Willful Depravity

by Ingrid Hahn

  His sin? The duke had discovered him not once, but twice, in the arms of large women, and had drawn the correct conclusion about his son’s preferences. “I couldn’t be more disgusted if you let some limp wrist bugger you,” he’d said.

  Giles had been sent away for a few days. His father had left the creature in the field, forbidding any of the grooms or stablemen from disturbing the carcass. When Giles returned, he’d found Icarus half-buried in mud and swarming with maggots.

  The duke would never stop trying to control him. But Giles would never be under his father’s control again. The duke had already cost Giles too dearly. Icarus had been the last horse Giles had allowed himself to care for, instead electing to lose himself in bringing color and shape to life on canvas. His father had taken that from him—the living being he’d loved, trained, ridden, day in and day out.

  “You’ll never stop until what?” Giles struggled to breathe. “You’ve brought me to heel?”

  “You’re a disgrace. My child. My son. My legacy. And I can’t stand to look at you. As hateful as it is to me, I am your father. Therefore, you’ll do what I want you to do. You’ll be what I want you to be.”

  “I’ll never submit to you.”

  “Easy words.” Silverlund’s voice was characteristically cold. “I can make it difficult for you to follow them. More difficult than you can imagine.”

  “Do your worst.” Giles remained hard. The rain began to pelt harder, and a gust of wind rattled the windowpanes in the castle walls behind them. “I’ve never been what you want. I never will be, no matter what you do.”

  …

  In the sitting room, Patience rested by the fire. Alone.

  The room seemed too large. Everything and everyone she knew and loved seemed so very far away. The castle had become a foreign, leering place. The walls were the same. But the pleasure palace was gone. In its place, a prison loomed.

  She shook with the weight of shame squeezing her lungs. Her hair hung in curling locks, droplets suspended from the ends. She pulled the rug more tightly around her, not in the least chilled, but needing to retreat to the safety of the binding.

  How could it have come to this? Her mind spun. Her choice to come here with the marquess seemed so foolish. In paralyzing fear, her bones became like jelly.

  The Duke of Silverlund appeared in the doorway and stalked into the room. Breath vanished from Patience’s lungs. He looked the type who would thrash a child’s backside to bleeding before the poor wee thing knew better than to sample rocks from the garden.

  “The dairy maid.” He looked her over, his bold gaze full of judgment. He made no secret of his intense dislike for what he saw. “How fitting.”

  This man was a cut above the rest of his kind. A bladed jaw. Pure white at the temples, while merely streaking the rest of the dark hair. A raw intensity under carefully maintained control that might have rivaled his son’s.

  But unlike Giles, Silverlund wore an air of ruthlessness. As if he’d been born with the brutal power to hurt people under his control…and he enjoyed it. Without a conscience to keep him in check.

  A duke, too. In the ordinary way of the world, a person like herself would never have come within ten feet of a person of such towering status.

  Funny. Where she and Giles felt so evenly matched—as equal in the turns of their minds as in the pursuit of pleasure—the duke had the look of a man who’d see her low birth as a character flaw. Something unforgivable. Something that tainted her.

  The two manservants hung back, flanking the doorway, their expressions twins of brutality and vigilance. One was ruddy, with a flat nose, and a face heavily scarred with pockmarks. The second had a deep dimple in his fleshy chin and small eyes. If the duke had sought to hire henchmen with fearsome looks, he couldn’t have selected much better.

  The boards underfoot wailed and moaned at each slow tread. Silverlund stopped before Patience, lip curled with disgust. “You foul thing.”

  She hung her head at the duke’s words, staring at the polished toes of his boots, unable to stop trembling. Her lips were quickly becoming chapped from licking them. Her mouth was dry, but it seemed all too possible she might retch if she tried to wet her tongue with a drop of wine.

  What would Giles do? Patience needed his strength. Come to think on it, where was the marquess?

  With every last ounce of strength, she leveled her gaze at the duke. “Leave me alone, please, Your Grace.”

  Please, Your Grace? Lord save her from the manners of polite Society. How could she have sputtered nonsense about goat fucking so effortlessly to the girls at the ball, then find years of training locking her tongue with the duke?

  Silverlund wasn’t as large a man as Giles. But he was big. In the rank cruelty of his hard features were echoes of his son. It wasn’t much. The line of the brow, the set of the eyes, a flickering movement in the mouth. Sometimes it was there, and sometimes it wasn’t. It was, however, enough for a crackling layer of ice to form over her heart every time a glimpse showed through.

  “I think it’s best if you leave before daybreak. There is a carriage being made ready for you as we speak.” He held up a hand. “Don’t worry. Not a thing will be said about your true identity. So long as you leave within the hour. But don’t think I won’t be watching.”

  All she had to do was leave? As far as threats went, it wasn’t so very dire. On the surface, that was. It was something she could ill afford to take casually. If news of her tryst ever found its way back to her parents, it would kill them.

  Giles appeared in the doorway, his face smudged with soot. His jaw set and his eyes narrowed. The tension in the room could have brought the castle crumbling down around them. “Don’t you dare speak to her.”

  “The fat whore who was blinded by lust and allowed herself to be lured to the den of a snake?” The duke sneered at Patience. “Believe me, I wouldn’t debase myself if it weren’t absolutely necessary.”

  Both of the duke’s henchmen had to hold a flailing marquess back from attacking his own father. “Don’t you dare speak to the woman who’s going to be my wife in such a manner.”

  Patience started, heart leaping at the idea, as the duke drew back in what was assuredly a rare display of surprise. Her hand flew to her throat. She and Silverlund spoke identical words at nearly the same time and with the exact same inflection. “What did you say?”

  Ashcroft’s chest heaved. Triumph lit his eyes. “I said, she’s going to be my wife.”

  Patience came to her feet with as much dignity as she could muster in the face of an overwhelming onslaught of anger. “I think you’ll find that you’ve forgotten something, my lord.”

  He knit his brows and frowned at her. “What’s that?”

  “Asking me.” He opened his mouth, but she held up a hand to silence him. If she heard the words from his lips—will you marry me—she might not be strong enough to say no. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how much she wanted that very thing. Not to be a wife, but his wife. Even under the wrong circumstances, it was almost too tempting to resist.

  Almost. He’d said it to spite his father. And she would never be a bride of spite. “Don’t bother. The answer is no. I won’t be made a pawn in your games, and I won’t be taken to wife until it’s for proper reasons.”

  What she meant by proper…well, it was the best she could do without revealing too much. That is, without exposing that—without irony and without apology for being tenderhearted and sentimental—she intended to marry for love.

  The duke snapped at her. “You stupid, stupid woman. You should be grateful for any man’s attention.”

  Patience could have drowned in the onslaught of ire. She tugged the gold band off her finger, slapped it upon the mantelpiece, and spoke between clenched teeth. “I will be grateful when it suits me to be grateful. Not a moment before.” She let sarcasm infuse her words with the subtlety of a jar of honey in a thimbleful of tea. “Even the likes of me won’t be made a pawn in this war bet
ween you.”

  Giles’s eyes darted between where she’d placed the ring and her. He whitened.

  With a smirk, the duke clasped his hands behind his back and rolled his weight on his heels. His gaze never left her as he addressed his son. “I’m almost sorry she won’t have you, you worthless whelp. She’s clearly far more clever than you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Giles spent the next hour standing wordlessly before the smoldering pile of what had been his paintings. In his years abroad, he’d spent time in graveyards, among tombstones and carved remembrances. They were usually beautiful and peaceful, and an afternoon with the dead had given him time to be alone and, well, not be alone.

  Nothing had made him think of death with as much visceral resonance as standing there in the courtyard, in the damp darkness, with so much of himself at his feet…destroyed.

  Dawn was a dirty gray smudge on the eastern horizon when Giles returned to the castle’s interior. It took fewer than five minutes for him to realize that something was wrong.

  Very wrong.

  Telling himself he had to be mistaken, he went to the room they shared. “Miss Em—Mrs. Warrington?”

  No voice answered.

  If she wasn’t there… He returned to the old solar that he’d turned into a temporary studio. Empty. A sense of foreboding permeated his senses. But he was still agitated from the night’s events. Surely his suspicion had to be in error.

  Leaving the room, Giles caught sight of a maid at the other end of the corridor scuttling away, no doubt hoping she wasn’t seen.

  “You there. Wait a moment. I’m looking for my—” The word caught in his throat and he swallowed. He’d been a monumental ass trying to force Miss Emery’s hand in marriage. If he’d witnessed another man do what he’d done, he’d have had some choice words for the miserable fellow. “I’m looking for Mrs. Warrington.”

  The girl stopped and turned, trepidation on her features. “Mrs. Warrington left, sir.”

  The maid’s words ringing in his ears, Giles stormed through the narrow spaces and uneven corridors of the old part of the building until he found the duke and burst in. His sire had taken one of the family rooms as opposed to the guest chambers, and was at the window with his hands clasped behind his back.

  The tables between them, so to speak, had turned. More like the tables had been thrown out the fucking window, but that didn’t have the same ring to it, did it?

  Giles stalked into the room. Though he bore no marks on his body, the last few hours had flogged his equilibrium. A hundred lashes had torn away the protective layers governing his control. The wounds inside wept—watery and bloody and bruised.

  That would not stop him. He’d already lost his paintings. He wouldn’t lose Miss Emery, too. “Where is she?”

  Not moving his hands, Silverlund turned his body slightly, brows lifting. “Your whore?”

  The force of Giles’s rage could have snapped his bones as if they were no more than twigs.

  That’s what the duke wanted. That’s what the man lived for. Thwarting his son and seeing Giles suffer. It was the duke’s daily bread.

  “What did you do?”

  “Really, you don’t think I’d sully myself with humiliating her now, do you?” The duke used the same tone as when he’d asked his wife why she had to leave to attend her cousin’s wife in her confinement. At the time he’d said that since “that old cow” was about to have her eighth baby, she should know what she was about by now, and as his duchess, Her Grace should stay close and attend his pleasure. Because she owed it to him, or some such.

  Giles recalled the hurt on his mother’s face with startling clarity. Helping women through childbearing was something she took very seriously. The duke had dismissed it out of hand.

  “Now, Your Grace? No. Later, if it suits your purposes, certainly.”

  “You and I do think alike, don’t we, my son?” The duke grimaced. “I, for one, don’t much care for the position you’ve put me in.”

  “If you blame me for your troubles, that’s your concern. I won’t be made to shoulder any responsibility for what you choose to do.”

  The old man’s face darkened. Behind him, the rain began pattering harder on the window glazing. “Never responsible for anything, are you, Ashcroft? Never your fault. Never your concern.”

  “For myself, certainly. But for you?” He snorted. “Never.”

  “If it weren’t for your depravity, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Tell me what you did.” Giles strained to stop himself from patricide. His soul already bore too many stains. His father wasn’t worth another.

  The duke waved a careless hand. “Sent her awa— Where are you going?” His voice went sharp. “I haven’t dismissed you, you whelp.”

  Giles paid no mind. He’d already turned his back to the duke. Nothing short of the divine metamorphosing Giles into a marionette and manipulating his strings would induce him to turn back.

  …

  The rain washed away the cold sweat from Giles’s brow as he stalked toward the stables. He needed a horse. The dark sky gave the morning light a flat quality. The storm beat down with unrelenting ferocity. The path cutting through from the kitchens to the stable yards had been worn by centuries of servants using it as a short cut. It was not paved with the smooth stones of the courtyard, nor lined with pebbles of the garden paths, and had already turned to muck. His boots were a disgrace.

  Uncharacteristically, he cared not a whit. Getting back to her was the only thing that mattered. There had been mornings in Venice or Padua that he hadn’t been able to paint fast enough. The beauty of the light falling on that church or over that dusty little road or hitting the bridge over a watery street made him dizzy.

  He wanted her more than all the light, all the beauty in the world. Because it all existed in her.

  In the wake of the fire, though, merely going to the stables took an unusual act of will. The scent of the smoke clung to his skin. The memory of seeing his work devoured by flames replayed again and again in his mind.

  It’d been years since going for his mount had affected him so strongly. Last night had dredged up those old memories of Icarus. He’d been a good horse.

  Giles tilted his face down out of the wet onslaught. The duke had no right to affect him like this. He could do anything. Try anything. Say anything. As long as Giles could paint and fuck, the duke would have no power over him.

  In the stables, warm from the carefully tended lamps and the blanketed animals, Giles went to the tack room. Most of the hands kept clear. When one brave lad, all lanky limbs and terror-filled brown eyes, stepped forward with an offer to help, Giles answered the boy’s bravery in softly reassuring tones. “I thank you, but this time, I’d prefer to tend to the task myself.”

  Which he hadn’t attempted in years.

  Focusing on what he must do to see each detail done correctly, beginning with brushing the coat, he moved slowly and deliberately. Each stroke mattered. Surprisingly, being near the horse brought a measure of calm, even as his muscles tensed with anticipation to jump on without a saddle and ride out, weather be damned. He wanted to be with her. Not break his neck en route and leave her alone for the rest of her life.

  Giles walked the saddled beast into the yard, adjusted the girth, and slung himself up in one smooth movement. No sooner was he up than he turned the horse and urged it as fast as he dared, breaking into speed matched only by the desperate beat of his heart.

  If he cut through the wilderness, he hoped to get ahead of Miss Emery’s carriage.

  The horse’s hooves pounded upon the earth. Somewhere between the stables and entering the woods, Giles and his horse had become a unified pair. They jumped a fallen tree, sailing over the obstacle in one smooth movement, and Giles ducked just in time to avoid taking a twisting branch to the jaw. Another obstacle came into view. Giles’s body remembered riding as if he’d done nothing else all the days of his life and needed no conscious thought to m
ake himself ready for the next jump.

  But something happened just before they reached the next hurdle. The beast lost its footing. In an instant, they were flying together through the air. This time however, there was no perfect control. Only perfect chaos. They were helpless. Utterly at the mercy of their trajectory.

  The horse screamed.

  Giles rattled as he fell to the ground, teeth chattering against each other as he rolled, knocking against stones and forest detritus. His body smashed against a tree trunk, a tangle of limbs. The world narrowed on the reverberating crack of human bone. An onslaught of hellfire shot through his arm.

  The horse righted itself. With an insulted whinny, it vanished with a trot into the thick forest, mud stuck with leaves and clumps of earth staining its muscular side.

  Giles was alone. Alone with rain falling on his face and frigid damp permeating the layers of clothing all the way to his skin. When he coughed, white mist formed in front of his mouth with the force of the exhalation. Cold mud soaked his clothing.

  There was nothing left in him to care.

  A thousand if-onlys pierced the inside of Giles’s skull, each tipped with a poisoned arrow. If only he’d kept in practice after Icarus’s murder. If only he hadn’t been riding so recklessly. If only it hadn’t been raining. If only he’d slowed the smallest amount before attempting the jump. If only the duke hadn’t come. If only he could go back a few minutes and try again, knowing what he knew now.

  Trying to move under the cruel mistress of fresh pain, Giles winced and inhaled a sharp breath. He turned his head toward the offending appendage. His arm throbbed, limp as it rested at an unnatural angle, splayed out on the ground beside him. His left arm.

  There was something worse. Something more terrifying even than the tender claws of death caressing the vulnerable part of his throat: Giles couldn’t move his fingers.