Page 15 of Kill the Beast
Lyssa flushed with pleasure, and was immediately angry with herself for it. She snatched the knife away from his throat and sheathed it. “A man like you should be pissing yourself by now.”
“My sincerest apologies for disappointing you. Ah, here we are,” he said, turning a key in the gate’s lock with a clink and pushing it open. “I really should label those, shouldn’t I?”
The road ended in a circular drive, at the center of which was a dried-up fountain filled with dead leaves. Beyond it, Alderic’s manor loomed dark and dismal. Lyssa imagined that carriages had once dropped off well-dressed couples here for elegant dinner parties, but now the windows of the enormous house were thick with cobwebs and overgrown ivy, and the carriage house was boarded up.
“Please excuse the sad state of disrepair,” Alderic told her, as if she were some cultured lady who might take offense to the condition of his property instead of a bounty hunter with a pistol at her hip and knives in her boots. “This place was empty for generations before I took up residence—an old ancestral home my family had all but forgotten about, due to its rather lackluster location. Aside from the… fortifications… I have made little effort to spruce things up.”
“Building the outer walls does seem like more of a pressing concern than cleaning the cobwebs,” she agreed.
“It was my only concern.”
Lyssa didn’t blame him. She wouldn’t have wanted to live out in these woods, knowing the Beast was nearby, without some measure of protection, either. If anything, a fortress with a spiked rampart surrounded by murder-trees wasn’t secure enough for her liking.
“Anyway, I’ll be quite relieved to get out of this godsforsaken place once and for all.” He struggled for a moment with the front door, at last holding it open for Lyssa with a sweep of his arm. She sailed past him, into the darkness of the foyer, and was just tilting her head back to look at the expensive chandelier when it exploded with light. Lyssa gasped and flung her arms up to cover her eyes, Brandy barking wildly.
“It’s best not to lookdirectlyat it,” Alderic said, as if she had done it on purpose.
“How was I supposed to know it was electric?” Lyssa shouted, blinking away the spots in her eyes. “The whole fucking town only has one gas lamp!”
“Right. My apologies. Sometimes I forget about these little indulgences I allowed myself whilst making this place inhabitable. I’ve become so used to them.” He motioned for her to follow him. “Come on, then. The claw is in the parlor.”
“You keep it in the parlor?” She had imagined a more secure location, like that dungeon he’d mentioned. But he’d said the map of the Beast’s location was in the parlor, too, so maybe he kept them together, in some sort of lockbox or safe.
Alderic strode toward the first closed door in a hallway full of them, flinging it open with a loud thud, as if there was something blocking the entrance.
There was. In fact, the entire room was crammed so full of things that it would take months to paw through it all. Suddenly, keeping the claw in the parlor made perfect sense, like stowing a needle in a stack of hay.
Lyssa peered through the doorway at the mounds of clutter. “I thought you said you haven’t been here for very long.”
“I did,” he said, sounding confused by the question.
She rolled her eyes. These rich assholes were all the same—too much money and absolutely no self-restraint. Although, judging by the look of things, Alderic straddled the line between “avid collector with funds” and something more concerning.
Lyssa commanded Brandy to stay in the hall lest he knock anything over, but he followed her inside anyway as she picked her way carefully down the narrow strip of bare floor. Alderic, on the other hand, maneuvered through the space as nimbly as a cat, as if he knew exactly where to step to keep from causing an avalanche.
There were lacquered chests and gilded clocks shoved in between the opulent furniture, carved wooden side tables spilling over with jewelry boxes and antique books, crates of golden trinkets crusted with gemstones. There was also an abundance of the sort of useless artifacts bored upper-class women spent theirdays creating—embroidered slippers and decorated tobacco jars, beaded pillows and cross-stitched wall tapestries bearing sayings like “No Hands Should Be Idle.”
“Are you married?” Lyssa asked as Alderic waded farther into the room, stepping over a stack of newspapers yellowed with age. “Or…wereyou, at some point?” she added with a grimace, thinking of the despair on his face when she’d asked why he wanted to kill the Beast.
But he snorted, as if the question was ridiculous. “No. Why?” He looked over his shoulder at her, and she held up a floppy hat with absurdly large crocheted flowers affixed to the brim.
“Oh, that,” he said. “That was just something to pass the time.”
“You made this?”
“I did,” he said, with a touch of embarrassment. “We can’t all be gifted bladesmiths, you know. Come help me with this.” She climbed over a dusty divan to where he was standing beside a chest of drawers.
“Is it in there?”
“In the bottom drawer. But there are too many things piled up against it, I can’t open it. Can you tilt it back?”
Lyssa did as he asked, straining against the unexpected weight as the contents shifted inside the drawers with a series of dull thuds. “What do you keep in here?” she groaned. “Rocks?”
“Gold bars,” he replied, kneeling out of her line of sight for a moment before getting to his feet with a velvet bag clutched in his hand.
Lyssa’s heart pounded at the sight of it. She set down the chest of drawers with a grunt and wiped her hands on her pants. “Is that it?” she asked, her voice hushed.
“Yes.”
