Chained: Reckless Desires (Dragon's Heart Book 1) (8 page)

She couldn’t have been imagining it, could she?

Bella had grown up as an only child and had longed always for a sibling. Seeing the messy, cruel squabbles between Dorian’s brothers made her glad for once that her parents had stopped after only one. Also, she was used to rich people having odd names, but the Winterborn brothers were right up there with the Romneys for bizarre first names. Who names a son Charlemagne? Or Xerxes? Or Napoleon? Though they seemed to go by Charlie, X, and Leon, respectively. Even after her time at the law firm, immersing herself in the concerns of the wealthiest, the Winterborns were a whole new kind of weird.

After a week of work, she completed one room. There were more to go. So many more. Dorian had started her on the smallest and easiest of the remaining rooms. The next had weird objects intermixed with the papers, and he tasked her with finding out their worth, as best she could. This meant calling antiques dealers, discreetly, and so much internet research. She was given use of his laptop and her own phone.

She hadn’t seen the beast in him since she started on the search. She sought for some way to ask him about it, but every way she imagined led only to him freaking out in a rage, and maybe strangling her. Probably he wouldn’t, but it was possible. Intermixed with the personal documents she’d been sorting was evidence of payouts from Octavian’s estate to other parties. They seemed to be a series of payments designed to keep his name out of the press, or himself out of court. There was evidence of Octavian’s great temper going back as far as 1911, when he’d beaten a chimney sweep so hard with a fireplace poker that he’d broken the boy’s leg. There was another story of him hurling a maid down the stairs. And another of him pummeling a server who spilled coffee on the his sleeve. Each of these accounts was met with official denials and large payments delivered anonymously.

Octavian had been a tyrant, nearly berserk when confronted. Was it any wonder his sons behaved so poorly towards each other?

The objects in the second room proved difficult to identify. Many were priceless antiquities that surely belonged in a museum, not in some dusty disused bedroom. And perhaps if they sold them all, they could clear a portion of the estate’s debt and secure its operating budget for another year or two. But that was a stopgap measure that Dorian refused to hear. Either they saved the estate or they sold it. He refused to squander the family’s goods and implied that if they did sell them, his brothers would demand their share. But at the same time, he needed each candlestick and vase roughly appraised, so as to know the true and total worth of the estate for an eventual buyer.

Bella recognized amongst the antiques the coins that Rodney had been taking. Was this where he’d found them? Or was there another stash? She wanted to go to him, to tell him to stop, but he’d been ignoring her ever since she’d been promoted, giving her little more than a nod when he saw her and leaving the room.

In the ledger, Bella noted every item. At the end of her day she left it on Dorian’s desk to review, took a plate from Chloe in the kitchen, and retired to her room where more often that not she fell asleep without eating. The research was exhausting work. The dust made her eyes burn. And she was working against some pressing deadline that Dorian refused to articulate. Whenever she asked how much time they had to finish the job, he’d only reply “Not much,” or “We need to have an accounting complete yesterday.”

Was it money that made the deadline so urgent? Or his curse? His health was failing. He was growing paler every day and his good hours—his daylight hours—seemed fewer. At night he’d lock himself away in his bedroom on the far side of the house, but still his raving could be heard echoing through the halls. Bella longed to go to him, to comfort him. What if her presence drove away his demon? Didn’t she owe it to him to try? She fantasized about nursing him back to health with her cool hands on his fevered brow, but she couldn’t bring herself to try. It was painful enough to hear him in the grips of his curse. To see him maniacal with rage would break her heart.

O
ne morning
she was awoken from sleep by a pounding on her door. It was a rageful, rapid pounding, like Dorian was trying to hammer a nail with his fist.

“Open this door!” he bellowed. “Open up, thief!”

Bella dressed quickly in a silken robe and opened the door. Dorian pushed past her, the handsome face that she delighted in seeing gone. The monster was back. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

“Where are they? Where have you hidden them?” He seized her mattress and flipped it over, then tore out every drawer from her dresser, upending each of them.

Tears sprang to Bella’s eyes. They’d been doing so well together. How could this happen now?

“What are you looking for?” she pleaded.

Dorian spun on her. His golden eyes were nearly black. Veins throbbed in his forehead and neck. His nostrils flared and he walked in a hunched posture, like a great weight was pushing down to the earth. He was more undressed that Bella had ever seen him before. He’d always been in a suit and vest, until now. Now he wore only an undershirt. With his suit pants and bare feet. Deep gouges marked his right arm, livid and pink. He still wore that rusted iron bracelet, but it looked smaller now, tighter against his skin. The flesh under it was red and raw, almost bloody.

“You know,” he said with a sneer. “You know. You know. You know.”

“Dorian, Lord Winterborn, I don’t. I don’t know what you think I stole.”

At the word
stole
, Winterborn howled with rage and punched his fist right through the wall next to Bella. Drywall and plaster and chips of wood pelted her in a small explosion.

“The coins, thief. Where are my father’s coins? You wrote thirty-seven in the ledger, but you must not have known that I double-checked your work every morning. Did you now, eh? I went and counted them, and this morning there are only twelve. Do you know how old those coins are? How long my father held onto them? A single one of them could pay off your law school debt. But you had to steal more, didn’t you? This isn’t the first time I’ve seen things go missing. I assumed it was my mind, before, or possibly Vincent. But it was you, wasn’t it?”

Bella fought to keep recognition off her face. She knew that if Dorian saw that she knew something it’d be over for her. It must have been Rodney. With his key, he must have lifted them. Had he planned for her to get caught, was that Rodney’s plan? Was that why he’d been so cold to her lately?

Should she tell Dorian? She could, she could say Rodney’s name and let Winterborn do with him whatever he wanted. It wasn’t her fault he’d been stealing, why should she take the blame? But no, if Dorian found out his trusted manservant had betrayedhim, he would be unstoppable. She couldn’t give Rodney up.

“I didn’t steal anything,” Bella said. “Nothing at all.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Dorian roared. He seized a small statuette of a phoenix from a bedside table and hurled it through the window, shattering the glass. “Never lie to me. There’s nothing I detest more than lies.” The depositions of Octavian’s victims flashed through her mind. The way they described him, the rages he exhibited, she was seeing it now in his son.

“I didn’t steal anything,” Bella said, calmly and clearly. She stood absolutely still as Winterborn grew increasingly violent. He shattered the dresser with his fists. He punched another hole in the wall. He broke everything breakable within reach, including her new phone.

“Go,” he growled. “Get out of here.”

“Am I fired?”

“Did I say you were fired? Oh, no. You still have debts to pay off. You still must be useful. No. Go back to the library. You are banished from this home for a week and a day.”

Bella did not hesitate. She grabbed her hoodie and sneakers off the floor and ran out of the room, her silk robe flapping around her legs. She ran all the way across the grounds to the library, to her old room, and hid there until night fell.

Her father came to her later that night. He was bringing back a book, ostensibly. But he paused before he shelved it. “You know, my whole life I’ve been a reader. My mother was, too. But I’ve always been of the opinion that nonfiction was superior to fiction. Novels seemed so frivolous. Such a waste of time. But I saw how you read them, how you fell into them. And I thought I’d give them a try. I thought maybe if I read some, I’d understand—never mind. This Jane Austen, she’s quite the writer.”

“Yeah, Dad. I’ve been trying to get you to read her for like twenty years.”

Franklin Hart nodded. Something was wrong. “But imagine my surprise when I opened the book, and this fell out.” He held up one of the hundred dollar bills Rodney had given her. She’d hidden them in Austen, thinking it was the last place her father would look. “And then I hear from my employer that he’s caught you stealing rare coins.”

“Dad, wait. No, that isn’t what—”

“How could you do this to me? This place, this estate, it’s my life!” He hung his head. “You can stay here as long as you need to, I refuse to be the cause of anyone’s homelessness. But please, don’t speak to me for a while.”

T
he world was darkness
.

Bella didn’t realize how lonely she’d been until she’d had friends again and had them yanked away. Chloe, for all her spookiness, had been a friend, and now Bella was forbidden to see her. Working with Dorian so closely, and without incident, she’d been able to fool herself into thinking they were becoming closer. But the curse ruined that. How could she love a man who turned into a monster so easily? Even Agatha and Rodney, two of the more infuriating people she’d ever met. She had a fondness for them born out of a shared burden.

But now, she had nothing. She was banned from the big house. Her father wouldn’t speak to her and wouldn’t let her explain that she had nothing to do with stealing the gold. Well, almost nothing to do with it. She had technically aided and abetted Rodney.

Bella was too angry to read and too sad to leave. She felt a great rage at all the men in her life who misjudged her, who blamed her for their own faults, or who saw her only as an object to be toyed with. She should have called someone. Reached out to old friends on Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat. She should have done
something
. Instead she stewed, marinated in her own dark feelings for days on end.

She was in a prison, she realized. There were no bars, but her circumstances held her just as tightly. The only way forward for her, Bella knew, was to leave. She couldn’t place herself in a position where some mercurial, moody man had such great power over her. So she packed up all of her things that she could easily carry into a shopping bag and walked out the front door. She’d hike down the mountain. She’d stick to the main road and hitchhike to Bearfield, and from there to anywhere else.

A fresh start was what she needed.

But when she opened the front door, Chloe was standing there with a lopsided grin on her face. “Hey, girl!” she said, and then threw her arms around Bella’s neck in a tight hug.

Bella felt her anger being drawn away. She’d thought it was a solid thing that could be carried and wielded, like a stone, but one look at Chloe’s face and her new pink hair and she saw what a lie anger was. It faded away, no stronger than smoke.

“It’s good to see you,” Bella said, squeezing her friend tightly and dropping her bag of clothes. “What’s going on?”

“You won’t believe it,” Chloe said. “Lord Winterbutt caught Rodney stealing like so much money. All the stuff he blamed on you and Vincent and Steffie and Saundra and Aberforth—it was Rodney the whole time!” Chloe blinked. “You don’t know those last people, but just like assume they were really cool and nice and were treated unfairly by management, okay?”

“What’s going to happen to him?”

“Winterborn, he’ll have to put his own pants on in the morning,” Chloe laughed.

“No, Rodney. What’s going to happen to Rodney?”

“He’s fired. Winterborn freaked out, like he does, and they got into a fight I guess. I wasn’t here. My boyfriend and I were seeing this show down in San Francisco that night. But the spirits told me all about it. Even
they
didn’t know he was the thief. Can you believe that? They said Rodney threw the first punch and called his Dorian-ship a bully and that Dorian shoved Rodney right through a wall. They were pretty excited, the spirits were. They haven’t seen a proper fight since the old man passed.”

“Is he hurt?” Bella’s heart ached, but she didn’t know who she was more concerned for. No, she knew. Rodney had chosen his path. She hesitated to say he got what was coming to him, because as an attorney she knew that was never the case. But Dorian—he’d be ruined. The man was nearly alone now with no one he could trust.

“The Rodster is scraped up and bruised, but okay, Agatha says. But I don’t know much more.” Chloe shrugged and twisted a hank of her pink hair in her fingers. “Anyway, yo, Agatha humbly requests your presence in the big house. She asked me to come get you. She would have herself, but there’s some big tour happening soon and she’s cleaning like she’s getting paid for it. She said you could go up to see his Highness-ness directly.”

Bella followed Chloe back to the big house. Whenever she thought of the last time she’d seen Dorian, she found her anger returned. It felt like armor around her heart. Chloe slipped in through the servant’s entrance heading off to cook whatever amazing dish she felt like making that day.

Bella didn’t follow Chloe through the servant’s entrance. She turned and walked along the front of the main house up to the expansive front steps. The dragon statue over the door glared down at her with hungry eyes. “Just try it, buster,” Bella whispered, glaring right back at him. She ascended the stairs slowly, taking her time, savoring the feel of the approach. No more servant’s entrance. She wasn’t less than Winterborn, she was better than him. He was the one who needed his own door, for shockingly handsome men with anger control issues.

The blackened doors swung open easily, noiselessly, and Bella found herself again staring at the stairs leading up to Winterborn’s office. She’d been preparing to take those steps haughtily, head held high and dramatic as hell. But when she looked, Dorian was sitting at the bottom of the steps, head in hand. He looked rough, with his hair tousled and his face unshaved.

The armor around her heart cracked, but did not break. She walked to him slowly, unsure of which Dorian she’d see in his eyes, the man or the monster. He looked up at her approach, and he was all man. His eyes swam with sadness.

“Bella,” he said, leaping to his feet. “It’s so good to see you. We have so much to get done before—”

“That’s it?” Bella snapped. The anger in her blood was a drug and it was not yet out of her system. “You call me a thief and a liar. You terrify me with your violent rages and your bloody murderous threats. And when you see that I’m innocent and unjustly accused, the best you can do is to say,
get back to work
?”

She wanted to breathe fire on him. She wanted to tie him up in chains and hurl him off the mountain into the sea. But mostly she wanted to kiss him, but of course that was impossible, which only made her angrier.

Dorian stiffened and stood straighter. “Of course, you are right. Please accept my apology.”

Bella stared at him, waiting for an apology.

Dorian stared at her, waiting for her to accept it.

“I haven’t heard an apology. I can’t accept it, your lordship, if it hasn’t been given,” Bella fumed.

“That was my apology,” Dorian said, a look of genuine puzzlement on his face. “What more do you want from me? Do I need to grovel? Crawl on my belly like a worm? Do I need to be lashed in the square, like father used to do?” His eyes darkened as Bella watched. It was unreal. The transformation—she could see it come over him. It wasn’t her imagination, he really was changing.

She knew she should back off, but she couldn’t. She was high on hate. “That would be a start, but still not enough to make me forgive you. Is this why your father cursed you? Because you’re so prideful that you can’t admit mistakes?”

The color was gone from Dorian’s eyes, the bright gold overwhelmed by darkness. “And yet you’re here, aren’t you? Do you still work for me? Am I your employer? Then go upstairs. You will find the doors unlocked. Go up to the next room and get to work. No more cataloging though, the time for that is through. We have a buyer for the entire estate arriving tomorrow.”

“Then what am I looking for?”

“Deeds. Money. Stocks, as before. Paper assets. But also,” he held up his right wrist, where the rusted chain was rubbing his wrist raw. “A way to unlock this.”

Bella looked at it. The chain was one piece, just link forged through link. There was no lock or opening visible. “I don’t understand. Can’t you just cut it off?”

Dorian opened his mouth to say something, and then a tremor took him, contorting him. “Just go!” he roared. “Find a solution. Find anything.”

Bella hurried up the stairs. She turned to look back and saw Dorian, again with his head in his hands, sitting on the steps.

T
he room
she found was as dusty as the others, but the boxes were in better order and labeled in a neat woman’s handwriting. Was it one of Octavian’s wives who had sorted them? Some long gone servant? She sorted them as fast she could, looking for anything useful. But it was more of the same. Correspondences and meaningless notes, hints of scandals and violence. If there was madness in Dorian, it had been in his father as well, and his older brothers. Though theirs, by all accounts, took on a crueler, colder form.

What could possibly unlock that odd bracelet of his? Bella had no idea. It didn’t make any sense. If the bracelet was a curse, how did you unlock it? It wasn’t the kind of thing you looked up online. She’d tried and only found fairy tales, fanfic, and video game walkthroughs.

After countless boxes of documents, Bella opened a leather-bound trunk and found it full of photographs. They were old, and many had aged poorly, but some were treasures. They showed the Winterborn family at rest, at play, and at work. She lost herself flipping through them, marveling at the old fashions. The earliest photo was marked 1927 and it showed Octavian Winterborn, a tall and broad man, imposing even in a photo. He had a tidy beard and a bald head and wore a light-colored three piece suit. He looked to be in his fifties. He was standing in front of the mansion with a challenging smile on his face. At his knees were two of his sons, Alexander and Hannibal, the note on the back said.

But that was impossible. She’d seen Alexander recently—his photos were online—and he hardly looked forty. He should have been in his nineties, at least.

An itch developed behind Bella’s eyes. Her nose twitched. She had a hunch, but couldn’t articulate it. She pulled out more photos, looking for any that had the Winterborn boys in them. And she found them, she found hundreds of meticulously dated photos showing the boys growing slowly across decades.

The first photo of Dorian was in 1970. It had his other name on it, Valdemar. He was a baby with a serious scowl on his face and one single thick lock of black hair in the middle of his forehead. But that would meant he was in his mid-forties, and Bella would have guessed he was no older than thirty.

“I expect I have some explaining to do.” Dorian said behind her and Bella leapt to her feet in alarm, tripping over the opened trunk and falling sideways into a pile of document boxes.

He was calm again and he’d combed his hair and shaved. Bella wanted to hate him, to fear him, but she couldn’t. He held out his hand and helped her to her feet.

Bella took a half step away from him. Clouds of dust shifted around her feet. “These photos.”

“Yes.”

“Your father—he doesn’t age in them. He ages a little, but not like normal people.”

“We aren’t normal people, Bella. But I think you know that already.” Dorian’s voice was low. His eyes devoured her.

“Did you mean for me to find these pictures?” Bella asked.

“No. I didn’t. I thought my father had destroyed all the photos years ago. He must have missed this box.”

Bella swallowed hard and asked the question that was on her mind. “Are you vampires?”

Dorian stared at her in surprise and then laughed explosively, sending up more plumes of dust in the musty room. “Vampires? Vampires! No, of course not. There’s no such thing as vampires. At least not anymore.”

The dust stung Bella’s eyes and clung to her skin. “Then what are you?”

“I owe you an explanation. Let’s go outside, out of this mess, and I’ll tell you what I can.” His eyes fell upon a photo that Bella had set aside. It showed Octavian and all thirteen of his sons. The oldest looked to be the same age as Octavian, while Dorian as the youngest was still in diapers. It was labeled 1971. Dorian’s eyes darkened and a hint of the madness shot through his body at the sight of the photo.

“Let me change first, please.” Bella’s clothes were caked in dust and cobwebs. She looked like she’d rolled in flour she was so dirty. Dorian nodded and she agreed to meet him in his office.

“Don’t be long,” he said.
Or the monster may be here when you arrive
was the unspoken part, which Bella understood all too clearly.

She went back to her room on the second floor and raided the closet for something suitable. She was tired of shoulder pads and polyester, so she picked out a knee-length sleeveless red dress and tried combing the spiderwebs out of her hair as best she could. When she met Dorian in his office, he looked dumbstruck.

Was it still him? Or had the madness arrived? His face was unreadable, almost horrified. Did she really look that bad? But then he breathed out and said, “You look simply incredible.”

Dorian took Bella’s hand and led her out of his office, all the way down to the kitchens. Dorian’s hand was strong in hers, and paler than before. He was fading away. She was losing him. She tried not to think of her mother—of holding her hand in the hospital and seeing how frail and fragile she was.

In the kitchen, Chloe was singing loudly and off-key, some song Bella didn’t recognize. Maybe it was on-key? What did she know?

“Miss Meadows,” Dorian said, but Chloe didn’t stop singing, she just nodded at them both and pointed to a basket by the door. “Miss Meadows, I was hoping to trouble you for a picnic lunch. I’d like to dine
al fresco
today,” Dorian said, louder.

Chloe pointed again to the basket by the door. She incorporated a wiggling dance into her song and winked at Bella theatrically.

“It’s like she doesn’t even hear me,” Dorian muttered.

Bella squeezed his hand to get his attention. They were still holding hands. Why were they still holding hands? “Dorian, she’s pointing to the picnic basket by the door. The one she already made for you.”

Dorian looked at Bella and blinked owlishly. “But that’s impossible. I hadn’t even asked her for it yet.”

Bella smiled at Chloe and dragged Dorian out of the kitchen, grabbing the basket on the way.

“But how?” he asked.

Bella ignored him. She didn’t like to think about Chloe’s gifts, about the world they implied. The idea of explaining them or defending them just made her feel exhausted. “What was your plan?” she asked. “Where did you want to eat?”