Page 115 of Sloth: The Fallen Earl
“I’m fine, Benedict,” she said, waking him from his trance.
She was fine? She was fine. How could she be fine when he’d been transformed into an elemental, tortured creature incapable of speaking sentences or any words at all?
Wakefield balled and unballed his fists. The bruise upon her left cheek had since begun to fade. Now, the imprint of a large hand had marked her other one. This time, the blow of whichever dead man had landed this one left a ring of purple around her right eye. The blows she had taken had been so violent, they’d already begun to leave her black and blue.
Now the doctor’s vitriolic rage made sense. The man had assumed that it had been Wakefield who’d left Cressida bruised so.
“If you’ll excuse us,” Cressida said as placidly and politely as if she were ushering a gentlemanly caller from a parlor and not a bloody doctor who’d come to tend her wounds. Both Dr. Carlson and Trudy honored Cressida’s request for a private meeting and stepped out.
The moment they’d gone, Cressida lay back down. She rested her hands behind her head and leaned in a relaxed pose against the pillows knocking them slightly. How was she able to move? How was she able to make so many slight and obvious movements? How, when Wakefield found himself made of concrete stone?
Immobile, Wakefield couldn’t take his gaze from the horrific bruising of her delicate features. The walls of his chest began closing in, even as a weighted pressure settled somewhere in the place where his heart beat, crushing him until his heart pounded and thudded sickeningly, as if it were about to explode.
“I really am fine, Benedict,” she said comfortingly.
As if I am the one in need of consoling…The column of his throat worked painfully as he continued to stare unblinkingly at her.
Those bruised and previously bloodied lips tipped up in a wistful smile for his benefit. And the way she relaxed against the pillows, he couldn’t tell if she’d adopted an affected air in a bid to ease his worries, or whether she used them to borrow support for herself. He’d wager both.
“I’ve upset you,” Cressida said softly, her smile falling. The slight way her body flinched was a testament to how even that subtlest slide to her lips wrought pain. “I expected your men had found Trudy, and I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t know when you’d be back, and…”
“Is that what you believe?” he asked incredulously. “That I am upset with you? With you?” he repeated. He both felt and saw her hesitation.
Closing his eyes, Wakefield shook his head. How strange to think not even three days earlier, the doctor’s assumption would’ve been what mattered first and foremost. How his reputation had been an obsession.
But that had been before Cressida. Now he couldn’t see past the evil that had been done to her, and his own murderous intent to hunt down the fiend responsible.
“Your brother?” He marveled at his ability to get those two words out.
Cressida’s expression instantly closed up. And lifting her chin, she stared him squarely in the eyes and glared with all the spirited fiery beauty of a queen. “What of him?”
Did she truly not understand what he was asking? Was she bent on torturing Benedict?
“Is he the one who did this to you?” he asked, unable to keep that question from exploding from his lungs.
Wakefield thought she might not answer, and then he’d go mad from not knowing and would be forced to kill any and every man until he landed upon the one guilty of the crimes against Cressida this day.
She hesitated and then nodded.
Oh, God.
Wakefield sucked in a shuddery breath. He made himself speak for her benefit. “I…see.”
This is what she endured.
Anguish consumed his heart before he smothered his own self-suffering. Cressida. It was her pain that mattered. Hers and only hers.
Oh, Cressida.“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?” Cressida said tersely. “Tell you who my brother was?”
Wakefield jolted, so dispossessed he’d not even realized he’d spoken aloud.
Cressida kept coming. “Or should I have told you where I lived? Or why I was at The Devil’s Den?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Any of it?Allof it?Something, Cressida!” Emotion wrenched that from him.
“Let me ask you a question, Benedict. You’ve continued to put questions to me, all number of them, any of which are deserving of answers. But on what grounds? Why?” she asked intriguingly. “What reason would I have to tell you about my life? So I could what?” she scoffed. “Be humiliated?Furtherhumiliated.”
