Page 86 of Lessons for Marquesses
Thrown to the ground, Nicholas sucked for air, coming to his feet without it, leaving his musket and knife and charging toward the French soldier still gasping in a carpet of crowsfoot. The soldier, a boy, begged for his life in choked French.
His blue eyes begged. His hands clawed at the space between them. The boy shouted out his life’s history. His name was René Durand, he was from Lisieux, he was the only son, he would surely die before ever seeing his wife again. He had a daughter aged two. He was twenty. He called Nicholas a good man. He said he could see that Nicholas was a good man. Even with the blood and dirt ground into his coat and his last victim’s blood smeared across his mouth.
“Go,” Nicholas said in French. He kicked at the boy’s leg. He kicked harder when the boy didn’t move. “Get out of here.”
The boy started to cry. “I will die.”
Yes, he would. But not here. Snatching at the boy’s waistcoat, Nicholas hauled him up and shoved him in the direction of the fort, toward the screaming and cracking gunfire.
“Stay north and you’ll live to see the fort,” Nicholas replied in French. “Go!”
The boy started to leave, eyes widening over Nicholas’s discarded weapons.
“Value your life, boy,” Nicholas said, “and keep walking.”
The boy spun about, his hand thrusting into his coat. Nicholas unsheathed a knife at his hip and plunged it straight into the boy’s hand, pinning it to his chest. The light dimmed in the boy’s blue eyes as Nicholas watched him drop to the earth. Where he had found him. Where the boy had begged. And decided to deceive him with tales of home. Where he now coughed and blood splattered over his chin, and he gawked at the blade buried up to the hilt.
Nicholas yanked out the knife and the telltale crinkle of paper echoed from beneath the dying boy’s coat. He reached in and pulled out a letter.
Addressed to Angelique Durand.
The boy coughed again.
In Lisieux, France.
Nicholas fell over the boy, his hands clenched into the white wool coat and the blood pouring out of the boy’s chest. “I told you to go!”
“Send it for me,” he whispered.
“I told you to go!”
René Durand, from Lisieux, his mother’s only son, a husband and father, Nicholas’s only act of kindness in the past five years, was dead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Georgiana peeked through the threshold,squinting past the taper to Mr. Wolf and the snowy white sheets twisting up his limbs. She had expected him to be thrashing, not lying deathly still.
“Go!”
Georgiana ducked behind the door at his shout, though the command was not directed at her. Someone in his dreams needed to go, and they wouldn’t. She keened at the desperation in his voice.
She slipped into the room and, gripping the candlestick, padded across the carpet. The vision of linens and his tangled, bare limbs sharpened and like a wave crashing into her, his body was revealed. She locked her knees at what she had never suspected, should have suspected. The ghosts had not only taken over his soul. They had carved themselves into him.
The most startling scar began at his left collar bone below his broad, corded shoulder. The light bent at the bone. It had been broken and unevenly knitted. From there, the thick, knotted scar glowed a silvery path to his muscled chest, sliced through hisdark, flat nipple and abruptly turned outward. At the edge of his torso, it slashed down, circling behind his back.
The muscles rippled along his ribs with each breath. Blocks of flesh covered his abdomen and tapered to his hips. A thin black trail of hair below his navel ended somewhere in his drawers.
She swallowed at the significant prominence beneath the linen and averted her gaze downward. There was a whorled scar on the curved musculature of his thigh. An angry slash below his knee.
His foot kicked out from the bed covers, almost striking her. Georgiana lurched back and studied his right arm crooked above his wild hair. A submissive, yet barbaric pose. On his left arm was another scar, like a knot in oak. Like an old bullet wound.
She should leave him. Now. Drag her curious feet from the bed and walk away. What she did was a violation of his privacy and pride. What she continued to do. This man had survived—she counted the scars—five deaths. Six if she added the one upon his cheek. Mr. Wolf was not a comforting shelter from a storm, a place to seek solace. He was danger in human form.
His mouth cracked into a grimace. The scar on his cheek distorted his face as a groan tore from his throat. He thrashed to his side, his broad back facing her and his plaintive pleas muffled.
What agony for this powerful man to be laid so low. For her to be witness to such torture. It felt as if he would never find peace. What if she tapped his shoulder to bring him out of his torturous slumber? Was she quick enough to flee before he stirred?
Setting the candlestick to the bedside table, she reached out tentatively to rouse him, but the distance was too wide. Easing a knee to the mattress, she dropped farther than expected into the yielding down and righted herself with her fingertips. Aftera slow, unsteady breath, she drew up her other knee to the mattress.
