Dangerous Exile (An Exile Novel Book 3)

by K. J. Jackson

  His gaze left her face, going over her shoulder to the weathered grey stone with a rounded top sticking out of the ground, leaning slightly to the left.

  Beloved son, Conner J. B. F. Burton.

  Nothing. No recognition. No sudden memory.

  He looked down at Ness, his head shaking.

  “Nothing?” she asked, worrying her lip.

  “No.” His right hand dropped from around her waist and he shifted to her side, driving the spade into the ground with his boot. “So we dig.”

  Three shovelfuls of dirt moved and Talen glanced up as Ness moved to the next headstone over, her fingers touching the top of it. A tall classical panel with side pillars and a pediment atop, the flowers etched into the stone were only partially worn with time. His gaze moved down the front of it.

  Beloved wife, daughter, mother, Mariana Burton.

  Mariana Burton.

  The shovel fell at his side and he moved forward, his legs wooden and barely able to carry his weight. An uncontrollable shake set into his hands, but it didn’t stop him from bending and reaching out, tracing the letters etched deep into the stone. Once, twice, three times over her name.

  “Mariana.” His lips moved, the faintest breath of a whisper forming the word.

  His eyes closed with the name spoken to the wind and a blinding light filled his head, so bright it felt as though his brain was about to explode from the inside out.

  And then nothing.

  Nothing but blackness.

  Blackness and one thing—the echo of a voice from long ago.

  “My merry Mariana.” He whispered the words, afraid to set them into the air for fear his head would truly rupture.

  Ness’s hand landed on his arm, worry in her voice. “Talen, what did you say?”

  “My merry Mariana.” He swayed slightly with the words, trying not to lose them into the blackness. “My merry Mariana.”

  His eyes opened to Ness. “My merry Mariana.”

  The words didn’t leave him. Instead, they only grew stronger in his mind, a seed with a thousand tiny sprouts flashing all at once.

  He closed his eyes, trying to stem the flow, trying to stem everything that was entangled with them.

  “Talen?” Ness’s hand tightened on his arm.

  The words. Concentrate on the words.

  “My merry Mariana. It’s what my father used to call my mother. My merry Mariana. All the time. My merry Mariana.”

  “You remember?” Her breathless words drifted into his ears.

  His eyes flew open, searching for her, searching for her eyes. “Your face—when you showed up at the Alabaster for me beaten to all hell.”

  She blinked hard, her head shaking. “What?”

  His entire adult life instantly made sense.

  Why he could never stomach a bruise on a woman.

  Why he could never dabble in brothels in his holdings.

  Why he cringed every time he heard a gun clicking on an empty barrel.

  “They killed my father immediately—even though she fought them—he fought them. She went crazy. Pure vicious madness. Scratching their eyes. Biting their arms.” His words flew in a torrent, his eyes closing as the scene—arms and legs and terror flying in puzzle pieces in his mind. “I fought them. I did too. But my father was the first to go. Quick. Merciless. One gunshot and he went down. They turned on me next, setting a pistol to my head. And then a click, the trigger pulled.” He had to gasp in a breath.

  “They shot you?”

  “No. The gun didn’t have a bullet. Just the click. So they took to their fists. Pummeling me, my head, my stomach, my chest. Fist after fist crushing into my face. So much blood I couldn’t see past the red in my eyes. They dropped me to the floor when they grew tired, thinking I was dead. I thought I was dead. In and out of blackness.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  Both of his hands went to his face, the butt of his palms crushing into his eyes, trying to wipe free the images. Images he didn’t want to see. “They moved onto my mother.” His hands pulled away from his eyes with a growl and he found Ness’s face.

  “Hell, you. This is what you looked like. It’s why I first felt the need to protect you, Ness—that first day when you came to me. I could never stand a woman with a bruise on her face—but yours, yours was horrific. It looked just like my mother’s as she took her last breath.”

  Her face crumpled, horrified, her hold on his arm bruising. “What?”

  His eyes squinted close as image after image flooded his mind. “But only…only after the hours—the night of the horrors of being half alive, hearing her screams, what they did to her. I could only watch through blood streaming in my eyes. I couldn’t move. When they finally let her body drop to the floor, she looked at me.”

  He collapsed onto his heels, his knees hitting the ground, his shoulders dropping. “And I saw only one of her eyes looking at me. Everything was in that eye. Still blue. Crystal clear blue. She could see I was still alive. And everything was in her eye. What she wanted for me. The future. For me to live. Giving me the strength to keep breathing. She wouldn’t look anywhere but at me. Willing me to live.”

  Ness’s hand, gentle, slid along the back of his neck. “And you did.”

  The blackness invaded, wiping free the images.

  He shook his head. Trying to get them back. Trying to banish them back into the void. An anguished roar left him, his mind battling itself.

  “You lived, Talen.”

  His body buckled forward, all air leaving his lungs, his knuckles digging into the dirt. “I did, but I do not know how.” His voice rough, words choked out. “The next thing I remember, I was waking up on that ship, Declan shoving a mop into my hand, yanking me out of bed because he was sick of swabbing the decks alone.”

  His body swayed, his mind fighting itself with every second.

  Fighting until he was numb, losing track of place and time.

  Fighting until he didn’t exist, not even in his own mind.

  { Chapter 20 }

  Heaven help her, what had she done?

  She’d wanted—needed—Talen to remember his past, to remember her. To know that she wasn’t mad and destined for an asylum. But this—she’d never meant to send him into madness.

  She hadn’t wanted this. Not the horror of what had happened to him. Not for him to leave this world even as he left his body behind.

  He’d warned her and she hadn’t listened. She’d let her own blasted self-doubt demand this of him.

  Rain had started, heavy rain, but even that hadn’t nudged Talen from where he’d frozen in place. Poised on his knees in front of his mother’s grave, not moving, his eyes open but not seeing anything.

  She’d yelled his name, over and over again, but she couldn’t get him to flinch, to move. A granite statue she couldn’t budge.

  Wedging herself between him and the headstone, she bent down in front of him, her right hand fully on his cheek, her left fingertips cradling the other side of his jaw. The rain was coming vicious now, slashing across her cheeks, drowning his face in rivers that ran from his dark blond hair.

  “Talen—Talen—look at me, please. Just look at me.” Not that her face could pull him from the monstrosity of what he must be feeling at the moment, reliving the deaths of his parents.

  Not that anything could pull him back.

  Her hands tightened around his face. “Talen, please.”

  No reaction, not even the slightest blink. Panic set deep into her bones. His eyes were glassy, so like her mother’s often were when she’d visit her in the asylum.

  She couldn’t lose him. Not now.

  What the hell had she done?

  “Apologies for the interruption, but the rain has started in earnest.”

  Ness tore her gaze away from Talen to crane her neck and look at the driver they’d hired in Birmingham at the far side of the iron fence. She had to lift her voice to be heard over the downpour. “The rain, it is already mucking the road
s, isn’t it?”

  “It is, miss. We need to leave before the carriage gets stuck. I moved it closer along the lane.”

  She straightened, her right hand moving to grip the side of Talen’s neck. “Help me. Help me get him back down to the carriage.”

  The driver hustled along the side of the fence until he could enter the cemetery. “What is wrong with him?”

  “He’s had a shock. That is all. But your arm around him from one side and mine on the other should suffice.”

  The driver nodded, quickly slipping his hold along Talen’s back and prodding him upright onto his feet as Ness did the same on Talen’s left side.

  Thank the heavens, Talen held the bulk of his weight on his own, and they managed to get him to take steps forward, though much of his heft still crushed down onto her shoulder. Again and again as they moved down the hillside, she tried to shift Talen over slightly, so he would lean more against the driver, but he would take a step and then lean back onto her.

  But she would bear the weight. Bear anything for him.

  She hadn’t realized until that slog down the hill, how much he truly meant to her. How she would trade everything—make a deal with the devil—if only he would come back to her.

  Her right shoulder near to cracking, they finally got Talen down the hillside and across the field to the coach.

  When they stopped at the open door of the carriage, Talen’s eyes were still glassy, unfocused, as Ness implored him, “Two steps up, Talen, please. Just two steps up and into the coach.”

  An exhale of relief flew from her mouth as his right leg lifted, then his left. Up and into the carriage.

  So he hadn’t completely left her. Not yet.

  She jumped up into the coach behind him, prodding him toward the bench before she turned back to the driver. “How far is the nearest coaching inn?”

  “There was one in the village we passed several miles back in Calthwaite.”

  She waved her hand toward that general direction. “Please, then, to there, posthaste.”

  He gave her a nod and closed the carriage door, the coach shifting to the side as his weight scampered up onto the driver’s seat.

  The ride back to the village was agonizingly slow with the muck of the road sucking at the wheels with every turn and stopping the coach twice, but within two hours they had a room in a coaching inn and Ness was teetering on the side of the bed, biting her bottom lip. She stared at Talen sitting on a chair, facing the fire, his eyes still glossed over. No words, no movement.

  Nothing from him even as she’d pulled off his sopping coat, waistcoat and lawn shirt, and pulled off his boots. Even with as wet as they were, she left his trousers in place. She doubted she could get him up off the chair enough to remove them.

  Then she’d sent a tumbler of brandy down his throat in hopes that might numb whatever had seized him, but there was no change.

  As she’d stripped off her own wet dress, leaving in place her damp shift, she’d kept up steady chatter about inane things like the birds most common in Scotland, the types of moss present on the ancient stones around Whetland Castle, and the lambing of ewes.

  Anything to keep her mouth moving and her thoughts off the possibility that she’d broken his mind with their trip to the Washburn estate.

  Not that he heard any of it. But she couldn’t leave him alone in the silence. Silence with nothing to bring him back to the present.

  But now she was waning, her words faltering, tears threatening.

  Watching the agony he was in had shattered her heart. That she had done that to him. Make him suffer as he did. She would never forgive herself for this.

  He would never forgive her for this.

  With her shoulders slumped, she scooted along the bed toward the bedside table and grabbed the decanter of brandy, pouring it into the tumbler that sat next to it until it was half full. She rarely drank brandy, but now was the time to start if there ever was one.

  One sip. Two. Both gulps sending fire across her tongue and deep into her throat. What she deserved.

  A third sip at her lips and Talen jerked, his body suddenly moving where there had only been stillness.

  The jerk and then he stood slowly, rising from the chair as his eyes came back into focus, though he didn’t look at her, his gaze solidly trained on the fire.

  She jumped to her feet, setting the glass on the table and moving to stand in front of him.

  Staring at him. Silent. Waiting. Excruciating.

  “Hell. All of this.” The words eked out rough along his tongue, a raw whisper.

  Her lips parted, but she had no words. No words for this. No words to make this better. To soothe the pain.

  His eyes slowly shifted up to her from the fire. “Dammit, this is why I froze. This is why I’m not fit to protect you, Ness. Not fit for anything but death and disaster.”

  { Chapter 21 }

  “Not fit to protect…” Her head shook, her forehead wrinkling against the worry that had lined her face. “What are you talking about, Talen?”

  Immersed deep in a pit of darkness and suddenly, there was Ness, in the light, bringing him back to reality. Back to the present.

  He blinked hard, his stare finally able to focus on her. On the terror on her face.

  Blast, where were they? A coaching inn? How had they gotten there? Where were his clothes, his boots?

  He blinked again, the one revelation he’d forged in that well of blackness hammered into his brain, unable to let go of him. “Death follows me, Ness. Death. Destruction. You need to get away. Get away from me now.”

  “What? No.” Her head flew back and forth. “No. I don’t need to get away. You’re not death, Talen. You’re the farthest thing from it.”

  “I froze, Ness. I froze.” He sucked in a breath that only partially made its way down his tight throat. “I freeze and I fail. I am death. Death for sure, for you.”

  She stilled in front of him and Talen could see her slipping, slipping away from him. Whether she wanted to or not, she was recoiling.

  Her arms drew inward across her body, her right arm cradling the bandage wrapped along her left arm. She wore only her shift. What had happened to her clothes?

  Her eyes wide orbs, she stared at him. “You froze? When?”

  “The brothel that burned down—the one Juliet saved me from.”

  “The Selkie South Brothel?”

  “Yes.” He nodded, his look dropping to the fire just beyond her skirts, not able to keep the long-held shame from his voice. “There was a reason it was set aflame. I had taken over the house, adding to it a cadre of women enticed over from a brothel across the river. I told you of them. All wanted to join my house, it was clean, they would be paid well, and I’d hired Juliet to see to all of that and she did an admirable job of making sure every girl wanted to be there and was content.”

  His voice became wooden, hollow to his own ears. “But I needed a shining star, a woman men would clamor to see, to be with. So I stole one. Layla Hodwell. A beauty. Charming. Men would extol on her theatrics in the bed all about town. She was the shining star I needed, but she was also the property of Filmore Bloodwater, a wretched, toothless cur. I convinced Layla to come to my house, paid off her debt to Bloodwater, and told her she would be safe with me. I would protect her. Except I didn’t. I couldn’t. A month after she came to the brothel, Bloodwater came for her. He got to her in the Selkie South when I wasn’t there. By the time I’d arrived, rushed into her room, Bloodwater and two of his cutthroats had already severely beaten her.”

  Ness’s fingers lifted, pressing against her mouth.

  “I could have saved her. I had the brawn, the skill. But I didn’t save her. I froze. I had a split second to act when I walked into that room and I didn’t—couldn’t do it. I saw her face, the brutality of what he’d done to her, and my body locked up upon itself. I couldn’t move my arms, my legs. I froze and I couldn’t control it.”

  “Talen—”

  “I fail
ed her. I told her I would protect her from Bloodwater—swore it—but I didn’t. And I never knew why I froze like I did. It had never happened before. But it makes sense now—her face…her face was what happened. The blood, the pus, how she could only see out of one eye.”

  His words choked, he had to pause, running a hand over his eyes, as though bitter hope promised he could erase the past with just one swipe. “It was the same thing I felt when I first saw you. I froze then, too, when you stumbled into the room. You didn’t see it, didn’t know it, but I froze. I froze because you and Layla looked just as my mother did at the end—face crushed, one eye open, staring at me.”

  He swallowed hard, his voice catching. “I froze that day and Bloodwater’s men jumped on me before I could recover. I’m deadly because I’m fast and that day…that day I was nothing. They beat me into unconsciousness. Juliet pulled me from that building—saved me, saved all the girls, but Layla…”

  His head shook as his fingers curled into fists. “They took her away and I never saw her again. Never heard of her. No one did. She was just gone. Dead.”

  “But you didn’t kill her.”

  “I did just as much as if I’d slipped a blade into her gut.” His stare lifted to Ness, self-loathing eating away at his chest. “I was the one to convince her to come to my house. I was the one that swore to protect her. And I didn’t. After that, I swore off anything to do with whores and brothels. The women at the Alabaster come and go on their own accord. We have rooms available if the man wants to pay for it—and my men oftentimes have to step in when there’s danger to a woman from men that are out of control on our property. But I will never be the cause of another woman dead because of me.”

  “Talen…”

  “It’s why you need to get away from me, Ness.” His legs suddenly useless, unable to hold him, he wanted to sink back down to the chair. But Ness needed to hear this, understand it, and she only would if he was looking down at her. His lips pulled into a terse line. “I am death. I can’t be trusted to protect anyone, especially you.”

  “Except you aren’t death and I’m not going anywhere.” She didn’t even blink at his words.