Sinner's Heart th-3

by Zoë Archer

  Taking a long drink directly from the decanter, Bram paced toward the chamber’s only other occupant. He stalked to the figure, readying his sword. An expressionless face stared back at him. But he expected no response from the straw-stuffed dummy positioned in the middle of the chamber. He stared at its blank face and drank again.

  The brandy burned on its way down. It wasn’t enough. It would take far more than drink to ease this monstrous emptiness within him.

  Prowling around the dummy, he assessed it as if it was an enemy. He feinted. Then swung his blade at the dummy. It hacked into the straw-filled canvas. Bodies felt different from straw—meaty and yielding, until you hit the resistance of bone. Dummies didn’t bleed, either. But if you hit a man just so, his blood would spray across your clothing, your face. He had taken a coarse rag to his skin after one fierce battle near the Niagara River and not known whether the blood staining the water was his or if it belonged to the French soldiers he’d killed.

  He’d come to learn the feeling of steel meeting flesh. Grew skilled enough to know where to strike a man so that he could no longer run, and how long it took to die from a wound to the stomach.

  And how much of his own blood he could lose, and still stay alive.

  The blank face of the dummy shifted, transforming in his sight to the Algonquin who’d cut his throat. Snarling, Bram now launched into an attack, chopping into the dummy as if he could kill the Algonquin all over again. He still sometimes woke, choking on imaginary blood, hand pressed to his throat. But instead of an open wound, a scar snaked across his flesh, its every contour familiar.

  He thrust his sword deep into the dummy’s chest. Its face changed again, and he found himself staring at Edmund—looking just as he did when he’d been stabbed. His mild brown eyes were wide with shock, his mouth forming soundless words. Only this time, Bram killed him, not John.

  Perhaps he was responsible. He hadn’t been able to stop it. He could have moved faster, blocked John’s blade.

  Rearing back, he pulled the sword from the dummy, and it clattered to the ground.

  Bram hadn’t called upon Rosalind, Edmund’s widow, half afraid of what he might find. He didn’t know if she even mourned her husband, or if she’d woken from the dream, and now embraced autonomy. With the Devil’s magic no longer binding her to Edmund, she might do anything she pleased.

  She’d better mourn. For Edmund had loved her, in a way Bram could barely fathom.

  The same emotion was in Whit’s eyes when he gazed upon his Gypsy woman. And Leo with his wife, Anne.

  Bram had no knowledge of what it meant, how it felt.

  He didn’t want to know. Love was unreal. Or worse—perishable, fragile. Like everything else in this world. Once he believed friendship could outlast anything. Curse him for a damned fool.

  After taking another deep drink, he paced back to the cabinet. His hand closed around the handle of a tomahawk. Holding it up, he studied its brutal, efficient lines. A memento he’d taken from the bastard who had cut his throat. Bram had torn it from the Algonquin’s grasp and buried its blade in the Indian’s skull. The weapon was his now.

  He hefted the tomahawk and turned his attention to the thick logs leaning upright against the wall. Strange decoration for a room that still had gilt paneling and crystal chandeliers, but he’d insisted, and no one dared gainsay him.

  Restless energy still tightened his muscles, so he strode to the logs. Raised up the tomahawk. Then brought it down, hacking into the wood. Over and over, using the tomahawk like the vicious weapon it was. He chopped away at the fury and despair within him, not stopping even when sweat slicked his body and his arm ached.

  His own face stared back at him from the log. He redoubled his efforts—hacking himself down, the tomahawk’s blade sinking into his flesh as he destroyed himself.

  “Bastard,” he snarled. “Deceiver. Betrayer. Villain.”

  He lifted his arm, preparing to strike again. Then froze.

  Hovering between him and the log was the ghost.

  “I made myself abundantly clear,” he said through clenched teeth. “Hie yourself off to Tartarus, or wherever you dead Romans go.”

  The ghost glared at him. “I don’t take commands. Certainly not from you.”

  He swung the tomahawk. She actually flinched as the blade passed through her torso and into the log.

  After giving her a cold, contemptuous stare, he stalked away, leaving the tomahawk lodged in the wood. He took another drink as he strode into the corridor. The brandy was doing nothing.

  The specter hovered in front of him, her expression murderous.

  “Would’ve thought an axe to the chest sent a clear enough message.” He narrowed his gaze. “Get out of my house. Leave me.”

  “There are many other places I’d rather be. Many other men with whom I’d rather keep company.”

  “Then go to them, and with my blessing. Spread your ghostly thighs for as many bucks as you like.”

  Her mouth flattened. She seemed unaccustomed to having anyone tell her what to do. In her life, she must have been a woman of status. He’d seen the same upright posture in aristocratic women, the elegant hauteur that came from generations of selective marriage. Yet this ghost held more confidence in the set of her shoulders than any living female, a confidence born from innate power.

  He frowned as desire flared through him. He couldn’t desire a ghost, and certainly not this ghost.

  Needing to be away from her, he walked on, until he found himself in the library.

  Neither the fire nor the candles were lit. The only source of illumination came from the sickle of a moon throwing weak gray light upon the patterned rug and calf leather–bound books. Their impassive spines offered no comfort—but he’d never turned to books for solace.

  As he stared at the shelves, the ghost took shape beside a heavy cabinet. She threw off her own light, a pearlescent gleam that softly touched the wooden carvings in a way that was almost beautiful.

  He took another drink. “How impossibly dull you are.”

  Lifting her chin, she was haughty as an empress. “I’m not here by choice.” She eyed him, her gaze lingering on his partially unlaced shirt, and how the fabric clung to his damp skin. Alive or dead, he understood women. And he was not mistaken in the flare of carnal interest in her eyes.

  Objectively, he recognized that she was wondrous to look upon, possessing a regal, dark beauty, even in this non-corporeal state. In the bold angles of her face, her full mouth and proud nose, there could be no mistaking her Roman origin. Knowledge and experience shone in her eyes, far more than possessed by even the mostly worldly English lady. Her thick dark hair was piled in artful arrangement and held back with a fillet. The pinned, draped tunic she wore revealed a lushly curved body. He was a man who knew the feel of many women’s bodies, yet hers he would savor. Were she mortal.

  But she was not mortal. He wanted no dealings with her. “You’re dead. You have choice in abundance.”

  “Not in this I don’t,” she snapped. “Dragged around like a mule, tethered to an even bigger ass. A dissolute second son.” She threw a dismissive glance toward the books. “Nothing has changed in here, not in decades. It’s derelict.”

  He wheeled away, then strode up the stairs, until he found himself in the master’s bedchamber. His room. In deference to current fashion, the walls were covered in silver paper imported from France, and silver tasseled silk hung from the canopy of the large bed. A gentleman’s chamber, in which he had conducted himself in a most ungentlemanly manner. The servants knew better than to make remarks or even acknowledge the behavior of their master.

  Restless, angry, he walked the length of the chamber. The clock on the mantel showed the time, so distressingly early he felt almost embarrassed. He could not recall the last time he was in this room, alone, at this hour.

  Something gleamed beside the fireplace. A glowing shape that took the form of a woman.

  Her.

  “Hecate
curse it.” She said something else, something that might have been Latin, but he’d retained nothing of his brief Classical education. He could infer her meaning, though.

  “Most women are pleased to find themselves in this chamber,” he felt compelled to say.

  She eyed him, unamused. “I am not most women. And none of your trollops ever found themselves in my plight.”

  The firelight shone through her as she drifted closer. He saw the set of her mouth. Nights at the gaming hells with Whit had taught Bram something of how to read a face. This ghost held a bad hand of cards.

  “You and I,” she said, “we are now bound together.”

  She did not anticipate that he would greet this news with enthusiasm, and she was right. He looked appalled.

  “More of your madness.” He scowled, a look so fierce that, were she a living woman, she might be afraid.

  “My mind is clear.” Though it had been a struggle. Even now, she twisted between his memories, her own, and their shared present. “Unlike yours, addled by drink.”

  He threw the decanter. It smashed against a wall, spraying glass and amber liquid in glittering arcs. She threw up her arm to protect herself unnecessarily, then cursed her habits when he sneered at her.

  “There. I’m sober as a Quaker. Yet you’re still here.”

  “Against my will. Where you go, I’m forced to follow.”

  “Not because I’ve wished it.”

  “I’m well aware how little you desire my company.” None of the Hellraisers had ever been pleased to see her. Neither had the two mortal women. Even in life, she would enter a chamber, and faces would shift into wariness.

  Bram was a fortress walled with ice as he gazed at her. “This is one of your damned tricks.”

  “I don’t play tricks. That’s for the weak-willed.” She had no feeling of the fire’s warmth, and noted the chill black sky outside the windows yet possessed no sense of time. She knew only that the Dark One gained greater strength with every descent of the sun.

  “And your character has been most admirable.” Sarcasm all but dripped from his words to stain the carpet.

  She had no blood to heat her cheeks. “This chamber holds two sinners. But I work to undo the wrongs I’ve caused.”

  “I am all esteem.” He bowed, lean and elegant and venomous. “And you are as trustworthy as a spider. Catching Whit and Leo in your web was very clever, but I’m no foolish moth you can ensnare through deception.”

  “There is no deceit.” She wished she had a physical body so she might strike him. “As you move from place to place, I’m dragged along with you. You and I are manacled together.” It galled that she didn’t know the how or why of it.

  “And I’m to believe this passel of lies, with no proof.” He crossed his arms over his chest, feet braced wide as if facing down a storm.

  Frustration welled—curse him for having a will as strong as hers. “Do you think my knowing you were a second son was a fortunate guess? I was there. I saw it, in your memories. When your father bought you a commission. You and he stood in a room like the one downstairs, and you complained because it was not the rank you wanted.”

  His frown deepened. “There’s no way you could know that.”

  “I know because I have been in your thoughts, your memories. I saw them, felt them.”

  Gaze and mouth hard as winter, he growled, “You had no right—”

  “It wasn’t by design,” she shot back.

  “My memories are mine.” He stalked toward her, until a small distance separated them. She saw the ring of indigo that encircled the ice blue of his eyes, and the freezing anger within them. “You violated them.”

  “This, from the man who uses magic to get women into his bed. Isn’t that a violation, too?”

  His gaze dropped, briefly. “They’re all well pleasured.”

  “Yet you take choice from those women, and no amount of pleasure ameliorates that.” Was that regret tightening his jaw? Could she imagine that he felt remorse for his actions? She had tumbled through the tempest of his mind, and yet he remained opaque as steel. “I’ve memories enough of my own. I don’t need yours, yet I saw them anyway, after I found myself in a chamber with you and one of your conquests.”

  “Intended conquest.” His mouth twisted. “She didn’t care for a spectral audience.”

  Livia would not feel contrite. She had no yearning to watch this virile, lean man make love, taunting her with what she had lost and would never have again. Though she could not stop images and thoughts from seeping in. In his sleek movement, he revealed his capability, his sensuality. He would be an expert in love play, turning an animal act into something creative and perhaps even brutally beautiful.

  Stop this. Don’t torment yourself.

  “That wasn’t by choice, either.” She glanced away, then back. “Watching such scenes is a punishment.”

  His gaze narrowed at this, and moved over her, assessing and bold. “I can see how that might be so.”

  When she had been alive, few men had possessed the insolence to look at her so brashly. She’d been one of the first families of Rome, and a priestess of considerable power. Was it her spectral state that allowed Bram to stare at her, his gaze brazen, openly carnal? Or was it the man, himself?

  “There’s no deceit here,” she said. “No guile. If this were my strategy, I’d choose a far less punitive one.”

  “Meaning I am haunted.” His words cut like mirror shards. “By you.”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me how long I have to endure your presence.”

  “Any moment is too long,” she snapped. “And I have no answers.”

  He glared down at the floor as if it whispered calumny. “Another delightful turn of events.” Turning to her suddenly, a hard, keen look crossed his face.

  She felt a change in him, a gathering of power drawing around him like shadows.

  “I urge you to leave.” He spoke the words as if they were an incantation, then waited.

  “Must we go over this again? We’re tied to one another.” She stared at him. “You just attempted to use your magic on me.”

  A scowl darkened his face. “It hasn’t yet failed me.”

  “The power that lashes us together may be stronger than yours.”

  “Or it doesn’t work on dead women.”

  “If you think to insult me with your bluntness, you will be sorely disappointed.” She waved down at herself, the transparent luminosity of her form. “I’ve had a considerable amount of time to adjust to my circumstances.”

  He was a thundercloud of a man as he swung away. Easy to see him as a soldier in the lethal economy of his movement. “I’m not so inured to the presence of ghosts, let alone being chained to one.”

  “Witness my own joy at this state of affairs.” Yet it need not be a wasted opportunity. This man was the linchpin in the fight. If she could turn him to the cause of defeating the Dark One, surely the chances of success must increase. He could be very powerful, if he so chose to be. But whether his power was for the Dark One or against him, that was yet in doubt.

  He went to stand at the window, staring out at the darkness.

  She drifted closer to him, until she was beside him. Women would be drawn to such a man, helpless as starving deer, craving a taste of him. Even without the magic given to him, he would pull them near. If he had a scent, it would be woodsmoke and clove. But she couldn’t learn his scent, nor the warmth of his body or touch of his hands. She had only the memory of her senses. Everything else was ashes.

  “The gifts given to you by the Dark One, they were but pretty trinkets in exchange for your soul.”

  He did not turn to her as he said without irony, “Didn’t think I had a soul.”

  “All men do. But it was yours the Dark One craved.”

  “Then he’s the bigger fool, for it has a negligible value.”

  She peered at him. “You truly believe that?”

  “Once I had a fine, dazzling set of
beliefs. They are all tarnished now. Or thrown onto the midden.”

  His bleakness made her frown. “The world is going up in flames.”

  “Let it burn.” He sounded weary.

  “It’s not simply a matter of the world ending. It’s not the blaze of the fire followed by cold nothingness. If the Dark One is victorious, it means suffering. Unending suffering for every living being.”

  He did turn to her then. “We’re all suffering.”

  “Worse.”

  Shadows shifted across his face like clouds across the moon. Yet he remained as distant as the moon, as well, shuttering away doubt. “Cannot be stopped.”

  “It can—”

  “You’ve denied me my night’s pleasure, and the Devil knows how long you’ll keep me from my peace, but you won’t keep me from my rest.” He moved away from the window.

  She glided forward to intercept him. He started to walk around her, then moved through her. She stiffened, anticipating sensation. None came. He went through her as if she were nothing, not even a vapor to leave a chill upon his skin.

  Coming to stand beside the bed, he stared at her with that cold, ruthless look of his she was coming to recognize. It had been intentional, his walking through her. Proving a point. She could not impede him.

  Slowly, his fingers moved to his waistcoat. The buttons sparkled and winked beneath his fingers as he undid them.

  Once his waistcoat had been opened and he let it fall to the floor, there were more layers. His torso made a firm, broad shape under the fabric of his shirt.

  He watched her the whole while. A thief ’s gaze. Canny and calculating.

  By all the gods, he was undressing. Deliberately. Knowing that she watched him.

  His laced shirt followed the waistcoat, making a soft white shape on the patterned carpet. His torso gleamed in the firelight, still slick with sweat from his combat practice. Scars marked him, not merely the one that twisted down his neck, but relics of other past wounds. She recognized the scars left behind from blades, but a strange circular one on his right shoulder puzzled her. There were odd new weapons now, weapons that exploded with fire and hurled balls of lead, piercing the body. Guns, she’d heard them called. A person could be shot by a gun.