by Ingrid Hahn
“Listen carefully, Roland. You’re right about him, of course. But what you speak of—killing him, willfully and knowingly taking the life of another—it changes a person. You’ll only burden the rest of your days, and for what? It will accomplish nothing. If he is gone, there will be another man to take his place. And another and another.”
“They must be stopped.”
“Not that way.”
His gaze hardened. “I’ve already made my decision.”
“You might feel you aren’t doing enough. Wait until I’ve seen this through. That will change. Promise me you will wait at least a fortnight after it’s finished before you act.”
“No.”
“Yes. A fortnight will provide you the necessary distance to cool these hot impulses. They’re not you, Roland. You’re not rash, you’re not vengeful. Don’t lose yourself to this. It’s never worth it.”
“Not rash? Not vengeful?” He came so close, nothing but the width of a few strands of hair could have fit between them. “Perhaps not now. But my restraint only goes so far.”
He put his hands against the wall, one on either side of her.
Sidonie shivered, ready at once to lose herself to the sweet oblivion of a purely physical existence. Her body responded, priming her for him.
“Don’t think you’re not mine, Sidonie. You are. You push me to my breaking point. I want you. I want to do things to you for my own selfish pleasure.” Their mouths were close. Dangerously close.
She licked her lips.
He all but outright growled, the rumble of his voice like rain to the parched soil of her soul. “I want to work myself between your legs until I bring you a taste of your own salvation.”
Her need sharpened to a tight point. If only he would run his hands down her body, over her breasts, across her belly. Down. Down to that place created for their bodies to join.
“But I won’t.” He drew back.
She blinked, too shocked to even scream or rail against the injustice. It was like the gates of heaven had opened only to crash closed again when she took her first step. “But—”
“Go. Up. Now.”
“Roland, please. I want you. And you want me. Why—”
“Because my duty to you runs far too deep.”
“Duty? What duty?” She was near frantic. “What are you talking about, you have no duty to me.”
“Yes, Sidonie, I do. Don’t you see? I’m a protector, just as you said. I fled from duty once. Never again. You are my duty now. If this is your path, then by God, any man who tries to stop you will have to come through me first.”
Chapter 18
Something powerful and frightening had been called out in Roland. It was new, but it was also a long time coming. Maybe it was that moment in the crypt when he’d been about to snap. Maybe it was before that, when he’d seen into the face of the inquisitor’s man and had been thrashed with the reality of what it was Sidonie had put herself up against.
Or perhaps it had been long before that—the first moment in the Bramville tower when he’d found her in his arms.
His veins might have been empty of d’Ambroisin blood, but he’d been born to protect. And protect he would.
They came up in an empty alleyway behind a grand mansion in a fine neighborhood. Sidonie was trying to climb the stones next to the gate that led into a courtyard.
Roland caught Sidonie’s shoulder and pulled her back. “No. We can’t.”
She glanced over her shoulder to all but arrest him with a crippling look. They hadn’t spoken since they’d crawled out of the tunneling crypt. “It’s all right.”
“What if there is someone—”
“There’s nobody and we must.” She hesitated long enough to take a quick measure of the sky, same as she had half a dozen times already.
It clicked in his mind what she’d been doing: She was keeping track of time. The truth of the situation ground into his bones. For better or for worse, it would all come to a head tonight. She didn’t know the hows or whys. They mattered not. Tonight it would begin. Tonight it would end.
She stood on her toes to reach to the top of the stone wall next to the gate, felt around a moment, and grabbed hold of something. With brows raised, she held up a key. “There, you see?”
The lock clicked and the metal creaked when she pushed upon the bars.
He caught her. “It’s still not too late.”
She slipped from his hold. “You claim to understand duty, yet you don’t accept the duty I have assumed.” She stepped through.
Roland didn’t hesitate. Where she went, he must follow.
They entered the secluded hush of a private world. What once must have been a gracious courtyard suitable for entertaining a king was now in ruin. Weeds and grasses, browned and wilted in the cold of winter, were taking over the cracked, uneven stones. Vines grew over the wall and circled up the fountain nymph’s marble curves, cutting into her exposed stone throat.
Up a few shallow steps to a spanning terrace were grand doors to the house. Above them flanked by carved scrolls was a weathered shield showing an elaborate C twined with stylized willow branches. C for Cordumont. “This is your father’s house.”
Sidonie crossed without sparing a single glance for her surroundings, going for a side door for servants’ use instead of the family entrance. When her skirts caught on a thorny bramble, she tugged herself free, shaking the skeletal branches of a dead rose bush.
“Why are we here?” The unbidden images of the beds inside came so strong as to almost make his steps falter. He’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t . . . and yet returned to this place again and again. How right he’d been about his resistance running thin.
“It’s a safe place. He never comes here anymore. Hasn’t for years.” She shook the door with a loud rattle, features pinching in dismay when nothing happened.
He risked putting a hand on her shoulder. “Enough of this. Let’s go. Someone could be waiting for you inside.”
“Nobody is inside.”
“There’s no caretaker?”
Her mouth quirked at the sides into the picture of amusement. “Given what you see, do you really suppose there could be?”
“Is this what you thought before I caught you prowling Bramville? That the place was deserted?”
“On the contrary. In that case, I was aware of the château’s occupants. If not in fact, then in potential. And I knew what meeting with one of occupants in particular would cost me.” Her expression remained straightforward, as if she were observing nothing more important than the color of the sky or the rise and fall of a nervous bird’s chest.
Roland went cold, his inner turmoil a swirling murk of unresolved feeling. Regret. Guilt. Resentment.
She counted their chance meeting as something that had cost her. Which meant he was failing her. And how he had. So many times.
If he continued to go unchecked, he’d find himself pinning her warm and willing body against the wall and showing her the full measure of what he could have been in her life. He’d demolish any notion their meeting might have been a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was the hands of fate twining the threads of their lives back together.
She cast him a wary glance. “I didn’t mean that as it sounded. I—”
“I’m sure you did not.”
“Listen, Roland, I beg you. Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to for—” The hair on the nape of his neck stood and he was flooded with the sensation of being watched. Roland flung himself around, dagger pulled, arms wide to protect Sidonie.
A black cat stopped mid-stride on the walk, the creature’s eyes pinning him to the ground. It looked quite like the one that made its home on the grounds of the château. A bit too much like . . .
Impossible. There had to be hundreds of such black cats with yellow almond eyes the whole of France over. They couldn’t be one and the same.
Sidonie brushed him out of the way. “What are you doing here?”
The cat howled a meow, quite a sound for such a slight creature.
Sidonie glanced toward the gate by which they’d come into the courtyard as if expecting something, sending all Roland’s defenses into high alert.
There was a sharp downdraft and rain began trickling from the sky—first only a few heavy drops. More threatened to follow.
“Come.” She tugged his arm, sounding for all the world like a woman trying to keep an edge from her voice. “We need to go inside.”
The inside was dark and murky. A hush curled in every corner of the kitchen. But it was anything but peaceful. The silence seemed to be doing nothing so much as waiting for its moment to shatter.
Sidonie threw the wooden bar up and cracked the door just wide enough for the cat to trot inside. In the space of a few minutes, she’d exchanged her cloak for a thick wrap hanging from a peg and had a fire going in the hearth. From a set of narrow shelves she took a cask and a bundle covered in burlap. Setting the items on the table, she tossed the material aside to reveal a hunk of pale cheese and a cured sausage.
“It’s all right.” She applied a knife to the food and offered him slices. “They’re fresh. Before the—” Her gaze fell to the floor and a bitter twist came to the corners of her mouth. “Whenever I come to Paris, I always stay here.” She filled rough-hewn cups with wine from the cask.
“Come to Paris? Why would you have come to Paris?”
“This and that. Little things, mostly. It’s rather surprising what crops up in the world that needs attending.”
Roland drank down the wine, seeking the same fearlessness in words as gave him the strength to protect at all costs. He came to the bottom of the cup much the same as he’d been upon starting it.
The cat had taken a station adjacent the fire, alert and watchful as a sentinel. Sidonie caught him studying the creature and refilled his drinking vessel.
He poured most of the second helping of wine down before stopping to stare into the dark-red surface of what remained. Wine carried the secrets of rain and earth.
“And you’re quite certain you’re safe here?”
“I don’t know how he would know to look for me here.” She avoided his eye, sounding as if she hoped she portrayed more confidence than she felt.
~ ~ ~
When Sidonie tried to stand, flashes shot into her vision so strongly she almost collapsed to the floor.
But Roland was suddenly there, as if he’d been born part angel. He caught her by the waist and steadied her. He smelled of wine—such an ordinary detail born of physical closeness. Born of intimacy.
“You’re ill.”
She squeezed her eyes shut almost as hard as she dug her fingers into his arms to keep herself upright, hissing an inhalation between clenched teeth.
“And in pain.” A note of panic edged into his voice. “You’re—”
But when he tried to lead her out of the dim passage into the open space of the room where he might have settled her upon sheet-covered furniture, she held fast.
Seeming to understand, he went still.
She let the rush overtake her, giving herself over to nothing but receiving. Images blurred and flashed in her other sight. Snippets of whispers all but breathed directly into her ear, hot and urgent. The world slipped away, the only thing keeping her from falling into the swirling flux was the strength of Roland’s strong hands gripping her and the sweet, lingering scent of wine.
The girls again. Those two sad children, eyes huge, faces pale. Somber and serious. They stood under a gray sky on a damp Parisian street after a rain. Their fine clothes were self-consciously modest, as if they were of a well-to-do family making a show of not displaying their wealth.
The images changed in a swirl. Sidonie surrendered more deeply than she could have imagined possible. Language vanished and questions fell away as she stepped farther into the promise of the vision, that she might hear what needed to be heard.
One last powerful image superseded the strength and enormity of any she’d ever experienced.
She jerked her eyes open with a shuddering gasp.
She’d become tangled in Roland’s arms. Their bodies were close. Their lips closer. The dark cast of his eyes heated, sending glowing warmth into her belly . . . and lower. She reached to test the shadowy beginnings of his beard against the skin of her fingers.
His gaze penetrating her own, his hands closed around hers and he guided her arm back down. “You’re overwrought, Sidonie. This has been too much—” His brows sank. “What is it?”
“It’s the message.” Released from the grip of the vision, she grasped for breath, heart pounding, skin pulled tight in gooseflesh as her hair stood on end. “But I don’t know what it means.”
“You are certain?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“A moon. A silver moon . . . bathed in the purest light . . .” She fought to reconstruct the image. “It called to me, not with words, but like . . . like the shimmering light were a sea and I was to fling myself off the edge of the cliff and let it consume me whole.”
His eyes went wide with horror. “Your death.”
Chapter 19
Roland’s body was tense. Sidonie’d had a vision she was going to die.
It was more obvious than ever that his place was here. With her. By her side, protecting her. If there was anything he could do to alter her fate, he would. He could not allow her to die. Not for any reason.
Heedless of his internal resolution, Sidonie struggled away from him, their half-finished meals forgotten on the table. “Remain here. I’ll just be . . .”
Whatever she said was lost when she swept into the archway and out of the room.
With a sudden desperation that if he let her out of his sight, he’d never see her again, he ran after her. She picked up pace, but he caught her arm and forced her to turn. They were in the cave-like, unlit corridor of pure gray stone, mere steps from what might have once been a majestic salon. The windows beyond were covered but enough light passed through to define her features.
“Sidonie . . .”
She looked back at him, her neck so long and regal. The curve of her shoulder so graceful. “Maybe you were right. Maybe you should not have left Bramville.”
“What are you saying?”
“You can’t interfere with what will happen. Your place isn’t here, after all. How many times have you yourself said—”
“I belong here, Sidonie. I belong with you.”
“I’m not so certain . . .”
He was frustrated beyond reason and ran his fingers through his hair.
“What do you want me to do to prove it? Throw you up against a wall and bury my flesh into yours?” He was already hard. Ready.
He’d come all this way. Resisted so long.
But he was just a man. And she was what he wanted more than anything.
What she’d told him of her vision stripped him of what shabby resolve he’d tried so desperately to cling to.
It was lost.
He could no longer fight the strength of his desires. He was wholly passion. No sense. The risks of doing what he’d avoided for so long amounted to nothing against the risk of living the rest of his life never having made love to her.
All she had to do was say yes.
Her cheeks turned scarlet. Her lips parted.
There was no mistaking that hungry look in her eyes. She wanted it too.
“You’re going to have to say it, Sidonie.” He towered over her. All he would have to do was bend ever so sl
ightly and he could capture her lips.
“I’m living in the shadow of Death, Roland. It’s cold here.” Her voice was rough. She lowered her eyes. “There’s no time for . . .”
Cold? With this ungodly heat between them?
He put his arms out on either side of her, bracing his weight on the stone walls and trapping her near him. “Say it and I’ll show you how wrong you are.”
“I thought you said you’d only ever do it again if you were married.”
“And may God save my soul, for I am going to rejoice in our sin.”
“I haven’t said yes.”
“Say it.”
“Roland—”
“I don’t want this boundary between us any longer. I want to tear it down. Annihilate it. Make you forget everything except that you and I exist together. We’re linked, you and I. We were brought together that night in Bramville when I found you in my arms. Every moment since then has been leading to this—us, together, as we were always meant to be. Give in, Sidonie.”
“Roland—”
“What if this is our only chance?” He took the cap from her head and let the linen fall to the ground. “You want me. Stop denying it. Sidonie . . . if only you knew what you did to me.”
“You don’t need to say pretty things. I’m ready to give myself to you.”
“No giving, ma chère. You need to want me.”
“Yes, I want you. God help me, but I do.”
It was all he needed to hear.
With care he didn’t know he was capable of expressing with such fierce need pounding through his veins, he cupped her face. He tilted his head and his lips found hers. He brushed against them gently at first, inhaling the scent of her skin. Memorizing the feel of her.
He reached between their bodies and freed himself. “It shouldn’t be like this. Our first time should be in a bed, warm and safe and sanctified in the sacred bonds of marriage. United forever under God.”