Kissed by Death - Book three of the Trueborn Heirs Series

by Queen, Nyna

  What must it cost him to soothe her, when, at the same time, he had to fight his own dark nature to keep it from emerging in the face of so much pain and suffering?

  If he could be this strong, so could she.

  “I’m okay,” Alex told him softly. “I was … overwhelmed, but I have it under control now.”

  Darken slowly let go of her arms as though every quick movement would provoke the shaper inside her again. Or, perhaps, the devil inside him.

  Alex picked up her abandoned torch and made herself inspect the room. Empty metal shelves lined the back wall. Several stainless steel beds on wheels formed a straight row in front of them, the torchlight casting glaring white circles on the dull, silver metal. Although they had been removed, Alex could still see the contraptions where thick restraining belts had formerly been attached to them. She cringed. A memory flashed before her eyes: another room; another metal bed with straps; fluorescent lights glinting on surgical instruments; and the Duke of Gomorrah smiling greedily right before a needle was punched into her neck.

  Alex grimaced and pushed the memory aside. She let her torchlight glide over the beds. Each one had a bowl at its lower end. Tubes led from the bottom of the bowls to ditches in the floor that all ended in a round, recessed drain in the centre of the room.

  The hackles on Alex’s neck rose to the ceiling.

  “What is this place?” she whispered, horrified. “Some kind of hospital?”

  “No.” Darken’s gaze slowly moved from the shelves, over the beds, to the drain in the floor. His face turned into the coldest, most malevolent mask she’d ever seen. “This is a torture chamber.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “A TORTURE chamber?”

  Stephane picked up one of the printed memoras scattered across his desk and glared at it. The thin paper-like fabric crinkled in his tight grip.

  Darken nodded grimly. “Most of the equipment had been removed, but I’ve seen enough rooms like this one to know what it was intended for.”

  Alex cast him a small, inconspicuous sideglance. They were standing beside each other in front of Stephane’s desk in his townhouse study, a prim distance between them.

  Last night, when the time had come to part, she didn’t want to leave. They had stood together for a long time, simply holding each other, both of them chased by the ghosts of what they had seen at the prison camp and neither of them willing to be the first to let go.

  But time had had no regard for their feelings and eventually Alex had to get moving to make it back to the Canterbury Estate in time.

  Groggy and bone-tired, every single muscle in her body screaming from soreness, she had dragged herself back across the forest-covered plain. Dawn cast its first pale light over the trees when she finally reached the estate’s grounds. By then, she was so exhausted that when she jumped the wall, she fell short of the main building, bruising her already sore wrist, and had to climb up its side, just barely escaping the notice of two guards doing their rounds. Once inside the safety of her room, she had hauled herself under the shower and then had fallen into bed for a few short hours of fitful sleep.

  But sleep had brought her no reprieve from the horrors of Maria P. Carvalis. Her dreams were haunted by images of blood-smeared instruments, scratched walls and faceless corpses piling higher and higher inside monstrous graves. She found herself running down dark, stony corridors that closed in around her, fleeing from nameless pursuers while around her explosions shook the ground. An open cell door loomed in the wall in front of her and she dove inside and threw the door closed behind her, gasping and shaking with relief. But when she turned around, the cell’s floor swam with blood, and pale hands were emerging from its depths, reaching for her and trying to drown her. With a scream of terror, she darted for the cell door, only to find it locked and no matter how much she yanked and pounded on, it wouldn’t open. Cold, wispy hands grabbed her ankles and mercilessly pulled her down, down, down into the soggy embrace of a wet, moldy grave. Desperately, Alex scratched at the door and the walls, again and again and again, until both her human nails and her shaper claws were broken and bloody, her horrified screams blending in with the wails of those who had died here before her.

  In the morning, Alex had woken up drenched in sweat and with the terrible fear that only the nightmares were true and everything she and Darken had shared the previous night had been nothing but a wistful dream, created by her mind to balance out the horrors they had witnessed.

  And even if it were real, what if he had changed his mind? After all, they had just narrowly escaped death and people were known to act impulsively when the relief of survival kicked in. Wild sex affairs weren’t unheard of in situations like that. But the adrenaline would have cooled off by now, and he might have come to regret his rash actions.

  Would it be awkward now? Would he act like nothing had happened, just the way he had after their first time at Blayde’s hotel?

  Alex had gotten herself so riled up that she couldn’t eat a single bite for breakfast, straining Josy’s already frayed nerves. The girl had nearly suffered a heart attack when she had seen Alex’s condition that morning, but had patched her up with her healing magic sufficiently for Alex to be able leave her room without causing a commotion.

  It took one look into Darken’s eyes when he picked them up from the estate to know that all her fears had been unfounded—last night had been real and he still wanted her with the same desperate need that had pulled them together on the edge of the mountain amidst bomb shards and rubble. As if she alone was the reason he was able to breathe.

  The realization had made Alex giddy with relief and a tiny bit wanton. If they had been alone, she might have done something rash and silly, like ripping off her clothes and throwing herself right at him. Only, they hadn’t been alone. They had been surrounded by Darken’s family and by the heavy weight of the questions that could neither be asked nor answered as long as they were out in public.

  Alex pressed her lips together. Before kissing goodbye at the foot of the mountain, she and Darken had agreed that it would be best to keep their relationship a secret for the time being. His family had enough to worry about right now. No need to complicate things any further.

  And if Alex was quite honest with herself, she was afraid of their reactions. Darken had told her that everything would be alright, but Alex didn’t share his confidence. Providing refuge for an ally was a little different from welcoming said refugee into the family, no illusions there. Oh, Alex certainly had a pretty good idea of what Heloise would have to say. Just imagining the hysterical fit, she had actually been quite glad to avoid that confrontation a little longer.

  All in all, it had seemed a reasonable decision last night—part of her even thought it was a little romantic—but today it was almost driving her out of her skin.

  She wanted Darken to touch her so badly that being deprived of his touch was worse than any physical pain could have been. She craved the warm reassurance of his lips on hers, the save feeling of his arms around her.

  He could still change his mind. The fear grated on her, and she knew that if only he could hold her for a moment all that irrational fear would evaporate into thin air, and she would be in that summer-sweet place where dark feelings didn’t exist, only bliss.

  Unfortunately, they had more important things on their plate right now.

  Alex forced her attention back to the memoras and couldn’t help shuddering when the images of the morgue slabs and the blood drains brought back the smell of dried blood laced with the stench of decay.

  A ghostly finger drew a line of shivers down her spine. Josy had done a complete healing on both her and Darken when they had finally reached the Dubois’ townhouse, but the procedure hadn’t been able to banish those memories from her mind.

  Stephane dropped the picture back on the messy pile. “Any dead bodies?”

  Darken shook his head. “No, but they do have a crematory there.”

  Easier to burn the bod
ies than to maintain a graveyard in a bomb-riddled mountain range. It also avoided problems like the spreading of sicknesses and keeping off scavenging animals. And frankly, it didn’t seem likely that anybody would have gone up there to pay their respects to the dead, anyway.

  Stephane nodded slowly. He perched his elbows on the table, forefingers resting against his lips. “We need to assemble a field mission. I’d like the investigators of the Department of the Interior to see with their very own eyes what’s been going on behind their backs all these years.”

  “That might prove difficult.” Darken’s jaw tightened. “I’ve analyzed the powder traces we’ve discovered all over the perimeter.” He set a small vial with a dark, glittering content reminiscent of iron powder on the desk. “It’s a chemically engineered and magically enhanced corrosive agent.”

  “Corrosive?” Stephane squinted at the content of the vial. “To what purpose?”

  Darken’s face turned glacial. “Let me put it this way—in a couple of days the prison camp will look as if it had been abandoned for the past fifteen years.”

  The gears visibly clicked into place in Stephane’s head. “So if you hadn’t gone there last night…”

  “…we would have found nothing but a decrepit ruin. Exactly,” Darken confirmed softly.

  Alex placed her hands on the desk and leaned forward, eyes blazing. “They knew we were coming, and they tried to erase all traces of their operation.”

  “They weren’t completely successful, though,” Darken cut in and flicked a hand at the memoras. “We know that, except for the mine, the camp was still running just shortly. But the big question remains. What have they been doing there?”

  Stephane leaned back in his chair and folded his hands. His lips pulled back in a smile somewhere between rapt and murderous, raising invisible hackles up on Alex’s neck. Like a lion about to tear into living flesh.

  “I think it’s about time we had a chat with my dear old friend Debayne.”

  THE Master glanced up from the papers on his desk when the door to his study flew open.

  He frowned, surprised—and none too pleased—about the intrusion.

  His informant rushed over to his table without taking notice of it, a blanket-wrapped bundle balanced on his arms. “There was a bit of trouble at the camp during the clean-up,” he said in a clipped voice, then raised his arms and his mouth twisted into an ugly scowl. “And the men found this.”

  With a flick of his hands, he unwrapped the bundle and a slender sword stamped with arcane glyphs clattered onto the table.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CONCEALED in the shadows of the stairway, Darken watched through a slit in the curtains as Senator Debayne exited a cab coach and hurried toward the entrance of the Dubois’ townhouse under a drab sky ripe with the promise of rain.

  A moment, and the doorbell rang.

  Darken silently slid deeper into the shadows as Hector emerged from somewhere in the house, crossed the foyer and opened the door.

  “Milord.” He bowed deeply.

  “Hector, good to see you.” Debayne rushed across the doorstep and nodded gratefully as the butler liberated him from his thin tweet jacket. “Thank you Hector, thank you. Now, where is the man?”

  Hector gave him his usual stoic expression. “His lordship should be here any minute.”

  “Good, good.” Debayne nodded distractedly and moved deeper into the hallway, his shoes gently clicking on the gleaming dark marble.

  Edward Debayne was a man of medium height and mediocre built, neither particularly handsome nor unattractive, with hair and mustache of that particular shade of brown tinted with red, somewhere in between bronze and copper.

  The Debaynes came from the lower ranks of the royal elite, and Edward’s seat in the parliament was a bit of a surprise, considering. Darken realized it had never occurred to him to wonder how he’d achieved that.

  He had always rather liked Debayne among his brother’s acquaintances. His dry sense of humor and down-to-earthness made him easier to deal with than most of the glib, puffed-up men and women that filled the ranks of the parliament.

  Debayne wasn’t one to push to the front, but he wouldn’t shy from an argument either. He was a fierce debater who pressed his points. A man of principles, as they say. It was why he and Stephane, birds of a feather in that regard, had become close friends over the years.

  A friendship, Darken thought grimly, that was about to be sorely tested.

  Stephane appeared in the doorway to the living room.

  “Edward.” His lips formed a smile, but the tense bulge of his jaw and the sharp lines around his eyes told Darken that his bother was boiling with rage on the inside and trying hard not to show it—yet.

  “Ah, Steph.” Debayne moved forward to grasp the offered hand. “I came as quickly as I could. You sounded as if it was urgent…”

  Stephane squinted past his shoulder. “Did you tell anybody you were coming over? Anybody?”

  Darken grimaced in the dark. You simply didn’t ask such a question. For all his political finesse, his brother lacked inquisitive subtlety. If Debayne started smelling a rat…

  But Debayne just blinked, looking a bit startled. “No, you told me not to.” He paused. “Steph … what’s going on? You’re starting to worry me.”

  Stephane forced another smile and squeezed Debayne’s shoulder. “Sorry, Ed. I’ve been a little stressed lately. Nothing to worry about. Come, I want to show you something.”

  Debayne followed his brother to the wide oak staircase at the other side of the hallway that spiraled down to the basement.

  Signaling to Hector to keep up his post in the hall, Darken broke away from his hideout and slunk after the other two men, keeping a little distance. Since their mother and Tyler were currently staying at their own apartments in Ciradell, nobody should be appearing out of the blue, but it never hurt to have someone at the back who had an eye on things.

  Darken skulked onto the stairs. Without forewarning, Alex dropped down from above, landing on the step beside him, and straightened.

  Darken lifted one eyebrow at her, and she flashed him a grin. He shook his head. He might barely make any sound when he walked but Alex … Alex moved like a ghost. Or, rather, like the spider she was.

  They descended the rest of the staircase beside each other, two soft-footed hunters stalking a very unaware prey.

  When they reached the bottom, Stephane and Debayne were just vanishing through the door of the wine cellar. A couple of steps, and Darken and Alex were beside the door.

  Darken nodded at Alex.

  She nodded back. Let’s do it.

  When they shifted places, Darken caught her fingers in his and placed a quick kiss into her palm. The heated, slightly wicked smile she gave him made him forget where he was. Hunger stirred inside him, hot and desperate, suffusing every part of his body with a dire, all-compassing need. It was a need that was as strong as his need for air, if not stronger.

  He pulled her toward him and brushed his lips against hers, savoring her taste.

  Alex smiled against his mouth, melting a little against him, before she leaned back and nudged him toward the door.

  Later, she mouthed, although the feverish glow in her eyes told him she was as eager for him as he was for her.

  I’ll take you up on it, he mouthed back.

  With great reluctance, Darken let go of her and slipped into the wine cellar while Alex stayed outside. With her acute shaper hearing, she would be able to listen in to everything through the door, and they didn’t want to throw Lady Alexandre de Nuy into the mix just yet—much less Alexis Harper, the shaper. First, they needed to find out what Debanye’s role in this sick game was. They would go from there.

  Warm, terracotta-colored tile and red brick stone gave the wine cellar a cozy, welcoming feel. The walls of the long room were lined with top-to-bottom wooden shelves that reached for the vaulted white plaster ceiling and were stuffed with row upon row of expensive wine
bottles. A couple of select bottles were displayed on elegant racks for the well-disposed connoisseur to survey. The backside of the room was stacked with old barrels. An old-fashioned cast-iron luster hung suspended from the ceiling, decorated with real candles. A small table with three chairs waited next to a huge upturned barrel with upside down glasses ready for a tasting.

  Darken slid behind the door, laying one hand on the heavy wood.

  Debayne was glancing around, obviously trying to spot something noteworthy beside Stephane’s newest brand of wine.

  “Now, what is it you wanted to show me?”

  Darken gently upped the pressure on the door until it swung forward with a creak and fell into the lock.

  Debayne gave a start and wheeled on the spot, his eyes widening when he saw Darken leaning against the closed cellar door. He took an automatic step back, casting a glance at Stephane, more confused than afraid.

  “Steph, what is going on here?”

  “Oh, I just wanted to make sure that we could have a private conversation.” All the polished veneer of pleasantness had vanished from Stephane’s face, replaced by a queer, dangerous glitter.

  Debayne took another step back, stumbling when his foot got caught on a chair leg. “I-I don’t understand…”

  “Don’t you?” Stephane asked softly, his gold-green eyes cold like two polished gems. “Well, let me help you along, then. Do you still think that we are under control?” He pointed first at himself then at Darken.

  Debayne’s eyes swiveled from him to Darken and back, his face blank. “Control? Steph, what—?”

  “At least that’s what you told Robert Ferhus shortly before he was murdered,” Stephane interrupted him, unperturbed. “Isn’t it?”

  The blankness was replaced by a flash of recognition. Debayne paled. “You were in the maze,” he whispered. His gaze flickered to Darken. “Or he was.”