Page 132 of You Only Love Twice
One hand was outflung, his fingers slackened as if he'd been trying to reach for something.
There was a gun on the floor, barely three feet from his outstretched arm.
And worse.
Adele would recognize the gold signet ring on his finger anywhere.
"Malloryn," she gasped, shoving the door open wide enough to allow her skirts.
Her husband lay unmoving, a spreading pool of darkened blood puddling beneath his chest. For a second she thought him dead, but the faint wheeze of air through his chest revealed life—even if the sound of it seemed like a steam engine on its last gasps.
Adele rushed to her fallen husband's side, rolling him onto his side.
He wasn't moving.
Was barely breathing at all. Blood ruined his trousers, both knees a sticky and wet mess. Bruises mottled the side of his face, and his chest—
He'd been shot at least four or five times.
Adele took stock. This hadn't been an altercation between a blue blood and his mistress. There was no way the baroness had managed to inflict this much damage upon him. Someone else had done this.
"Is he dead?" Hattie whispered from her vantage point in the doorway.
Adele found the flickering pulse in his throat. Blue bloods were insanely difficult to kill, but the blood.... Everywhere.
"You've barely been married a handful of days, and you might already be a widow."
Adele leaned over him. With his eyelashes closed over those dangerously piercing eyes, and his lips faintly parted, Malloryn looked almost peaceful. Nothing like the broodingly intense duke who'd told her the night of their wedding she'd be keeping a cold married bed for the rest of her life.
"Do as you will, Adele. I don't give a damn. As long as you don't do it near me."
"You'll inherit enough to live your own life, Adele," Hattie said in a wondering voice. "Mother and Father shall never be able to touch you again, and you won't have to deal withhimever again."
"Hattie," she admonished.
She didn't want her husband dead. She never had.
He wasn't... cruel.
Merely indifferent.
He hates you, a little voice whispered.
But he'd saved her from a life of penniless dependence upon her mother and father, who'd been pushing her to make an alliance with lords she hated—and couldn't trust. Malloryn didn'thaveto marry her, after all.
She owed him.
And he needed blood.
Badly.
"Shut the door," she said firmly as she flipped open Malloryn's waistcoat, searching in his pocket for the small bloodletting kit every blue blood lord carried about his person.
Hattie gasped. "You're not going to bleed yourself! Adele, he's unconscious and injured! You know the rules."
Every thrall worth her brass knew the rules.
Blue bloods were dangerous in an unconscious or injured state. During their lessons in etiquette, pianoforte, flesh rights, blood rights, and dancing, their instructor had told both girls what to do in the event they gained a happy thrall contract.
