Page 89 of Dukes Are Forever
"He's not going to be a problem for much longer. I was going to wait another week until this was all done, but with Devoncourt flaunting you right in front of me, the opportunity seemed too good to resist." Gripping her chin in one hand, he forced her head back, baring her throat. "Stop struggling, you cursed bitch."
Never.
She strained to see what he was doing.
Dragging his bleeding kit from inside his coat—the little case every blue blood carried to bleed their thralls—he slapped it on the desk and tugged it open. Steel gleamed beneath the gaslight, and Adele kicked furiously.
Not like this.
She'd escaped this life by marrying Malloryn.
Six months of freedom from the worry of being stalked by those like Corvus, who didn't give a damned whether she protested. A tear leaked from her eye as the razor edge of the flechette he held sliced across her vein, and hot blood splashed free.
The press of his body ground her against the desk, and then his dead fish mouth was locked around her throat, taking what did not belong to him. Adele raked her nails down his arms, but she might as well be wrestling with steel cables.
The kit.
Her hand flung out, reaching blindly as she gave a low, whimpering moan. Somehow her hand closed around one of his little knives.
Adele drove it into his eye.
Corvus screamed, rearing back from her with one hand clamped over the wound. Adele jerked away from him, but then his good eye locked on her, and she knew she was in trouble.
He lashed out with his blade, and the knife scored across her upper arm as she flailed backward, smashing into the desk. Slipping on the hem of her skirts, she went down, flat on her back, as Corvus advanced.
"I will kill you," he promised as he leaned over her.
And then there was something moving in the cathedral-like rafters.
A shadow opened dark wings above her, like a fallen angel plummeting from the heavens.
Adele thought she was seeing things, but as Corvus knelt to grab her, she realized it wasn't an angel.
It was Malloryn.
Malloryn.
He landed on the desk, boots slamming onto the timbers as Corvus's knife jerked against her shoulder in surprise. A single kick and Corvus's entire weight was flung back off her. Adele gasped, clutching at her bloodied throat as Malloryn went after him.
"Your Grace?" Byrnes appeared out of nowhere to help her to her feet. Behind him, Ingrid watched the fight with molten eyes.
"I'm fine." Adele dashed a hot tear from her eye, her hands shaking violently. There was blood all down the front of her pretty gown. On her hands. On her breasts.
Her blood.
"Allow me," Byrnes murmured, spitting on his fingers and then smearing his saliva quite liberally across the gash in her throat.
A disgusting gesture, but a kind one. The chemicals in his saliva would coagulate her blood and force the wound to heal.
"Here." Ingrid dragged her leather coat off and draped it around Adele's shoulders as Corvus's breath slammed out of him. "Don't watch."
"I want to."
The violence in the fight shocked her; she'd only ever seen Malloryn reclining in his library chair, or stalking the edges of a ballroom with watchful eyes. Even among the Company of Rogues, he was the one who gave the orders from the comfort of his safe house.
But Corvus was the one with the knife now.
It didn't seem to matter.
