Page 61 of The Shadow of Breninsol
“Madam!” the marquis said in a voice she hadn’t heard from him before. He had lost his slow cadence and strode into the room with a severe look. “You will leave us,” he ordered.
Madam Grace glared at Eleanor, curtsied to the marquis, and left.
The marquis’s intervention surprised Eleanor. His gaze swept the room, seeing the plain room for what it was with its bare furniture and peeling walls. His eyes settled on her and ever so slightly softened.
“You have ten minutes to get ready.” His cold eyes flicked up and down her partially covered body. “Unless you’d prefer to goas you are?” His lip curled at the suggestion, with the implication that it wouldn’t matter either way to him.
Prick.
“Leave?” she croaked, still anticipating a hit from Madam Grace.
“A day,” he replied with a glint in his eyes she couldn’t place and turned on his polished black heeled boots.
The tapping of his cane against the corridor’s wooden floor trailed off as he left her stunned, in her dreary room that now felt much too small, empty, and cold.
Iris appeared in her doorway wide-eyed and clutching her faded purple robe around her. “You never said you bagged the marquis, flower.”
Eleanor couldn’t tell if Iris’s tone was an accusation or not. “I didn’t know who he was,” she sighed as she toed aside some empty bottles. “And I didn’tbag him.He’s probably just bored and toying with me or something.”
Eleanor dressed in the muted steel dress that Madam Grace had issued her with when she’d first come to the pleasure house. It was still revealing, but unlike the shared dresses, it didn’t have such a long slit up her leg, nor did it have cut-out panels on her waist. It was practically a modest dress and therefore the warmest.
Eleanor turned her back to Iris, who wasstillhovering in her doorway, to strap her smallest dagger into her homemade thigh sheath. It resembled a knife more than the dagger she kept under her pillow, but the dress clung to her body and the outline of a dagger would be obvious.
The narrow blade was only a few inches long, but it’d serve her well if someone got too close for comfort or she needed to apply pressure in the correct points. It wouldn’t take much to slit a throat or two if necessary. A quick flick of her wrist and she’d get herself out of a difficult situation. The tricky part was hiding the body afterwards; she’d left a fair few of them in backstreets. No one batted an eyelid at a corpse in the Barrow, especially a corpse that was no longer a nuisance for the city guards. City guards seldom patrolled the poorer parts of Breninsol, and blessedly, no one ever thought a woman could kill a man.
Idiots, the lot of them.
“If that’s what he wants, I wouldn’t mind beingtoyed with,” Iris said, waggling her dark brows and flipping her dishevelled hair over her shoulder.
“Iris,” Eleanor groaned, pushing past her as she went to the shared bathing room, “it’s not like that.”
“Oh, come on,” Iris continued as she trailed behind. “Admit it. He’s delicious to look at.”
Eleanor didn’t listen to the murmuring from the others who were poking their heads out of their rooms and washed her face in the cold water.
“I’m not blind. Of course he’s handsome.”
Eleanor averted her eyes from her reflection and ran a broken comb through her tangled waves.
“When you become a marchioness, remember us here will you…yourLadyship?” Iris said, picking up her muted purple robe in a shaky curtsey while also flashing her naked self to Eleanor.
Eleanor scoffed. “Yes, a prostitute becomes one of the most influential and richest ladies in the land. I can see it now, and if that’s how you curtsey, you’re more likely tobaga lord sooner than me.”
“Who’s bagging the marquis?” Lucy yawned, running her hands through her tangled mess of hair.
“Oh, for the love of—” Eleanor muttered under her breath as she pushed past them both.
She paid no attention to the cackling coming from the two of them and the unhappy looks from the others, who’d decided that the hallway was now safe for them to emerge in various states of dishevelled undress.
Eleanor stifled a yawn as she wrapped her cloak around her, hating that she couldn’t wear her dark one that was securely hidden, and braced herself for the cold. It annoyed her even more that he could have left her in bed instead of dragging her out in this weather. A cruel reminder that her life wasn’t truly her own.
Her empty stomach sunk as she got closer to the waiting night-blue and silver carriage, seeing the man sitting inside.Him.The bastard.Even from the street, Eleanor could see he was wearing the most ridiculously wide-brimmed feathered hat she’d ever seen. Fury fuelled her as she stalked up to the carriage door being held open by a nondescript manservant.
“You!” she accused the pretentious man sitting within.
“Me,” he replied with more satisfaction than he should have. “Morning, darling,” he continued, giving her that maddening little smirk of his, and ignoring her annoyance.
“Don’t youdarling, me!” she hissed. “What areyoudoing here?”
