Page 22 of Til Death Duke Us Part
“What did you do? To the rings?” She was no longer bewildered by his glamour show. She was no longer under immediate threat of being tarred and feathered by an angry mob. And free of those constraints, her brain could actually work. “You said you fixed them, but that’s not possible. Unless…” She couldn’t breathe. The air had become molasses. “What did you do? The rings feel…” Dull. Lifeless. Empty. “Dead.” Dread sat heavy in her belly, and she pulled the ring off her finger. Not a trace of memory left in her. No… He couldn’t have.
“Oh, that. I visited a potions mistress this morning. She gave me a brew to wipe the metal clean. Now we can use them, and I can sell them, and?—”
“You did what?” She almost knocked him over with the force of her scream.
He had the good sense to look a bit worried.
She grabbed his hand and ripped the matching ring from his finger. She cradled both in her hands, tears blurring the dusty road around them. “How could you?”
“Persephone—”
“You killed them. You killed their love.”
“That’s a bit?—”
“Don’t talk to me,” she snarled.
And thank the heavens he listened to her. She didn’t want to hear his nonsense. She was too busy crying.
6
VICTOR AND FRANKENSTEIN
“Persephone, I’ve apologized ten times. Ten. That’s excessive.”
She pretended she didn’t hear him, sitting prim and proper, shoulders back and spine straight.
Victor shouldn’t care that he’d upset her so badly. And he didn’t. Truly he didn’t. But she was making the hours interminable! They would roll by as smoothly as the landscape if she was insulting him.
But she wasn’t. And he felt grumpy about it.
“You’ve not said a single word for five hours. Five. I’m damned bored. Forgive me and speak to me already.”
She sniffed and looked in the opposite direction.
“I cannot take this any longer.” He meant it, too. Five hours was much too long for her to go without calling him names. And he’d determined sometime yesterday, they would be lovers during this absurd little trip. Rings be damned. Whatever force she thought they’d held over them yesterday, he didn’t believe it. That had been plain lust, nothing more, nothing less.
And the little interlude had only whetted his appetite for her.
But he couldn’t seduce her if she wasn’t talking to him. “I apologized for the rings. I didn’t know you’d take it so hard. I thought you’d think me clever.”
Another sniff.
“I didn’t even know I was ruining them.”
“Them?” The word sailed out of her like a bat out of a cave at sunset—surprising and not in a good way. “By them, Morington, you mean the rings. But I mean the people who wore them while living.” Finally, she turned to him, the rage from five hours earlier still lived in her face.
“They’d taken the rings off.” He shrugged. “You say that means they were estranged.”
“But their memories were there! The memory of their emotions and love and frustration and passion!” She held the rings up on a single flat palm. Her bottom lip trembled.
“Don’t you dare cry.”
“Now, even if they wished to make up in the afterlife, they will not be able to.” The last word was a wail.
“I didn’t take you for a romantic,” he grumbled.
She cried, sitting as upright as a human could get, her chin lifted to the heavens and her hair streaming down her back.
