Page 73 of Darkest at Dusk
“I know them all,” Isabella said.
“It was Fenwick who told me of a gentleman, an antiquarian who collected items pertaining to ‘phenomena at the edge of seeing.”
“Papa,” she said softly.
“Your father,” he agreed.
“You hunted him. You hunted me.” Her tone was flat, her eyes searching as she studied him.
“I did,” he said simply. “You and…” He hesitated, then revealed the last bit of it. “You and a book I believed to be in your father’s possession. To free those I love.” The words came harsher than he meant. He forced himself to soften. “Even when I stood in the street, and you in the window above, you steadied me. You made the voices quieten.”
“Do you think I could hate you for this? For any of it?” she asked, her dark eyes wide and searching.
Almost did he say yes. Almost did he tell her to hate him now, before it grew more difficult later.
But she whispered, “I dislike the snare. I dislike the darkness you walked in order to reach me. But I do not, I cannot hate you. Only… No more tricks. No more lures. No more boxes laid out to tempt me. Only ask me as I have asked you.”
He buried his nose in her dark hair, soft and thick and fragrant, and he said, “No more snares. I will ask.”
He had not intended for it to be like this. He had intended for her to help him, to stand beside him and open the gate. The plan had been clean, cold, brutal: Survive the house. Free his family. Keep Catrin from devouring what little remained. Nothing more. Nothing tender. Certainly not this.
He didn’t deserve this.
And yet here she was, pressed against him, her breath a soft rhythm against his skin, her hand resting on his heart. He had thought himself emptied years ago, believed that grief had burned away the part of him that dared to want. But with her quiet strength, her refusal to flinch, her defiant compassion, Isabella had slipped past to fill him again. And that fullness brought fear.
The scent of lavender threaded with the faint salt of her skin teased his senses, and he realizes he was memorizing it, hoarding it as a man does water in a drought.
Everyone he had ever loved was buried or burned. To love this woman was to gamble with ruin. If the house took her, if Catrin tore her from him, the wound she left behind would be worse than the wailing of a thousand ghosts.
Something gave way inside him, a fracture running through the stone he had carried for years. He had lost everyone he had ever loved. He could not lose her, too.
And yet, if he tried to keep her safe by sending her away, he would strip her of choice. She was not a child. Not a possession. She was a woman with a right to choose her own path. He would not take that from her.
He would let her decide to choose him—or not.
Chapter Eighteen
Isabella woke to warmth and the unfamiliar feel of skin beneath her cheek. Rhys’s chest rose under her ear, and fell, and rose, the steady pattern of his breathing.
The room was dim but not dark. Coals glowed in the grate like banked hearts. She could not hear the needles of sound that lived at the edge of every hallway here. The hush had a different character in this moment, like a blanket pulled up to the chin. She wondered if it was the two of them, connected now, the made the voices so quiet.
Rhys’s arm lay heavy across her back. His hand spanned her shoulder, a weight that did not pin so much as reassure. He had fallen asleep like that, holding her as if some part of him feared the air might take her if he loosened his grip. In the close quiet, she buried her nose in his chest and breathed in the scents of citrus and mint and a man’s musk.
She thought of the weight of him as he had come over her, the shift of his muscles beneath her hand, the thrust of him between her legs, and felt her cheeks heat.
Then she thought of the corridor, the girl’s unhinged jaw, the black, oozing seep, the keen that had wormed inside her skull. Catrin was not gone; this was only a reprieve.
For now, the worst of her fear had been melted by his body, by his mouth, by his name in her throat and hers on his lips. She turned her face a little against him. The small, ordinary rasp of hair on his chest abraded her cheek. Her hand had drifted in sleep. It lay now across the ridges of his belly, fingers splayed.
He stirred. “Awake?” The word was low, thick with sleep.
“Yes.” Her voice surprised her. It sounded like honey poured from a jar, slow and lazy.
He tightened his arm, briefly, as if answering a question neither had spoken, then loosened it again and slid his palm to her hair, smoothing it where he had mussed it. “You’re warm.”
“Because of you,” she said truthfully.
“Good,” he said. A beat passed. Then, more quietly, “I am sorry.”
