“This is where I actually wanted to take you. The last house was the home everyone thinks I live at when I’m not at the Alabaster. Including my driver.”
She pushed the hood off her head and peered down the dark hallway to her right. “But you don’t live there?”
“No. I live here. No one knows this place exists.”
Her look snapped to him. “No one knows of this place?”
He shook his head. “No one except for Declan. That’s it.”
Her jaw dropped, gaping for several seconds. “But why?”
In the dim light still eking into the hallway through a window beside the doorway, his icy blue eyes looked even chillier. “There are plenty of people that wish me dead, Ness. This is the only safe haven I have.”
“What? Who wants you dead? Why?”
He moved past her, walking along the main corridor. “People I have destroyed. People that want revenge. And I have power. Other people want that. The world has never been any different.” He shrugged as though that simple answer satisfied him.
It didn’t satisfy her. “So, you own one home that you don’t use, except to stroll through on the way to your real home? A home that’s hidden because you cannot sleep peacefully when you’re exposed?”
“Yes.” He stopped in the front foyer, went to a side table and lit a lantern.
The flicker of the flame lit the area about her. The last home they had been in had been grand. But this was palatial, if the imperial staircase that cascaded down from the level above was any indication.
Her look fixed on the marble stairs as she shook her head. “It just seems like such a…”
“Waste?”
“Yes.”
“It is.” He moved to the right arm of the staircase and swept his hand upward to move her along. “But this place fell into my lap and I like having a place where no one knows me. Where no one wants anything from me.”
Picking up the front of her skirts, Ness moved up the staircase in front of him. “What about neighbors?”
“The house to the left belongs to an earl that is never in town and there was a house being built on the other side, but the family ran out of money to finish it. They made it all the way to the full exterior, but have never been able to scrape the funding together to finish the interior and furnish it. Yet they refuse to give it up. Either way, this street is empty and it suits my needs perfectly.”
She glanced back at him. “And how did this place ‘fall into your lap’?”
“There was a duke with a son with a rather large debt run up at the Alabaster. The duke didn’t have the resources to pay the debt, so I accepted the house as payment.”
“And no one knows of it?”
“I used a solicitor that only serves…clients of a certain esteem.”
“Wealthy ones?”
“Yes. He deals in secrets knowing that his life is forfeit if he spills said secrets. The man knows I received it from the duke for an undisclosed sum, but he doesn’t know the business I am in. Declan knows. And now you know.”
Ness paused at the landing at the top of the staircase. “But this townhouse, I can hear the echoes of my footsteps up the walls, it’s monstrous. You must have staff here?”
“Just a maid that comes and cleans every week. She doesn’t know who lives here. And a cook drops off salted beef, biscuits, and brandy in the kitchens twice a week. It’s all I need here as I usually eat at the Alabaster.”
He halted at the top of the stairs, his right foot atop the landing and his left foot on the last step. Even at that, he was still taller than her. “I didn’t think about food. You’ll probably need more than some tough meat and bread. And I can’t have you soused all the time.”
She glanced away from him, spying what looked to be a wide ballroom to her right. “So, this is where I am staying?”
“Yes. It’s the only other place that I trust to be safe, Ness. No one knows of it, so no one would ever find you here. You could, quite frankly, grow old and die here, and someone would find your bones tucked into a bed a hundred years from now when the building is torn down.”
She chuckled, unease in the sound. But as long as she wasn’t locked in an insane asylum, she was grateful. “Please tell me that is not my fate. Please tell me there is another way.” She exhaled a quivering breath. “Another way to be free of Gilroy. I can’t live hidden away forever, Talen. I cannot.”
His gaze locked onto hers, the rasp in his voice dropping to a low rumble, both calming and determined. “Once I find the men looking for you, we will figure out a path forward, I swear it.”
She held his stare for a long moment, trying to judge the sincerity of it. Trying to not break under the weight of the fear that had crippled her bones for the past four years. She wanted to believe him. Wanted so much to believe Gilroy wouldn’t find her—couldn’t find her.
But what then? He would always send more. And this was no life. Hidden away in an empty, cavernous house.
She straightened her spine. Patience.
A path forward would reveal itself eventually, she just had to be patient. Patient and quiet and hidden away from everything and everyone.
A prison of a different sort, just not the terrifying one she’d existed in under Gilroy’s thumb.
Her bottom lip jutting upward, she nodded.
{ Chapter 14 }
“Oh, you are up here.” Surprise sent Ness’s hand flying onto her bare chest above her chemise, the wide silk sleeve of Talen’s dark blue banyan slipping far down her arm. He’d given it to her earlier in the night, promising to bring her more clothes from the Alabaster in the coming days.
His feet swinging down to the floor next to a lantern, Talen sat up from the long wooden chaise longue he’d been stretched out flat upon, his right forearm propped under his head. “How did you find your way up here?”
Ness looked from him to the roofs of the buildings surrounding them, lower than the top of Talen’s house. Lights as far as the eye could see, glowing orange in the night. The city streets far below were busy at this time of night, though the stark noise of it didn’t reach up to her ears, just the fat echoes of the many wheels and hooves on the cobblestones.
Her gaze shifted back to him. “I couldn’t sleep. I tried, tried for hours, but then I heard sounds, sounds from above so I followed them. It took me a while to find the staircase next to that last room in the attic.”
He pointed to a dark corner of the rooftop terrace. “You probably heard Cat.”
“Cat?” She took a step closer to the corner he pointed to and saw a black tail twitch in the dark. A black cat with two white paws sat eating something from a bowl, paying her no mind. “You have a cat?”
He shrugged. “More of a visitor that visited often enough I finally began to feed it.”
Her lips pulled to the side in a wry smile.
She hadn’t figured him as an animal person. Especially not one that would take in a tiny cat. A lion. Maybe. Or a dragon. Definitely.
She turned around in the dark, surveying the rooftop oasis that sat atop his townhouse. Taller than all the surrounding buildings in every direction, the rooftop terrace held several benches, the chaise longue Talen sat on, chairs and a table. Vines grew from planters along the edges of the space, curling up onto the wrought iron railing that topped the half-wall surrounding the terrace.
“You really shouldn’t be poking around other people’s houses, Ness.”
“You didn’t lock my room, didn’t tell me to stay in one place for a change, so I took advantage.” She walked over to the edge of the rooftop, setting her right hand on the iron railing. The view stretched to street after street, full of busy coaches, all black and shiny with the finest dressed people within, rolling to and fro through the maze of the lanes below. Lights glowed in the many townhouses around them—a thousand flickers of flames that warmed the city, almost making it charming for the late hour. She’d heard that London was active during much different times than in Scotla
nd, but had never been able to judge it according to the Alabaster. It was a gaming hell, after all.
Talen cleared his throat. “Then this is me telling you to stay in place. Your room. Up here. That is the extent of where you can go. I cannot afford anyone discovering you are here.”
Without turning around to him, she offered him a slight nod.
“Promise me, Ness. Don’t make me sink to locking you in your room again.”
She looked over her shoulder at him. “But at the Alabaster you did that to lock others out, not me in.”
“Yes. But I also wouldn’t think twice about locking you in your room below for your own good. You know I will do it.” The hard cut of his voice sliced into the night, making her cringe.
He would do it, she didn’t have a doubt.
“I promise.” She turned back to the street, leaning forward, her right arm long along the railing propping her up as she watched the carriages below. She would promise him anything at this point. He’d brought her here instead of leaving her in that madhouse. It was better than she could have hoped for.
“Thank you for not leaving me there.” She said the words softly, letting them drift off into the night air of the city, not sure he even heard her.
“What did you mean at the asylum when you said, ‘not like your mother’?”
Her mouth clamped shut as she stilled in place. The gratitude hadn’t been an invitation for questions, but she should have been prepared for Talen to be curious. She’d acted like a madwoman when he’d left her there. Now he wanted to know why.
Her look trained on a woman in a glowing silver gown floating down the street at the arm of a gentleman. So simple. So light. A burn deep in her chest seared with envy. She would never be a woman like that. Light. Easy. Not a care in the world.
That sort of freedom was stolen from her long ago, so what did it matter now if she talked of her mother? Who was there to judge?
Her mouth opened, hanging agape for long seconds before she could form words. “My mother was the finest woman. A lady, through and through, the fourth daughter of a baron. She loved me so much. Loved my father.” Her head shook, the darkness of the night sinking into her lungs.
“But?”
She turned around to look at him and leaned back against the railing. The black cat with two white paws had moved from the corner, curling in and out of his legs, though Talen’s attention was solely on her. His forearms balanced on his thighs, he stroked its back, sending warbling purring that sounded more like a mouse squeaking into the night air.
“But my father tired of her. Tired of her by the time I was ten. To be honest, I don’t know that he ever cared much for her. Not for how he treated her. Treated me. Still, it took him years to get rid of her.”
“How did he do that?”
“When I was fourteen he wanted to have his mistress move into our estate in Cumberland, so he placed my mother in an insane asylum.” Her right hand moved to clutch the front of his banyan higher over her bare chest to cut the chill invading her. “He committed her to the asylum and my mother wasn’t mad. She was sad. Sad that her husband had no regard for her. But she was always sane. And once she realized she was in there for good, with no escape, she was even sadder.”
“Could you visit her?”
“I was allowed to see her once a month and I lived for those days, for she would always brighten when she would see me. Sing me songs she used to sing to me when I was child. Like she could send time back to where I would crawl in her lap and she would sing to me. I think she thought I wouldn’t notice the marks on her arms if she was singing. The marks set onto her arms by her own fingernails. The gaping wounds where she’d gouged out her own skin.”
Even with the scant light from the lantern, she could see his eyes darken. “Yet she was sane?”
“Too sane. And it was more painful—harder—because she was. If she were mad…it would have been easier. But she wasn’t.” Her bottom lip pulled under her top teeth for a long moment as she choked back tears. “I would ask father to bring her home. Beg him. Beg him for hours on end. He would do nothing but laugh at me.” Her hand curled onto the folds of the banyan at her chest, her knuckles near to popping. “Every time, he would laugh. Until he didn’t.”
“He stopped?”
“He did. That was the day he told me he’d found a new place for me to live. He was done with me. That I was to marry Gilroy. I didn’t even know the man. But Gilroy had seen me at our estate, reading in the gazebo. Father said Gilroy offered him a healthy sum for me, and he sold me. Sold me to him like a sack of grain.”
“Did you not have a dowry?” His forefinger twirled around the cat’s half-missing left ear.
“Why waste a dowry when he could get paid instead?” She unclenched her hand from the banyan, flattening her hand on the slope of her chest. “I fought him on it for a week, refusing to marry Gilroy. I had never stood up to him until that moment, and I paid for it. Paid for it with bloody lips and bruised cheeks until he finally gave me an ultimatum—my choices were marriage to Gilroy or marriage to a lecherous old marquess looking for his fourth wife, or exile, or the madhouse.”
A shudder ran through her and she exhaled a long breath. “I chose Gilroy. So I was sent to Whetland Castle in Scotland with my maid. Married within a day. It was its own exile that I never saw coming.”
“Why?”
“There were no women at Whetland. Only a few maids. A cold castle. An even colder man that was my husband.”
His head shook and he looked down at the cat wrapped around his left leg, scuffing its chin against his calf. He scratched it behind the ears for a long moment before looking up at her. “Your mother, is she still in the hospital?”
Her mouth opened as she sucked in a hiccupped breath. She shook her head, her eyes closing, fighting the tears that threatened. No matter how many years had passed, the images in her mind stayed vibrant, as though they were happening in front of her in that very moment.
“I was allowed to visit her one more time before I left for Whetland and I was the one that found her, a sheet wrapped around her neck and tied to the railing of the bed. She looked so peaceful, like the sadness couldn’t get to her anymore. It was all I wanted, month after month, to see her happy, at peace. But not like that.”
A sob gargled up her throat as she buried her face in her right hand for a long moment. Her voice reclaimed, she looked at Talen. “Not like that. I don’t know if she knew I was leaving her behind. She lived for those visits with me, and if she knew they were ending…”
Her right arm wrapped across her ribcage, her gaze going to the left, locking onto the greenery wrapping up the trellis in the corner. “They said she killed herself. I never believed it. She would hurt herself, bleed her arms, yes, but to kill herself? No. She believed in the sanctity of heaven and hell. She would never.”
The same visceral rage from when she’d first heard those words spoken—that her mother had killed herself—surged in her gut. Surged to the point of almost exploding when she was always so good at tamping down the anger.
What the hell was happening with her? She excelled at controlling the rage. The pain. Holding back tears. But now, in the last few weeks, it was all she could do to hold onto the slightest remnants of sanity.
Sanity.
Tight control.
Always tight control, or she was two steps away from belonging in a madhouse herself.
She swatted away the tears that had escaped onto her cheeks and turned away from Talen, staring out at the rooftops. Gagging downward the spiked ball of rage stuck in her throat, she heaved a breath—it usually wasn’t that painful, ripping at her throat like that.
Her look glazed over and she forced her voice to as neutral a tone as possible. “But then again, my mother wasn’t insane when my father stuck her in that place. Maybe it did eventually drive her mad.” Her shoulders lifted. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“I’m sorry.” Talen had stoo
d and moved directly behind her, making her jump as his words drifted soft into the air about her right ear. “I didn’t know. I never would have brought you there—much less left you there had I known.” The odd rasp in his voice wrapped around her chest, making her heart constrict.
“There was no way you could have known.”
“Except there was a way I could have known.” He moved to her left side, setting his hand on the railing, his eyes searching her face. “I could have asked you questions. Could have listened to your answers. I could have known what happened to your mother and this whole day would have been avoided. But I’ve been avoiding asking you questions for days now, and that is my own failing.”
“Your failing? No. That is ridiculous to put that upon yourself.” She turned toward him, her eyebrows lifting. “But why have you not wanted to ask me questions?”
His lips pursed for a long moment, hedging his reply. Measured. He was always so measured around her it was no wonder she secretly celebrated breaking through his granite facade when he smiled or chuckled.
“I had originally thought that the less I knew of you, the better. You were a job Juliet sent to me.” His mouth pulled into a tight line, fighting what he didn’t want to say. “But then I did want to know more about you—every damn minute we’ve spent together has only stoked that thirst. But I knew full well I couldn’t act upon it. Juliet sent you to me to protect. Nothing more.”
“You’ve wanted more?”
“Honestly, I don’t know what I want when I’m with you.” His head shook slightly. “I want to know everything about you. I want to know nothing. Neither is a path I should take.”
She froze, her eyes fixed onto his. “Why can’t you want to know more?”
“You want the thousand reasons why not? You’re an innocent. You’re married. You think I’m someone that I’m not. Juliet explicitly told me to keep my hands to myself.”
His right hand flipped up as his shoulder lifted. “I can’t afford the complications in my life that come with someone like you. Yet Juliet set you in front of me.”
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