Teresa Medeiros (28 page)

Lucy’s fingernails dug into her elbows as she doubled over, bracing herself for a fresh torrent of tears. But her pain ran beyond tears into a soundless cry of agony. When she finally lifted her face to the murky sky, it was as dry and barren as the winter wind whisking through her soul.

A flicker of light in the darkened windowpane of the library caught her eye. An acrid bitterness burned her throat. Her father couldn’t spare the time to wish his only daughter good night, but he could work until the wee hours of the morning. He was probably reviewing his memoirs, gloating over his feats of derring-do transcribed in her own tidy hand.

Lucy climbed to her feet, her spine rigid. The wind molded her thin gown to her legs, reminding her of the night she’d stood on the deck of the
Tiberius
and watched the
Retribution
melt out of the mist. Gerard had been right about one thing. She would have been better off clinging to her fantasies of a dashing pirate
than risking her heart to the fickle affections of flesh-and-blood men.

She started for the house, her strides brisk with purpose. Gerard might leave of his own choosing in the morning, but she would not have him driven off by her father’s bullying or her own pathetic infatuation. She had no idea how she would broach the subject when she stormed the Admiral’s hallowed retreat, but she was done with being dismissed. Never again would she meet rejection by crawling off into a corner to lick her wounds.

She slipped through a side door and made her way to the entrance hall. Shadows draped the cavernous room, swallowing the whisper of her footsteps across the polished parquet. Lucy’s confidence waned as she approached the massive library door. How many times had the beautifully carved teak barricaded her from her father’s life? It would have taken so little to make a lonely child happy—an adjustment to her ribbon, a welcoming smile, even a well-intentioned scold instead of the glacial scorn that had withered her tender feelings before they could bloom.

Lucy could feel herself shrinking again, remembering all the times she’d stood on tiptoe to reach the brass knob. Her hand betrayed her with a slight tremble as she inched the door open.

The only sound in the fireless room was the ghostly tapping of snowflakes against the windows. A host of dizzying impressions assaulted Lucy: a menacing shadow by the secretary, a harshly indrawn breath, a flicker of matchlight quickly extinguished.

She crept forward. “Father?” she whispered, then more tentatively, “Smythe?”

She was beginning to wonder if one of the servants hadn’t slipped in to filch some sherry when a dark shape separated itself from the shadows, closing the
distance between them with the lethal grace of a charging predator.

Claws of terror raked down Lucy’s spine. Even as the Admiral’s voice chided her …

He doesn’t give a farthing about you, you silly chit. He won’t come
.

 … she opened her mouth to scream for the one man who had offered her refuge, however brief, in the shelter of his arms.

Gerard
.

A merciless hand stifled her cry, clamping hard over her mouth. She found herself imprisoned against a man’s unyielding chest, dragged away from the door toward her father’s desk. Desolation threatened to rob her of her will to resist. It washed over her in bleak waves, sharpening the sense of abandonment she’d fought since a child.

Gerard wasn’t coming. He wasn’t going to stage a daring rescue. He wasn’t going to defeat this faceless demon in the dark or dry her frightened tears.

She was truly, completely alone.

That grim realization gave her the strength she needed to fight. It infused her veins with the reckless courage of someone who has nothing left to lose. She twisted wildly in her attacker’s arms, flailing out with her fists and feet. A muffled grunt escaped him as her heel connected soundly with his shin, giving her an all too brief rush of satisfaction.

His back collided with the unmoving mahogany of the Admiral’s desk, jarring every bone in their meshed bodies. Lucy took advantage of the impact to sink her teeth into his unyielding palm until she tasted blood, salty and metallic, against her tongue.

With a vicious oath, he jerked his palm away, but before she could draw breath to scream, something damp and bitter-smelling was pressed over her face.
For one dark moment, Lucy believed he meant to smother her as punishment for her rebellion.

Sickly sweet fumes stung her eyes, flooded her lungs. The rigidity of terror drained from her limbs, leaving them too weak to support her. Consciousness wavered before her eyes like a watercolor seascape. Realizing in some tiny corner of her brain that her attacker’s grip had softened, she turned in his arms, desperate to cling to something solid in a world gone liquid.

Her hand clutched his nape, then slid to his collar in a mocking travesty of a lover’s caress. She clawed for substance, parting his shirt over the heated skin of his shoulder. Her curled fingers went lax, unfolding over a slash of puckered scar tissue.

The precise sort of scar that might have been carved by an ivory-handled letter opener.

“Doom,” she breathed. His alias. Her fate.

She flung out an arm in one last desperate grasp for reality, sending her father’s precious hourglass tumbling end over end off the edge of the desk.

Time crashed to a halt in a cool spill of sand over her feet as Doom’s powerful arms broke her fall into oblivion.

“Smythe!”

The crisp bellow fractured the well-ordered serenity of Ionia’s morning. The servants who had served under the Admiral prior to his retirement flinched and scurried for cover, already tasting the bite of the cat-o’-nine-tails into their flesh.

Lucien Snow ploughed down the stairs, gripping his cane as if more inclined to break it over someone’s head than use it for support. He was too enraged to humor his own frailties.

“What the devil has gotten into that man?” he muttered.
“Must be going dotty in his dotage. Smythe!” he shouted to the deserted entrance hall. “Where the bloody hell is my breakfast?”

There were no carpets or tapestries to absorb the sound. The hall threw back a barren echo, giving him the unsettled impression that something more important than breakfast had gone missing from his routine. The Admiral despised feeling unsettled. When every mundane detail of his daily existence wasn’t carefully under his control, he suffered from the same jittery sensation he used to get while dodging his father’s drunken blows and shouted jeers that he would never amount to anything.

He strode toward the gaping door of the library, cheered by the prospect of verbally castigating whoever had dared to profane his sanctuary with their unworthy presence.

He froze in the doorway, paralyzed into inaction by the odd sight that greeted him.

Smythe sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the desk, surrounded by scattered sand and fragments of broken glass. His uniform was rumpled and soiled.

“Oh, bloody Christ, Smythe, not the hourglass! First that rapscallion Claremont breaks my favorite bust and now this. I warn you, man, this is coming out of your wages and don’t think it’s not. Why I’ve had that hourglass since my first command on the
EMS …”

The Admiral trailed off, disturbed by the vague, but repetitive, motions of the man’s hands. Smythe was scooping up fistfuls of sand, but no matter how tightly he cupped his fingers, the fine-grained sand trickled through the gaps until he was forced to begin again. Tiny cuts crisscrossed his knuckles.

“Smythe?” the Admiral whispered, battling a formless dread.

Smythe had seemed oblivious to his bellows, but the tentative whisper brought his head upright. His face was haggard, his skin a pasty gray.

He blinked once, twice, like a child awakening from a bad dream. “She’s gone sir. He’s taken her.”

As the butler’s hand closed in a bloodless fist, squeezing the last of the sand from his fingers, the Admiral staggered backward, forced to lean on his cane or fall.

P
ART
T
WO

Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n
.

JOHN MILTON

Kill then, and bliss me
But first come kiss me
.

T
HE FAMILIAR ROCKING MOTION soothed Lucy. It was like being suspended in the womb of some giant, but gentle, beast whose only intention was to protect her from harm. She’d learned its rhythms before she’d been old enough to express the comfort she found in them. Before she’d been old enough to dream she was being cradled in the arms of a mother she would never know.

Hazy light filtered through her eyelids. She eased them open. Gerard’s dear, familiar features, taut with concern, drifted into focus.

Memory returned in fragments, jagged but complete. A cloud of joy enveloped her.

Gerard hadn’t abandoned her after all. He’d somehow heeded her strangled cry and rushed to her rescue as he’d done so many times before. He could never leave her, nor could he deny his feelings for her. They were written all over his face, as plainly as the nameless dread that darkened his eyes to smoky topaz.

She lifted a hand to his face, longing to banish his foreboding with the reassurance of her touch.

Her hand stopped halfway to his unshaven cheek.

She frowned as confusion buffeted her. If Gerard had rescued her from Doom’s perfidy, why was her bed creaking like the deck of a ship at full sail? Why was his face hardening even as she watched, its boyish planes sketched in ruthless lines, as if by an artist who would deny his subject was capable of tenderness, mercy, or even the most basic human kindness?

Her outstretched hand began to tremble.

She lowered her eyes to shield them from his predatory scrutiny. He knew, she realized. He knew with inhuman instinct the second she started to doubt.

Her hand shot out with a will of its own. He didn’t flinch or make any move to protect himself. She could have struck him full in the face and he wouldn’t have so much as blinked.