. As if a finger had drawn across my lower lip.
Open, he’d commanded, only hours ago.
My breath rasped out, and I sealed my lips so tightly, I imagine they whitened.
This was not the reason I was here. I’d come to beg Hawke’s help, not his attention. I’d come because I had nowhere else to ask for help.
I did not know what he could have done, but he was the bloody ringmaster, wasn’t he? He could do so much, if I only offered him my pride.
To find him like this, strung up like some kind of criminal? Isolated, alone. No. “Shush,” I counseled briskly, as if I were the greater force present. “You’re distracting me.”
Forcing my attention once more to my task, I leaned against Hawke’s rigid figure for balance and teased the first of his locks open.
I should have foreseen the consequence of loosening the pull upon one arm, yet I could not be expected to think so far ahead when the heat of the man’s body buried itself into my clothing, nestled into my skin. When I was aware of every second he stared at me, scowled at me, and my senses filled with the fragrance of heat and spice and overwhelming Hawke.
When the manacle released, his arm dropped, and the tension holding him in place lessened along his right side. His body swiveled, tore my balance free and I flailed atop my chair, cursing a sharp uncivility. The floor tilted. The chair tipped.
The muscles at Hawke’s left shoulder bunched, his swollen hand whitening around the remaining chain. With incredible control, his body wrenched back into place. His free arm banded across my shoulders, one hand seized the base of my plaited hair, cradled the back of my head, and as the chair righted itself upon all four legs, I found myself pulled hard against Hawke’s chest.
But it was no measure of safety, no rescue. Hawke’s fingers tightened in my hair, tugged my face up. My lips parted on a gasp.
He swallowed the sound. Plucked the air from my very lungs. His mouth closed over mine, a kiss that was nothing like the first we’d shared that night he’d saved me from alchemical ruin. Where that had been demanding, this was punishing. Wh
ere the first had coaxed, this taunted. Claimed. Devoured.
He did not wait for my invite, for I had none to give. No understanding how to give it. His tongue plunged between my lips, tasted the inside of my mouth as if it were nectar of the gods he lived in defiance of; rasped against mine with such controlled violence that I did not know whether to be frightened or intrigued.
Aroused, or silent.
The icy tomb I’d placed around me shuddered.
No. I couldn’t bear it.
My hands stiffened against his chest, fingers digging in to the warmth of his body veiled by thin cotton. I pushed, hard enough to garner his attention but incapable of the strength to break his grasp.
He paid no mind, lips punishing, mouth coaxing mine wider, until he could capture all that I had, claim my kiss as if it were his for the taking.
What it did to me, to the conflict raging within me, was nothing I was prepared to understand.
When it ended, I was left with no uncertainty that it was because he allowed it. He lifted his head, his mouth damp and mine aching.
Did the light pick out the gleam of it upon my lips as it did his? I read nothing of it in his stare, for what shaped his fierce expression was nothing close to kindness. “This is what I promise you,” he said, his voice a dark, violent pledge. I shuddered in the crook of his confining arm. “This is what your efforts will reap. Leave. You will not be allowed another opportunity.” His eyes glittered, too cold for the raw seduction of the kiss. “Lady Compton.”
The name of my title, my late husband’s surname now mine, hurt as nothing else did. As little else could have. A shard of ice to the heart.
Perhaps it would have undone me, had I not wrapped myself so carefully.
Instead of pain, simmering like a cauldron inside my very soul, I allowed pride to rise. Obstinacy to win.
I reached for the second and last lock.
He permitted it without further interruption. But his free hand did not leave my hanging plait, and he watched me so closely, until I could feel his gaze boring into me. Searing, challenging. He said nothing, but I knew his glare for the threat it was.
The taste of his mouth still burned upon mine, and he truly wanted me to leave him?
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