Dark Embrace

by Eve Silver

  Dark Embrace

  Eve Silver

  Contents

  Also by Eve Silver

  Praise For Eve Silver’s gothics

  Dear Reader

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Kiss Me Goodbye Sneak Peek

  Also by Eve Silver

  About the Author

  Also by Eve Silver

  Dark Gothic Series

  (Books in this series can be read in any order)

  Dark Desires

  His Dark Kiss

  Dark Prince

  His Wicked Sins

  Seduced by a Stranger

  Dark Embrace

  * * *

  The Sins Series

  Sins of the Heart (Book 1)

  Sin’s Daughter (Book 2, Novella)

  Sins of the Soul (Book 3)

  Sins of the Flesh (Book 4)

  Body of Sin (Book 5)

  * * *

  Northern Waste Series

  (Eve Silver writing as Eve Kenin)

  Driven (Book 1)

  Frozen (Book 1.5)

  Hidden (Book 2)

  * * *

  Compact of Sorcerers Series

  Demon’s Kiss (Book 1)

  Demon’s Hunger (Book 2)

  Trinity Blue (short story)

  * * *

  The Game Series (Young Adult)

  Rush (Book 1)

  Push (Book 2)

  Crash (Book 3)

  * * *

  Join Eve’s Reader Group for the latest info about contests, new releases and more!

  Dark Embrace Copyright © 2017 by Eve Silver

  Kiss Me Goodbye Copyright © 2017 by Eve Silver

  * * *

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  www.evesilver.net

  Dark Embrace

  ISBN: 978-1-988674-13-1

  Praise For Eve Silver’s gothics

  "A dark and delicious gothic. I gobbled it up in a single sitting. Oh, how I have missed books like this!"

  —New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

  * * *

  "...beguiling gothic tale..."

  —Bookpage

  * * *

  "Silver thrusts the gothic romance into the next century with the ideal merging of chilling and dark mystery elements and heated sexual tension. Victoria Holt would be proud!"

  —RT Bookreviews

  Dear Reader

  Dark Embrace is a full length novel based on the novella “Kiss of the Vampire” originally released in the anthology Nature of the Beast. I have expanded the original novella to flesh out the characters, plot, setting, and conflicts. I loved this story when I wrote it as a novella, but the length constraint meant that I had to be spare and brief. I’m thrilled to bring this story to you in its fuller form.

  * * *

  I hope you enjoy Dark Embrace!

  * * *

  Eve

  Prologue

  London, February 10, 1839

  * * *

  Killian Thayne couldn’t say why he noticed Sarah Lowell—there were night nurses and day nurses aplenty at King’s College—but notice her he did. It was an hour before dawn. She had come early for her shift and she stood by the bed of a man who moaned against the pain. She was not tall, but her posture made it seem as though she was. And she was confident in her skill as she unwound the bandage from the wound on his arm.

  Killian stood in the corner, cloaked in darkness, and he watched with interest as Miss Lowell lifted her candle, and examined the deep, long slash that had been fixed with an adhesive plaster and tight bandage.

  The man on the bed groaned.

  “Let me help you,” she said softly.

  The patient ceased his thrashing and stared at her. “How can you help me? The surgeon said there’s nothing more to be done. I’ll heal or I won’t and it is out of his hands.”

  Miss Lowell looked around the room, wary. Once she appeared certain that the other patients slept and no one else observed her, she said, “There is something to be done, and I would be pleased to do it. There is a piece of cloth in the wound and several small stones. I can remove them if you’ll let me. And then I’ll sew you up.”

  “You?” The man made a harsh laugh that turned into another groan.

  “Me,” she said. “After all, is not your wife a fine hand with a needle?”

  The man stared at her, wary. “She is.”

  “I, too, am a fine hand with a needle. And I think sutures will do better for you than the plaster.” She paused. “And it was not a surgeon but an apprentice who tended your wound, one with less than a year’s experience. I have trained more than half my life. Do not let the fact that I am a woman sway you from accepting my care. I can help you.”

  He was silent for a long moment.

  “I can help you if you’ll let me,” she said, her tone even, confident.

  The patient hesitated a moment longer and then with a grimace, he offered a nod.

  Miss Lowell hastened from his bed and when she returned, she stopped at the basin at the side of the ward and washed her hands. Then she drew close to the patient once more and set out red wine, pads, rolls of linen bandages, and a needle with waxed threads.

  The first thing she did was give the patient some of the wine. A good portion of it.

  “We must be as quiet as we can,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  Again, the patient offered a short nod.

  She took a pad and rolled it into a cylinder. “Bite on this to stifle your pain.”

  He did as she instructed, but still, he groaned as she prodded in the wound with her small fingers. Killian was not surprised when she drew forth the cloth and stones she had described. He was not surprised when she washed the wound with red wine and dried it with the pads, then sewed it up with neat stitches and wrapped it tightly in linen bandages. And he was not surprised when she cautioned her patient to mention the care she had provided to no one. If anyone asked, he was to say that he could not recall who had stitched and dressed his wound.

  Killian was not surprised because from the first second she had unwound the man’s dressing she had portrayed confidence and experience. So, no, he was not surprised, but he was impressed.

  She had the knowledge and hands of a surgeon. A trained surgeon. Somehow, this woman had studied medicine or apprenticed to a surgeon. Both options were impossible for no medical school would accept a woman, and no surgeon would take one on as an apprentice. But Killian did not doubt what he had seen.

  Which made Miss Sarah Lowell very interesting, indeed.

  1

  London, November 3, 1839

  * * *

  Dying moments of darkness and shadow fought to stave off the first creeping fingers of the dawn as Sarah Lowell walked the familiar route through the edge of St. Giles, north o
f Seven Dials. Her boots rang on the wet cobbles as she ducked through the dim alleys and twisting lanes, past wretched houses and tenements, and rows of windows, patched and broken. Wariness was her sole companion.

  A part of her was attuned to the street before her, the gloomy, faintly sinister doorways, the courtyards that broke from the thoroughfare. And a part of her was ever aware of the road behind, dim and draped in shadows and menace.

  She was alone…or was she? The scrape of a boot sounded from somewhere behind her.

  Would that it was the cold that made her shiver. But, no, it was unease that did the deed.

  Her twice-daily trek along these streets and laneways was something other than routine. More times than not she felt as though unseen eyes watched her from the gloom, footsteps dogging her every move. In the months since her father’s death, she had become increasingly aware that someone followed her.

  Beneath her cloak, she closed her fist tighter around the handle of her cudgel. She never left her room in the lodging house in Coptic Street without the short, sturdy stick. With good reason.

  St. Giles was not a place for a woman alone. But, unfortunately, poverty did not allow for over-particular standards. She had little choice in where she lived but she could—and did—choose to protect herself. She had neither the means, nor the inclination, to own a pistol, and she had considered—and discarded—the possibility of defending herself with a knife.

  So, the cudgel it was, and she prayed she never found herself in a circumstance where she would be required to use it on another human being.

  Should those prayers go unheeded, she suspected that surprise would be one thing in her favor. With her small frame, wide hazel eyes, and straight dark hair, she appeared young and delicate. She was young, but she was far from delicate. Any attacker would likely not expect the defense she would mount. Her father had always said she was sturdy in both body and spirit. She wished it had not taken his death and the desperate turn of her life to prove his assertions true.

  She had spent years by her father’s side, honing her muscles lifting and turning patients who could not do so for themselves, honing her mind under his tutelage, learning anatomy and surgery and the details of all manner of diseases. More recently, she had spent months under her landlady’s watchful eye, pummeling a sack stuffed with old rags in order to learn how to wield the cudgel.

  A muffled sound to her left made her spin and peer down the alley next to the darkened chandler’s shop. Her heart gave a lurch in her breast, and she dragged her weapon free of her cloak.

  With a loud belch, a man stumbled toward her then veered away to lean, panting, against the wall. Muttering and cursing with a drunken slur, he fumbled at the flap of his breeches. Then came the sound of a stream of liquid hitting the wall.

  Turning away, Sarah walked on, skirting the refuse and detritus that littered the street. She slipped her weapon beneath her cloak once more and willed her racing pulse to settle.

  The feeling of being watched, being stalked, oozed across her skin like a slug. She glanced back over her shoulder, but there was only the empty street and hollowed doorways behind her.

  And the sounds of footsteps.

  Swirling fog and mizzling rain settled on her like a shroud, clinging to her hair and skin and clothes, a cold, damp sheen. She quickened her pace and hurried on.

  Her destination was Portugal Street and the old St. Clement Danes workhouse that now housed King’s College Hospital where she worked as a day nurse. There was talk of a new building but a new building required funding and there was none to be had. So, for now, there were some hundred and twenty beds in the old workhouse, split into several overcrowded wards that offered care to the sick poor.

  No one of wealth and means would step foot in King’s College. By choice, the rich were cared for in their own homes, and because of it, they were more likely to survive. Her father had often been called on such visits, and Sarah had accompanied him to assist. But the poor could not afford such luxury—a doctor to attend their bedside, medicines to cure disease or ease their pain—and so they came to King’s College, and often enough they died.

  “They would die regardless,” her father had pointed out many times when Sarah had bemoaned the plight of those without ample funds. “At least the hospital offers some hope, however small.” He had been implacable in that belief.

  Sarah had agreed with him then and still felt that way now. She worked every day among the sick poor and she could not bear to think that all her efforts were for naught, that there was no hope for them, or her.

  “Hope matters,” her father used to say, the words lifted by his smile. “There is power in belief.” If she closed her eyes and concentrated very hard, she imagined she could hear his voice. She missed him. She missed their talks. She missed the way he saw her not only as a daughter but as a person, one with valid thoughts and opinions. She missed their lively debates, the smell of his tobacco, and even the way he slurped his soup. She missed his laugh. She missed their life.

  Again, came the sound of footsteps behind her, the pace matched to her own. She stopped. They stopped. She walked on and they followed, neither speeding up nor slowing down and when she glanced back, there was only fog and darkness.

  Almost there now. She strode past the crumbling graveyard, shoulders back, head high. It was a horrific irony that King’s College Hospital was situated squarely between that graveyard and the slaughterhouses of Butcher’s Row. She had her own well-guarded opinion that while some doctors and surgeons at King’s College were dedicated souls bent on easing suffering, others might be better suited to work in the abattoirs.

  At least there, death was an outcome both expected and sought after.

  As the hospital loomed before her, she paused and glanced back once more. There, near the graveyard, she saw a black-cloaked figure clinging to the shadows, painted in shades of pewter and coal and ash. Watching. A shiver chased along her spine.

  Each day, she walked to work in the predawn gloom and returned home after the sun had set. Many times, she had harbored unnerving suspicion that she was being followed, but proof of her supposition had, for the most part, been absent. This was only the second time that a form had actually materialized from the mist. Or had it? She stared hard at the spot, but could not be certain she saw anything more than a man-shaped shadow that could be cast by any one of the statues in the graveyard.

  She had her cudgel in hand. She should walk to the gate and discover if it was statue or man that cast that shadow. And if it was a man? Her fingers tightened on her weapon.

  She was torn between confronting the miscreant and avoiding such confrontation at all costs.

  After a moment, she decided on the latter and headed for the doors of King’s College. She hurried into the building and made her way first to the nurse’s cloakroom, where she divested herself of her damp over-garment, then through the dim hallways to the women’s sick ward. There was a patient here she wished to check on, a woman who was so ill she had not been able to eat or drink or even void for two days. It was as though her body refused to carry out the normal functions of life. Sarah hoped she had taken a turn for the better, though it was more likely that the woman had taken a turn for the worse.

  She paused in the hallway near the ward. The first rays of dawn filtered through grimy windows to steal across the floor in pale slashes. The sounds of suffering carried through the place, eerie moans and louder cries, a sob, the creak of a bed as someone shifted, then shifted again.

  Sarah stepped through the doorway and took a second to acclimate to the smell. No matter how much limewash was slapped on the plaster, no matter how many scrubbings with yellow soap the floors took, the smell—the metallic bite of blood, the raw-onion stink of old sweat, the harsh ammonia of urine—never quite melted away. These small battles might beat back the wretched stench for a time but, in truth, the war was long lost. The sick ward was forever infused with the vestiges of human misery.

  Her g
aze slid over the beds. Each one was full. Some even had two patients crowded into a space meant to hold only one.

  In the corner was the bed she sought. Little light penetrated that far into the gloom. She took a step forward, then froze with a gasp.

  There was someone sitting on a stool at the far side of the bed, a man, garbed all in black, the pale shape of the patient’s partially upraised arm a stark contrast against the dark background offered by his coat.

  He held the woman’s wrist. Sarah could see that now. And she could see the breadth of his shoulders and the pale gold of his hair. She knew him then.

  Killian Thayne.

  Her pulse jolted at the realization. No matter how many times she saw him, how many times they interacted, she could not seem to put aside the schoolgirl infatuation that had struck her the first time they met. She rolled her eyes at her own foolishness.

  She must have made a sound that alerted him to her presence, for he raised his head.

  “Miss Lowell.” His voice reached across the space that separated them, low, pleasant.

  “Mr. Thayne,” she acknowledged.

  University-trained physicians were addressed as doctor, apprentice trained surgeons as mister, and there was a distinct barrier between them, not only at King’s College but at any hospital throughout the city. Mr. Thayne belonged to the latter group.