The smell was unmistakable. Loamy and musty, but … this time mixed with an acrid char.
She was underground.
An acid wash of panic crawled down her flesh, biting like a thousand tiny insects. The fear anchored her in the moment, sent her heart pumping hard enough to wash out the vestiges of whatever venom swam within her blood.
If she didn’t give over to the terror and allow it to sweep her away, she could use the fear. Hone it to help her escape.
Testing her limbs, she found her feet free, but her hands were not. She swallowed another surge of panic, this one threatening to overwhelm her.
What she needed was information. Knowledge helped to combat fear.
What could she glean right away?
She lay on her side on the floor in a dim room. The only light filtered from somewhere behind her. The floor against her cheek was gritty with dirt or sand, but smooth and hard beneath. Her hands remained tied behind her back.
What did she remember?
She’d been reading by the fire at Elphinstone Croft.
Jean-Yves had rushed in, kicked something out the door, and slammed it shut.
“Someone is outside.” He’d pressed a pistol into her hand and then went to the bedroom where the rifle was kept. They’d sent Phoebe into the loft, gotten rid of the loft ladder, and then crouched in the bedroom with their guns.
“Who is out there?” Cecelia had whispered around the terror in her throat.
“I do not know. Lord Ramsay has gone after them.”
She’d felt safer, then. Surely Ramsay could take on the world. He was a mountain of a man with tireless reserves of fortitude. He was a soldier, a Scot, and a war hero.
She’d been so certain they were safe.
So how had she been captured? How did she end up beneath the earth?
Finding the ground untenable, Cecelia squirmed and maneuvered until she could roll to her knees. From there, she stood.
Oh God. This couldn’t be happening. She was underground. Beneath the earth. Trapped. Locked.
Again.
She fought a flare of breath-stealing panic, looking around for any clue that might help her. She found a source of light, a tiny window in the door of her prison. A tiny, lovely window.
The etched glass she recognized immediately. She wasn’t just beneath the ground; she was beneath her ground. Henrietta’s School for Cultured Young Ladies.
A sinister face appeared in the glass, and she jumped, letting out a cry of shock.
“She’s awake,” Winston called from the other side of the door.
“Thank you, Winston.”
With a cold wash of ice, Cecelia’s memory returned, flushing over her with absolute heart-rending betrayal.
She’d put her gun down at Elphinstone Croft. She’d let her enemy through the door. She’d been the architect of her own demise.
Because she’d trusted Genevieve Leveaux.
“Genny?” she whispered, unable to believe her own memories, even as they slammed back into her with bone-jarring force.
The woman had pounded on the door, begging to be let in. She’d cried out that she’d come to Scotland to warn Cecelia. That Lilly and the girls were in danger.
She’d sounded so frightened, so incredibly convincing, Cecelia had admitted her immediately.
And she and Jean-Yves had been ambushed.
“Genny.” Cecelia rushed to the door. “Genny let me out.”
“Hello there, honey.” The soft regret in Genny’s dark eyes conjured a little flame of hope in Cecelia’s middle. Perhaps Genny had been helpless in all this somehow, coerced by the Lord Chancellor to betray her. One couldn’t fault her for that.
“Genny? Please. Don’t keep me underground.” Cecelia fought sobs of hysteria threatening to overtake her. “Tell me everyone’s all right, that they’re alive.”
Ramsay would not have allowed her to be taken. Had he been overcome? Killed? Where was Phoebe? Jean-Yves?
She couldn’t imagine a world without them in it.
Genny tilted her head to the side, her ringlets flowing flaxen over her bare shoulder. “Honey, there are too many bodies to count now, all because of this.” She held up the codex. “I couldn’t tell you who survived and who didn’t.”
Cecelia leaned forward, pressing her forehead to the glass, fighting a dark anguish. “I know,” she sobbed. “Burn it. It’s brought nothing but pain.”
That pain welled within her. Deep and abiding. Was this how she ended? Was everyone she cared about hurt or … worse? Were they after Frank and Alexander next? She wanted to ask again, to insist, but was terrified of the answer. If she did not know, there was still hope.
And hope might be all she had left in the end.
“Step back, doll.” Keys rattled on the other side of the door as Genny unlocked her prison. “I’m coming in there with you.”
The kindle of hope flared to a bright glow, and Cecelia scurried out of the way.
The door opened. Winston and two other men preceded Genny into the room. Two of them carried crystal oil lanterns and set them on what used to be student desks before the explosion and subsequent chaos had decimated what Cecelia could now see had been a classroom.
Something else filtered into the room behind them. Something that extinguished any hope with astonishing immediacy.
The cries of children.
They echoed down the long hall, each of them breaking her heart. The calls and pleas of captive young girls locked beneath the earth as she was. Begging for mercy. To be released. To be fed.
This was her fault, Cecelia realized. Once she’d gone to Scotland, Henrietta’s had become the hellish prison Ramsay had initially suspected it was. The girls hadn’t been here when she’d taken custody of the property, but they’d been moved in when she’d fled.
There were no words for the horror of the din. For the memories they evoked in Cecelia. All the blood drained from her extremities and, had her stomach not been empty, she’d have heaved its contents onto the ashes at her feet.
“What have you done?” The demand escaped as a hoarse whisper of dismay. “What sort of nightmare has this place become? Did Henrietta know about this?”
Genny’s features arranged themselves into a smug, repulsive mask of disgust.
Cecelia stepped back, shocked at the first time the woman hadn’t appeared a stunning beauty.
“Henrietta Thistledown could dress this place in all the lace and silk she wanted, but at the end of the day the girls who worked in the casino were all still nothing but a line of pretty cunts. And she was the queen of us all.”
Cecelia flinched. “I’m sorry if she was cruel to you, Genny. But I never would have been. I would have made this place a haven, you have to believe me.”
“Oh honey, I believe you. I have nothin’ against you, personally,” Genny rushed to assure her. “You’re an absolute peach, I declare. I wish we could have truly been friends. Business partners, even.”
Perplexed, bemused, Cecelia glanced at the men fanned out to Genny’s right.
Winston, almost unrecognizable without his Georgian costume, was younger than Cecelia had first assumed.
Next to him stood a big, bald man with no neck to speak of and an extra layer of bulge around his muscles. To his right, a lovely-skinned Indian man with a long, bushy beard clasped his hands in front of him.
“Genny.” Cecelia felt a flare of a different sort as she read a sort of sinister anticipation in their eyes. “Genny what are they doing here? What is going on?”
“You should have married, Cecelia, after your tenure at de Chardonne.” Genny acted as if she’d never asked a question. “You should have nursed fat babies and settled down, then Henrietta wouldn’t have been so goddamned proud of you.”
Cecelia shook her head, wishing she understood. “What does my getting married have to do with anything?”
Genny’s expression darkened from unkind to truly demonic. “Do you realize I worked for that woman nea
rly twenty years?” she hissed. “She thought she was above us. That she could outsmart every person in this godforsaken empire, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t almost do it.” Genny crept closer, brandishing the codex. “I licked that woman’s boots for twenty. Fucking. Years. I was her servant, her handler, her confidante, and her lover. And you know what the scum-sucking bitch left me?”
Cecelia took a step back against the woman’s advance. She couldn’t help herself; she’d never in her life been regarded with such abject hatred. Not from the Vicar Teague. Not from her fellow male students at university.
Not even from Ramsay when he thought she was responsible for the worst crimes imaginable.
“Nothing.” Genny tossed the codex to Cecelia’s feet, where it landed with an innocuous whump. “That woman left me not one goddamned thing else but a love note with instructions to look after you and that little brat with a promise that you’d take care of me.” The last part of the sentence she forced between clenched teeth.
“Phoebe?” Cecelia rushed forward. “Tell me you haven’t hurt her.”
“You are so like that sanctimonious, undeserving cow!” Genny’s lips curled into a masculine sort of snarl. “No, no you’re worse. You never once had to lie beneath a rutting boar of a man to feed yourself. You never had to fight off drunk men and work on your feet for endless nights just to avoid working on your back.”
Her fingers turned to claws as she gestured her hatred. “You were educated, spoiled, coddled. I fucked half the ton while you went on holiday with them. And when Henrietta found me, I helped earn the money on the card tables. Money she sent to you. I built this empire with her, and she leaves it to you?” She shook her head in abject disbelief. “What makes you think you deserve this?”
“I—I don’t!” Cecelia insisted. “I never wanted—”
“I don’t give a silken shit what you wanted,” Genny said. “I only care what you can do for me now.”
“What? What would you have me do?”
Genny pointed to the book at her feet. The dratted codex. The bane of Cecelia’s existence. “I know you’ve deciphered it. I saw the pages burning in the fireplace before I fished them out. There’s a fortune worth of information in there, and I need every word, do you understand?”
“Tell me something first.” Cecelia was stalling for time, wondering if she could get a message out somehow, her brain churning for anything to cling to that might help her escape this helpless, hopeless place. “Is Lord Ramsay alive? Jean-Yves? What about Phoebe? Is she harmed? Please tell me what happened to them!”
“You’ll get information when I get what I want from you,” Genny scoffed.
“No.” Cecelia shook her head, drawing herself up. “That’s not how this works. I will tell you what is in the codex when you assure me those I love are safe.”
“Love?” Genny sidled closer, her laugh long and low and unsettling. “What is it about fucking Lord Ramsay that shags a woman’s brain right out of her head? You and Matilda both. Spend a few nights with him and suddenly he’s wrapped those unwieldy paws around your heart and squeezed all sense out of it.”
Cecelia suddenly felt for poor Matilda. She’d been torn between two loyalties. That to her employer, and then to herself. How devastated she must have been when Ramsay had thrown her out of his house and his life.
“Don’t tell me you loved that horse-cocked lummox of a Scot,” the American spat, tugging at the lace sleeves of her nearly white gown.
Loved. Past tense. Did that mean Ramsay was no more?
Cecelia swallowed around a lump of despair. What if he’d died without knowing how she felt about him? What if she never had the chance to change his mind? She had fully intended to once she was through being peevish. It’d taken everything for her not to prostrate her pride and her principles at his gigantic feet and ask to be carried about like a damsel again.
What if she only ever received the gift of one of his smiles in her entire life?
If he was truly gone … she would even miss his frowns. The darling way he struggled to remain grumpy in her presence. The way tenderness and lust turned his wintry eyes a darker, warmer blue.
To lose him would be the greatest tragedy in her life. And for his daughter to lose him as a devoted father was the greatest heartbreak she could think of.
Ramsay. She loved him. Every solid, starched, stubborn inch of him.
A ragged sob tore its way out of her throat, closely followed by another. “I’ll die before I help you hurt those girls out there,” she said with a flinty resolve.
Genny’s eyes narrowed, a frightening glint hardening in their depths as she glanced to Winston. “You and Phoebe were given everything, because Henrietta wanted to keep you both innocent. Unspoiled. You’re a bit old to be worth much, but if you don’t comply, I’m going to let Winston and the boys have their fun with you. Keeps them loyal.”
“I don’t care,” Cecelia claimed, though the threat horrified her down to her very core. “I won’t be party to the evil you’re perpetrating down here.”
“There’s nothing to be done for the girls out there, their fates are sealed.… But what about Phoebe…” Genny adopted a speculative look. “I know how much a man will pay for a girl her age. Hell, I’ve been selling virgins to disgusting men for some time now.”
“No.” The truth drove the breath out of Cecelia’s lungs and took the starch from her bones. She crumpled, landing hard on her knees and bowing in front of Genny in an age-old posture of supplication. “Please. Do what you want to me. Take everything. The house, the business, the fortune. Just don’t hurt Phoebe. Let those girls out there go.”
Genny squatted down in a most unladylike manner, pushing the codex against the floor. “I fucking told you already, those girls are bought and paid for, I’m just waiting for their owners to come collect,” she said. “The Lord Chancellor will pay me more money than Midas if I decode this before they take the girls to the country house, so you’d better start writing, or I’ll make Winston bend you over that desk first before the other two have a go.”
Cecelia had to check her courage against the threat, wondering how much she could take before she spilled every secret she knew. For Phoebe? She’d do anything. Endure anything.
“Are you a part of the Crimson Council?” she whispered. “Did they put you up to this?”
“Honey, no one put me up to this.” Genny stood, looming over her like the whore of Babylon. “In this world it’s eat or be eaten, and I’d rather eat at the table of the Crimson Council than just about anywhere on this earth. Henrietta refused to provide them what they wanted, but I have no such scruples. And I killed her when she began to piece it together.”
“The bomb? That was you?” She’d been such a blind, trusting fool. So worried about the wolf at the gate that she hadn’t noticed the snake hissing into her ear.
The woman gave a faint smile, as if mildly amused by the memory. “I thought the blast would be smaller, all told, and I was certain it would take care of Phoebe. I pushed that burning log toward you, as well, but how could I have guessed Ramsay has the reflexes of a mongoose?”
“You’re evil,” Cecelia accused. “To subject girls to such things. To conduct this violence against women? Vulnerable women?”
“You think I wasn’t sold to my first man by a woman? You think Henrietta didn’t do the devil a few favors before I employed foxglove to send her to hell?” Genny turned back to the door, resting her hand on the latch. “I ain’t evil, doll, just angry. Angry and ruthless as any man would be in my position. You understand.”
“No. I don’t,” Cecelia said, fuming now. Genny had taken everything from her. Including the aunt she could have known and loved. The only family she truly had left. “Nothing could cause me to commit such deplorable acts!”
“That’s because you’re weak. You think your goodness will save you but it’s your greatest folly, and that’s why you’ll never set foot outside this room again.” Genny nodded to Wi
nston. “Hand her the papers, and if she stops writing before she’s finished with that entire book, then tear her apart from the inside.”
“Gladly.” The man watched her alertly, his droopy, doglike eyes glimmering with anticipation.
Cecelia gaped at Winston, unable to believe her ears. She’d helped him out of the blast. Made certain his wounds were tended to and offered him a salary even though the house was currently not in business.
How could he repay her kindness with the threat of the ultimate cruelty?
Cecelia reached for the book, wondering if wrongly decoding could buy Phoebe some time, when a masculine scream pierced the air outside the room. It was full of a pain so pure, it sent shivers reverberating up and down Cecelia’s spine.
The door burst open, sending Genny crashing to the floor.
Ramsay strode in, bringing with him with his particular brand of frigid, unnatural calm. A sinister expression turned his features from grave to positively reptilian. He moved like a predator. Unconcerned. Unrepentant.
Utterly lethal.
He didn’t touch her with his gaze so much as skipped over her to skewer the other inhabitants of the room with shards of ice.
He’d not reverted to the London Lord Ramsay. His hair was still as wild as it’d been in Scotland. His trousers and coat were not fresh, as though he’d slept in them, and the untamed, unkempt kit added to his imposing figure.
This was not a man of stricture. Nor was he shackled by the bonds of the law.
This Ramsay was capable of anything.
Relief flooded Cecelia with such violence, she surged to her feet and might have cheered. He was alive! Ramsay was alive and he would save Phoebe in time!
“Touch her and I’ll shatter the tender parts of yer skulls with my bare hands,” he said in that soft, terrifying way of his. “I’ll leave ye alive long enough for ye to be aware whilst I hollow out yer insides, do ye ken? Ye’ll feel pain like none ye’ve imagined, and in the end, ye’ll beg for the mercy of execution.”
Cecelia absurdly reminded herself to tell him later that, despite what he’d claimed, he was an excellent wordsmith.
Astonishingly, he allowed the men to recover from their awestruck amazement and fall into fighting stances, producing various weapons.
All Scot and Bothered Page 32