Page 35 of Darkest at Dusk
Mr. Caradoc took a step closer. His shadow swallowed her, the air between them crackling until she could feel the whisper of his breath on her cheek.
“I know only what I received,” he said. “If there was something your father kept apart…something uncatalogued…I have no direct knowledge of it.” He paused. “Do you?”
Isabella stiffened. “No,” she said, too quickly. The lie felt brittle on her tongue.
He tilted his head, watching her with an unsettling calm. “Next time you hear something in the night,” he murmured, “stay in your room.”
The warning in his tone sent a shiver down her spine. And then, before she could reply, he leaned in and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, his knuckles grazing the angle of her jaw, his fingertips lingering at the sensitive skin just beneath her earlobe. The world narrowed to that single point of contact. The warmth of his touch combined with the way he looked at her sent heat spiraling through her veins.
She swayed toward him.
They were separated by mere inches, his gaze fixed on her mouth in a way that made her edgy and nervous, wanting…no, needing something she could not name.
Her pulse raced. Her lips parted. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. He filled her senses. The heat of his body, the rough texture of his fingertips, the weight of his gaze?—
He stepped back.
“Goodnight, Miss Barrett,” he said.
A small bow. A turn.
And then he was gone, swallowed by the darkness.
Isabella stood there for a long moment, forcing her ragged breathing under control. She entered her room and closed the door behind her then pressed her forehead against the wood, her body trembling, not with fear or cold, but something else, something unfamiliar and exciting. Desire, she thought. It pricked her like pins from the inside. Confusion lapped at its edges.
She made a soft, shaky laugh, unsure which haunted her more, the wraith or the man who had walked her through the shadowed dark.
A buzz drew her glance to the floor. A crisped fly lay on the rug at her feet, its wing giving one last brittle flutter before falling still.
Rhys strode along the dark corridor, the feel of Isabella’s skin lingering in his palm like a brand. With each step away from her, the thin, needling susurrus he had learned to endure crawled back into his ears. But the noise was a pale imitation of itself, as if someone had draped wet muslin over a violin and bid it play. Just having her in the house made the hum bearable but touching her made the sound weak and toothless.
He told himself that was the reason his pulse had stumbled when she swayed toward him, the only reason his thumb had found the hollow beneath her ear and rested there as if it belonged.
He had meant to keep his distance. He had meant a hundred sensible things.
She had looked at him, a proper little scholar with a straight spine and threadbare wrapper. She had seen him and not looked away. That had surprised him, as had the truth of it: desire arrived not as a blaze but as recognition, the clean, undeniable sort a man feels when a key finds the lock he’s been turning bloody for years. He dismissed the metaphor before it could fully form. She was not a key, not a tool to be used. She was a woman who did not flinch.
And he was a man who had already decided what he must ask of her, how he must use her, though she deserved better.
At his door, he stilled, recalling the round, steady drum of her pulse beneath the delicate bones of her wrist when he’d held it. Had he not released her, the chorus might have stilled altogether. A seductive thought. A dangerous one. A man might do unforgivable things for quiet.
A child’s cry carried from inside the wall, a thin warble that might have been his name. Or not. The sound was tinny with distance, heavy with despair. Another cry followed, a woman’s wrenching sob that sat heavy on his heart. Then the scrape came low along the skirting, nails on stone, chasing the others away, sharpening itself on his regrets.
He opened the door and stepped inside. The fire had fallen to red embers and ash. On the table lay a half-sorted sheaf of notes…dates, marginalia, the diagram he had sketched of a half-circle and its broken twin. Two halves, the grimoire had stated.
Two willing halves joined, and the gate would open.
Two halves, one of them a living conductor that could reach into the ethereal place not quite of this world when the gate began to sing.
He had chased that promise—the promise of freedom for the souls of those he loved—through ink and rumor until it had brought him to a man in London and the man’s daughter who steadied a haunted house simply by being in it.
As he set the papers in order, he made a silent vow. He would keep her safe and he would have what he needed of her. Both truths could live in the same space. He could keep her here, arrange her circumstances so leaving felt unthinkable, pay her well and call it mercy, pretending all the while that he was not the villain in this tale.
“She is staying,” he said aloud, and only then allowed himself to acknowledge the truth. He wanted Isabella Barrett for more reasons than he cared to admit. And if he could keep his hands from her, if he could do what needed to be done, then the weeping in these walls would at last go quiet for good.
Chapter Nine
The air carried the faint scent of smoke and ash, the last remnants of the fire that had burned itself out during the night. The morning light crept through the narrow crack in the heavy curtains, painting thin, bright lines that stood out like scars on the dark wood floor and the carpet that covered it.
