Brimstone Seduction (8 page)

The iron was cold against her fingers, but its chill didn't account for the frisson of fear that followed.

Suddenly she felt as if she was being watched from the shadows.

Kat wrapped the brooch back in the handkerchief. She closed the drawer and glanced around one more time. No other belongings seemed unusual. She refused to let her nervousness rush her away. But she found nothing else during one last, quick sweep of the room.

She tried to ignore the tingle between her shoulder blades and the chill on the back of her neck.

The feeling was even worse in the corridor, where hundreds of eyes stared at nothing for eternity. She passed them quickly, trying to ignore the observation from inanimate eyes that were too real.

She took the brooch, the key, and the photograph of her mother back to her room.

Only when she closed the door did the feeling of being watched fade.

Chapter 8

T
he enclave nestled on the side of a mountain in the Western Carpathians on a range that ran through Slovakia, Hungary and Ukraine. Formerly an Eastern Orthodox monastery, the Order of Samuel had reclaimed the deserted castle-like structure for their training. Young novitiates were brought to the Order by train to Poprad-Tatry. Then they moved on to electric tram to reach High Tatras. From there, they proceeded on donkey up steep, winding trails to the enclave.

The strenuous journey was the first trial Reynard had conceived to test the strength and determination of those he called to serve. The wind, rain, ice and snow contributed to the monks' education.

There were many more trials, some so cruel they resulted in permanent scars or even death.

The abandoned castle wasn't the only abandoned thing Reynard used to fuel his obsession.

He traveled the world to recruit for the cause. The devout, the driven, the orphaned, the abused and neglected—all proved fertile ground for his teachings, lost boys made devoted servants when they were found. He gathered them to him like a pied piper, and all of them danced to his tune.

All but the members of the D'Arcy family.

They had been of Samuel's choosing.

Their reluctance to serve never allowed Reynard to forget it.

He'd come back to his mountain sanctuary to heal after the daemon attack that had left him near death in spite of his special blessings. His men had nursed him with special medicines and poultices and prayers, but it was his calling that had begun to close his wounds and strengthen his heart. He'd made a pledge to those who would help him to fulfill it. This cause now burned in him where a soul no longer resided.

Katarina had escaped with the child, sheltering the daemon's spawn against her blessed breast.

His pen scrawled on the page of parchment. The sound was loud in the room in spite of the wind and rain that lashed the thick antique bubbled glass of the windows in his high turret study. Occasionally he coughed and the spasm shook his body, jarring his wounds.

Once, monks had transcribed biblical teachings on similar parchment in this place.

His own missives were just as holy.

He dispatched instructions to his men around the globe. His hand shook with righteous fury he hadn't been able to express because of the physical weakness that still claimed him. That weakness also contributed to his shaking until his usual dark script was pale and scribbled on the page.

He would recover. He always did. He had done what was necessary to ensure his survival and success.

The ungrateful bitch.

As worthless and treacherous as her mother.

He had let the D'Arcy women roam free with only strands as fine as fishing line to bind them to the Order they should have been fervent to serve. All he asked was for them to lead his monks to their prey. They did not have to sully their delicate hands with Brimstone blood.

But he'd been too lenient.

As he'd lain close to the death that would have been the torturous end to all his plans, he had vowed to change that.

He scribbled and he planned.

This time, he would use real chains, not the symbolic bracelets that had failed to hold them. They would never be free again.

It was time for this D'Arcy generation to beget the next.

The letters he currently wrote were instructions for his best men to return to the enclave. From the thirteen he called home, he would choose the hardest and the most devoted to bed the D'Arcy sisters. This time he would have the men run a gauntlet of trials to prove their worth.

And if none of them rose to the top, he would take on the task himself.

He paused in his writing.

He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes as the idea made him lightheaded with possibility. His fountain pen slipped from his fingers. Ink flowed from its tip and pooled like a premonition of blood. At all times, he was conscious of his responsibility to lead the monks in the way they must go. He balanced fear with revelation, love with pain and righteousness with fury.

Perhaps only his seed would sire Seekers who deserved the affinity Samuel had wasted.

He rose from his chair and limped to the narrow window. The whole world stretched out beneath his domain, beginning with the sloped edges that formed the mountain pass. He'd begun his life in one of the modest villages in these Carpathian Mountains. Now he ruled an empire that begat life or death, depending on his whim.

No. Not his whim. His calling. His cause.

He was the true Father of the Order of Samuel, after all.

Chapter 9

T
he cello lured Severne through hallways haunted by the souls of the damned. They watched as he walked by. The woman's blessed hands deftly coaxed out the notes with a well-placed bow drawn over perfectly tuned strings, and the sound tortured him. More so than the doomed observers.

He'd lived a half life for a very long time. The music—her music—woke feelings in him he never allowed. Longing, desire, hunger. It was homesickness for the man he might have been without his grandfather's wicked bargain. He was a beast drawn to a beauty so poignant it caused his chest to fill with emotion he could only repress because there was nowhere safe for it to be expressed. But the emotion drove him as the music drew him. She lured him closer and closer to a place he'd forbidden himself to go.

She'd practiced all day. He was the opera's master. He knew the hours of the orchestra and the company. He'd avoided her siren song. After his dawn run, he'd slept fitfully, and then he'd gone to several meetings in a perfectly tailored suit that hid the tally marks on his arm and the dagger slash on his shoulder. He'd left Grim to wait and watch over her. He'd thought to miss her playing and thus its effect on him.

To no avail.

She never rested; therefore, nor could he.

He'd heard it wafting through the corridors as he'd loosened his tie.

He could have ignored it. He could have changed into shorts and hit the gym he'd specially engineered to hone away every ounce of softness in his flesh until he dimmed the ache of his bartered soul.

Could have, but didn't.

Instead, he walked barefoot down shadowy hallways with his suit loosened and his whole being less tamed by weights and ropes and old-fashioned medicine balls than it should have been.

He craved a different, sweeter penance.

Not one of lifting and pulling and sweat and blood, but one of kisses that could go no further and a soft, feminine body he didn't dare corrupt.

The cello, mellow and low, spoke louder and louder. He could feel its reverberations on his skin as if she touched him when she drew the bow again and again across its strings. He came to her door. He leaned his forehead against the cold wood.

Grim whined once and fell silent from the shadows, perhaps only half-materialized with his forepaws in Baton Rouge and his hindquarters in Paris.

Katherine paused in her playing, and he held his breath. Would she come to the door? Would his resolve be tested to an impossible degree? The moment stretched. Its tension was tighter than the cello's strings. His chest was so full, he had to expel his pent-up breath or the emotion, because there wasn't room for both inside him.

The woman on the other side of the hard wood against his face resumed her song and air escaped in a sigh through his parted lips. It was safe to breathe. Emotion was the dangerous thing to allow after all this time. Feeling had to be denied.

He was using her to fulfill an evil bargain signed in Severne blood. It was madness even to imagine tasting her lips again...or more. Her skin would be as soft as petals against his mouth. Her sighs as sweet.

No. Hell no, to put a finer point on it.

He backed away from the door without knocking. He left her alone with her music. Several hours in the gym would set him on course for victory. Damn him forever if he now felt hollowness in his chest that had been so full. He must succeed in this quest to save his father. He had to free him. Even if the price of that freedom meant he had to continue to suffer alone.

* * *

She'd felt him outside her door. He'd stood, resisting, then he'd gone away to bleed. Kat let him go, but her playing slowed and stuttered to a stop once he'd gone far enough. Or too far. Her affinity felt the loss of his presence. Keenly. She was compelled to put her cello in its case. She allowed the pull toward Severne's Brimstone blood to urge her out into the hallway to follow in his retreating footsteps.

He wasn't calling her.

He had resisted and rejected the connection between them. But his resistance called as surely as the damned beats of his heart.

She listened. She followed. It was always like this. She could ignore the call, but not forever, and Severne's call was stronger than any she'd heard before. Worst of all, she didn't have Reynard on her heels contributing to her need to resist. Why not follow the magnetic pull of Severne's blood? So many logical reasons. None strong enough to obey.

When she found him, he was in his torture chamber of a gym. She hesitated when she saw him. His every muscle flexed as he lifted and released the weights on an oversized wooden contraption with an inhuman amount of heavy iron disks on massive chains.

She wavered in the doorway.

But she didn't turn away soon enough to avoid being frozen by what she'd seen. She might never turn. She might stand and ache to her bones for the torture he inflicted upon himself forever without being able to look away.

His jaw was set.

His body trembled.

He'd obviously taken his physical form to the brink of what it could do.

It was horrible and it was beautiful. She was caught at the door of his monk's cell where he'd come to hone his body rather than knock on her door. And there was no way she could do anything but follow the pull of his blood and her fascination over the gym's threshold. Only then, when her soft satin nightgown's sheen stood out against the wood and iron and chains, did she realize she'd walked through the opera house in her nightgown to respond to this daemon's call.

“Katherine?” Severne asked. He rose, allowing the weights to slam back down into place. The floor shook beneath the impact. She'd surprised him. She'd shocked herself. He'd already warned her away. But his blood called and her affinity for daemons answered. At least, that was the excuse she could claim. Stronger needs and urges had contributed to her entrance, but she wouldn't admit it.

“Tess said there was a patron named Michael who was interested in my sister,” she said.

His dark eyes shone, as did his bare body beneath a sheen of perspiration.

They both knew she wasn't here because of Tess. Or her sister.

Severne reached for a towel and wiped down his chest and abdomen as he rose and came toward her. She didn't avert her eyes. Despite the surroundings, this wasn't 1852. She could look if she wanted to. And who wouldn't?

“You're learning more, just as we hoped you would,” he said.

“Tess says he might be at the masquerade,” Kat said.

“Everyone will be there, but I doubt the solution to your sister's disappearance will be that simple,” he replied.

“I've never had the luxury of simple solutions,” Kat said.

He was so hard, honed, as if he'd attempted to become stone, inside and out. Because her muscles weren't as obvious and her past was unknown to him, he assumed she was soft. He was wrong. She'd seen horrible things. She'd endured. She hadn't been soft even when she'd been in hiding. It was her strength that had allowed her to survive even then.

“I'm used to complicated,” she continued.

Severne smiled. It was as tight a smile as a woman would expect from his angular face. But she saw something others might not see. In a face with eyes nearly black and lined with fine, white scars, his mouth was full and sensual. She'd tasted his kiss, and it had been a hint of softness in an otherwise steely man.

She wanted to taste it again.

He saw the direction of her eyes. If possible, the black in his eased to a hint of green. Only a trick of the light. A reduction of pupil that allowed striations of iris to be seen. It might cause his expression to soften to match his lower lip, but she couldn't read softness toward
her
in that.

The logical pep talk about the science of irises and how they reacted to light didn't keep her stomach from lightening, as well. She lost the firm footing of his hard, daemon appearance because of that subtle shift from hard to soft. It seemed to occur just for her.

He reached a calloused hand up to brush her hair back from her collarbone. Then he traced a gentle touch down her bare arm to her wrist. She trembled, but she didn't turn and run. He threaded a finger into her bracelet and lifted her wrist with it, carefully, gently. The Samuel medallion tinkled against its silver chain, a comfortable, familiar sound. But the sound contrasted with the moment, because he held the bracelet up to his daemon scrutiny, and his eyes had gone dark once more. They glittered beneath one raised brow.

“The Order of Samuel has chained you to a duty you detest, but you haven't removed their chains,” he said.

“I'm not allowed to remove it. I've worn it since I was a small child,” she said.

The silver glimmered in the light beneath Severne's dark gaze.

“Your chains are all around us,” she reminded him. His gym looked like it had been built decades before modern equipment. Heavy iron chains and wood looked more like medieval torture devices than fitness machines. She could see the smooth surfaces of worn wooden handles indicating his long obsession.

“I don't wear them,” he said.

“But you are marked,” she noted. The tattoos on his arm stood out starkly on bare, uncovered flesh. She reached with her other hand to touch the black slashes. He didn't pull away or drop her bracelet, but he did stiffen as if her touch on the marks pained him in some way.

“Mine wouldn't come off as easily as this,” Severne said, tugging her closer with the tiny chain on his finger.

The scorched marks on his arm did seem permanent. Her delicate bracelet was slight in comparison. Until she remembered the mad glint in Reynard's eyes when he'd placed it on her arm. She still relived that moment in her nightmares.

* * *

They hadn't known Father Reynard was coming. If they had suspected, Mama would have packed up all their belongings so that they could flee. Kat had her own special travel case in the palest pink leather, and she'd been taught to keep it packed with necessities like underwear, a toothbrush and socks.

Her mother had sewn a special pocket into the lining of the suitcase for her doll, Lucie. She had bought the porcelain doll in a Parisian shop. Kat loved the red bow of Lucie's mouth and the blush on her cheeks. The dress Lucie wore was as finely made as a costume in one of her mother's productions.

But Lucie hadn't been packed safely away that night because Reynard caught them by surprise.

Her case was under the borrowed bed in a flat they'd stayed in the night before, after their mother sang in one of the grandest opera houses they'd ever seen. She'd had only a very small part, but it had been quickly accepted so that they could leave London in a hurry.

Katherine knew it was because Reynard had been closing in on them.

Now he had found them, and Katherine was old enough to know this kind of hide-and-seek wasn't really a game.

“Anne, you led me on a merry chase this time. Sydney? And only a bit part? But never mind. Here we all are, together at last,” Reynard said.

Katherine stood with Victoria at attention like toy soldiers. Mother had told them to never argue with Reynard. Not because of love and respect, the way they didn't argue with her when she told them to eat their sprouts or wash their hands.

Reynard had madness in his eyes.

He was a bad man.

The worst Kat had ever seen in all her five years.

“I have a gift for your daughters. A gift for them and a reminder for you. Their father would have given it to them if a daemon hadn't killed him. Now it's up to me,” Reynard said.

“No. Leave them alone,” Anne D'Arcy protested.

Victoria had gasped.

Katherine could still hear the sound of her sister's shock. Their mother had broken a very important rule. And they saw her pay the price.

Reynard backhanded the petite contralto. He knocked her against the table holding Lucie, and both the doll and their mother had fallen. Lucie's cheek had shattered, but it hadn't been the jagged hole in the beloved face of her doll that had made silent tears course down Kat's face.

It had been the blood on her mother's mouth. The lovely face of Anne D'Arcy was suddenly unfamiliar as it swelled.

Neither of them rushed to their mother's side. She held up her hands to warn them away. They stood, quivering, good little soldiers, while Reynard turned from the woman he'd knocked to the ground.

“Your mother disappoints. Always she disappoints us. But I have high hopes for you. High expectations of what you can do for the Order of Samuel,” Reynard said.

They heard the tinkle of the silver medallions and the chains that would become so familiar to them as Reynard pulled them from his pocket.

“One for each of you. See the medallions? It is Samuel's figure upon them. He will go with you wherever you roam. To remind you of your gift and your sacred duty,” Reynard said.

He fastened Victoria's around her wrist first. She didn't protest. Their mother stood. She didn't try to stop him again. She only watched silently and bled while they cried.

When Reynard took her hand, Kat grew lightheaded and weak. Repulsed by his evil, but confused by the affinity she hadn't learned to control or direct. He fastened the bracelet and stepped away, but not before Kat thought she detected the scent of a match, sulfuric and sickeningly sweet.

She coughed. She gagged. Reynard only laughed.

“And now we will go hunting,” he said to their mother.

Katherine tucked Victoria in that night. She patted her shoulder as her sister cried. Lucie slept in the pink suitcase, a bandage carefully applied to her broken cheek. They would run again in the morning. Kat was small, but she knew how to be prepared.

It didn't matter that this time they would run in chains.

They would run, and only running mattered.

* * *

“Sometimes being able to remove the chain makes its weight harder to bear,” Katherine whispered.