Dangerous Exile (An Exile Novel Book 3)

by K. J. Jackson

  Mounting fear in her chest started to war with a panicked calm—both attempting to take over her emotions.

  The dowager couldn’t have possibly brought her here, could she?

  She looked to Lady Washburn. “Where are we?”

  The dowager patted her knee. “Nowhere important, dear.”

  Ness’s lips parted so she could draw more air into her lungs as she stared at the woman in front of her. Such a kind face.

  But a madwoman.

  There wasn’t any denying it. She’d been bound up. Set in this hovel. And the only one in front of her was Lady Washburn.

  Reality was her only ally in this situation.

  The sooner she accepted the fact the dowager was not her friend, not kindly—that the madwoman had intentionally dragged her here and tied her up—the better off she would be.

  Ness glanced down at her bound wrists again. Fat rope. Talen had tied her up several times to teach her how to loosen the knots enough to free herself. With enough time, she could get out of the rope. She just needed time.

  Hard won, the panicked calm took over. Talen would be proud of her.

  Shifting her hands out of view under the table, her wrists started to work back and forth as her look lifted, her eyes narrowing at the dowager. “So, what do you propose to do with me?”

  The dowager turned away from her and moved to the small square table by the hearth. She picked up the table, balancing a teapot and teacup atop it, and came back to Ness, setting the table down directly in front of her.

  The dowager picked up the pot and poured what looked like tea into the delicate teacup. She set the pot down and nudged the cup closer to Ness, then stood straight, her hands folding in front of her grey cloak.

  Ness looked to the table. The teacup sat in its bright white splendor, the prettiest painted blue bells lining the lower half of it.

  Gorgeous destruction.

  Ness’s glare lifted, skewering the dowager.

  She smiled at Ness. The same vacant smile that had been in her face when they had first met. A smile that somehow now managed to look both idiotic and sinister all at once. “Please, dear, just drink the tea.”

  “The last time I drank the tea, I faded into blackness and then woke up in here.” Ness let every ounce of bitterness she was feeling lace her words. The damned woman was about to find out she wasn’t going down without a fight.

  The dowager’s lips pulled tight, the hard glint in her eyes not shifting. She looked pointedly to the tea.

  “What was in it last night? Laudanum?”

  “Just drink the tea, dear Nessia. It will be easier for all parties involved. Cleaner. Less dramatic. Less fear. Less pain. Just quiet. Just slipping into darkness.”

  Ness scoffed a laugh as her hands started to work harder at the rope binding them. “You wish me to die quietly?”

  The dowager took a heaving sigh and her hand dipped between the front folds of her cloak. She fished into an interior pocket for an extraordinary amount of time before pulling free something silver.

  A pistol.

  A bloody pistol, the elaborate etched scrolling motif along the silver barrel showing it was one of a fine dueling set.

  She didn’t actually know how to use it, did she?

  The dowager pulled back the hammer of the pistol. Damn. The blasted thing was already loaded.

  Lady Washburn aimed the tip of the barrel at Ness’s head. “Please, dear. We both want this to be attended to with the tea. I fear for the pain you will be in if the bullet strays from my aim.”

  All of Ness’s breath left her in that moment, the air seeping out of her until she was nothing.

  No.

  Fight.

  What did Talen always say?

  Stay alive.

  Fairly simple instructions.

  She tried to draw in breath past the dam of fear lodged in her throat and she looked up at the dowager, attempting to ignore the cavernous black hole of the pistol that was aimed at her forehead. “Why? Why do this?”

  “Conner will not take the title from us. He won’t. I worked too hard for it. It is mine. With you gone, his interest in it is moot.”

  Ness’s eyebrows drew inward. “It’s not your title. It’s your son’s.”

  Her lips drew into a vicious snarl. “It is ours. Mine. I did everything for it. Everything. Now drink the damn tea, Nessia. I do not have the patience for this.”

  Stay alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

  Her look fixed on the pistol, Ness reached out with her bound hands and wrapped her fingers around the teacup. She paused, staring at the brown water.

  Death. So simple and easy.

  Death she didn’t want.

  For how she’d wished for it once upon a time, that time was done. She’d been a fool. An utter idiot to have ever tried to escape this life.

  “Do it.”

  Ness set the cup to her lips. How much could she hold in her mouth?

  “Do it.”

  Raving desperation spiked the dowager’s words and sent a shake into her hand holding the pistol. The last thing Ness needed was for the madwoman to accidentally discharge the pistol into her skull.

  Her hands trembling, Ness parted her lips, letting the liquid breach her mouth. Bitter tasting, so bitter she could barely hold it against her tongue.

  Don’t swallow. Don’t swallow. Don’t swallow.

  “Swallow it.” The barrel of the pistol edged closer to her brow. “I said—”

  The door of the cottage flew open, crashing into the adjoining wall.

  Talen.

  Talen standing in the doorway, raging.

  The dowager spun around and Ness instantly spewed out all the contents in her mouth.

  “Don’t move.” The dowager lifted the pistol high, aiming it directly at Talen’s chest.

  He stilled in place, his fists half raised as his look surveyed the cottage. Then Ness saw it plain as day in his eyes.

  He knew this place.

  Knew it well.

  Terror. Pain. Death.

  All of that had happened here.

  And he froze.

  { Chapter 29 }

  His father on the floor.

  His mother dropping in front of him, her bloody head half on the brick hearth.

  Their bodies in front of him. Cold. Lifeless. But so fresh into death, the smallest hope remained.

  Until it didn’t.

  Their bodies shells. Their spirits gone to ghosts.

  Ghosts.

  Ness.

  Ness.

  Ness spitting out something brown all over the table.

  Ness wasn’t a ghost. She was gagging and tied up.

  And Lady Washburn wasn’t a ghost. A bastard demon—blood and skin the only thing making her fit to walk the earth. A demon holding a pistol.

  Every muscle in his body burst alive. But he held still, not letting the evil woman see.

  “What the hell are you doing, Dowager?” His words came cold, calculating, as he kept his focus on Lady Washburn. On the cocked pistol in her hand aimed at his chest. He only needed three steps forward. Three running steps and he could yank the gun from her hand.

  An eerie chuckle bubbled up from the dowager’s throat. “I am keeping Mrs. Docherty here for her father. He can collect the rubbish of this whore. She will do you no good, Conner.”

  “My name is not Conner.”

  “You’re right. You’re right.” Another high-pitched chuckle escaped her, her words manic. “What was I thinking? To save lives? Mercy? What was I thinking? I need to just take care of you both. My boy doesn’t have the stomach for it. Doesn’t even know how much I’ve done for him.”

  Her right hand holding the pistol lifted, her forefinger twitching, then pulling the trigger at the exact moment a teacup flew through the air, hitting her hand.

  An explosion of sound and instant pain sent Talen flying backward.

  He slammed into the back of the door.

  A full second—a lifetim
e—passed before he realized the pain was only in his upper arm. Not his chest.

  Shit.

  Ness was flying through the air—her hands and feet tied—diving head first at the dowager. She hit her at the waist, ramming the dowager into the brick side of the fireplace. And then Ness fell, her feet tangled and of no help.

  Flat onto the floor.

  The dowager’s arms flew wide for balance against the fireplace and her right hand clanked onto the fire poker.

  Before Talen could blink, the dowager grabbed the fire poker, swinging it high into the air.

  He froze.

  The same fire poker he’d watched swing down at his mother, sending her to screams.

  To pain.

  To death.

  His mother’s bloody temple. The life leaving her. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t save her.

  The dowager swung down, the curved spike at the end of the poker aimed at Ness’s temple. Just before iron met flesh, Ness rolled, dodging the spike. But it forced her body up against the bench, cornered.

  A screech from the bowels of Hades ripped from the dowager’s mouth and she pitched the poker upward, poised for another blow.

  Ness on the floor. Just like his mother. Death looming above her. Death coming down swiftly at her head.

  Frozen.

  But no. His limbs were moving. Moving on their own. Not frozen. Lunging across the room, his arms flailing out, hitting iron in mid-swing, tackling the wretched woman.

  Another scream pierced his ear and he had the dowager on the floor, holding her down by her neck as he grabbed her wrist and slammed it hard onto the floor, the bones in her wrist snapping as the iron poker flew from her grip.

  Such a weak woman.

  Yet such destruction she’d caused.

  He grabbed the top of her scalp, his fingers curling into her tightly pulled back grey hair, and he lifted her head, then cracked it down onto the stone floor.

  Not enough to kill her. More than enough to send her to tormented unconsciousness.

  How he didn’t kill her, he wasn’t sure.

  Scrambling off her inert body, he crawled to Ness, his fingers furious as he tried to calm them enough to untie the knots at her feet and then her wrists.

  She was free. Free and looking up at him, wonder in her eyes.

  His hands slid under her, crushing her body into his.

  He needed to feel her breath. Feel her heartbeat. Feel her hands moving along his back, his torso, his arms.

  “You didn’t freeze.” The choked words vibrated, muffled into his chest. She wedged her head free from his hold, looking up at him. “You didn’t freeze. You saved me.”

  His right hand lifted, capturing the side of her face, needing her skin, her eyes on him. “No, Ness, you saved me. A thousand times over.”

  This. This one second in his life—a new defining moment.

  He didn’t freeze. Didn’t fail. Not when his whole life, when his whole world, his whole future, needed him most.

  He couldn’t save his mother, but he saved Ness.

  And Ness was everything.

  Seconds count.

  { Chapter 30 }

  “It is done?” Ness’s look jerked up from the soap and washcloth in her hands as Talen walked into her room at Washburn. It had been dark for hours now, and she’d finally broken and pulled herself away from worrying at a window, her stare locked on the front drive to Washburn. She’d had the bath readied in a hopeless effort to calm her frayed nerves.

  “It is.” He closed the door behind him, dodging around the plump pink damasked chair that had been shifted away from the fireplace when the copper tub had been moved into the room. The deep circles under his eyes didn’t escape her notice. He looked exhausted by what had happened that day.

  “I wish I had come.” She twisted the washcloth in her hands. “Seen that witch dragged into that place.”

  Talen pulled off his tailcoat and waistcoat, tossing them onto the chair, then wedged off his boots. Standing straight, he rolled up the sleeves of his lawn shirt as he walked across the rest of the room and bent down behind her, resting on his heels.

  He leaned over the edge of the copper tub and set his lips to her wet neck as he reached around her and plucked the washcloth from her fingers. “One, I’m never letting you near another one of those monstrosities for as long as we live. And two, I did it myself, dragged her into the asylum, so my mind and your mind can be assured it is truly done. Clayborne signed all the paperwork.”

  She involuntarily shuddered, the mere thought of a madhouse still striking innate fear deep in her gut.

  But Talen knew what she needed, and the last thing she needed was to be delivering the dowager to the Devlon Asylum for the Insane. Though he’d always been like that. Always known, since the moment she showed up at his doorstep, what she needed.

  “How is your arm?” she asked. The bullet from the dowager’s pistol had gone clean through his upper arm. The wound had been cleaned and wrapped, but she knew it still must sting.

  “It is nothing.” His fingertips prodded her to lean forward in the tub and he dragged the washcloth against her back, sending ripples of pleasure up her spine.

  As much as she wanted to revel in his hands moving over her wet skin, worry made her glance over her shoulder at him. “You are at peace with the fact that the dowager is in that place and not with a noose around her neck for all she has done?”

  His knuckles that had been lazily tracing upward along the bumps of her spine stilled. “Her fate in that place will be torture for her mind, day in and out, so am I at peace with it?” He shrugged. “I am coming to that point.”

  He fell silent as he collected her hair, twisted it, and draped it forward over her shoulder. The only sounds in the room were droplets dripping from the cloth into the water as he washed the expanse of her back.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Sorry? The worry balling in her gut intensified. Ness shifted in the water, half turning so she could fully see his face. “Sorry for what?”

  “Sorry that I didn’t see the dowager for what she was. Sorry I didn’t remember her or my uncles or that time all together—if I had, I could have stopped her. If I had, you wouldn’t have been in danger.”

  “Except I’m not in danger from her. You saved me. You protected me when I most needed it. I saw how you froze in that cottage. Saw the horror of the past reach out and take a hold of you.” She reached up, pressing her palm along his cheek. “But you fought your way through it. You fought to me. You swore you would keep me safe, and you did. I think this proves you are not death, Talen. That I wasn’t wrong when I trusted you with my life.”

  His light blue eyes seared into her, searching for salvation. “Was it enough?”

  “I am here, naked in front of you. Unharmed.” A soft smile lifted the corners of her lips as her left arm, unwrapped and whole, lifted up from the water. “Healed. I think it was more than enough.”

  His eyes closed for a long breath and she could see the demons still swirling in his head. See how lost and scattered he still was when all she wanted was for him to fight his way back to her. To want to fight his way back to her.

  But maybe she wasn’t enough. Maybe she’d ruined everything. Maybe the past and what he’d suffered would always haunt him, shadowing everything she could offer him.

  Her hand on his cheek lifted, her thumb brushing along the edge of his eye. “I never got to tell you last night—and I should have turned around and come back into your room the moment that I left…”

  Her head shook, fear taking a hold of her, and her hand slipped from his face. Maybe he’d reconsidered everything they were together. Everything she wanted with him. But if she didn’t tell him everything now, she would be giving up without a fight.

  And that’s not who she was anymore.

  Her look dipped down to the bathwater between them for a breath, then she lifted her face to him. “But I didn’t. I didn’t turn around because you’re stubborn and
it makes me want to strangle you, and yet I am just as stubborn. And I was scared. Scared by what I did to you—brought upon you. All those memories.”

  Her heart thundered in her chest. “So I cede. I thought I wanted something for you because it would help you, but I don’t want it if you don’t. I cede because I don’t care if you’re an earl or if you’re a fishmonger. I never did. I don’t care. I only want you. Talen Blackstone. I love you. Not who you could be. Not who you were. You. Do not doubt that.”

  His head dropped forward, hanging for a long moment and avoiding her gaze.

  His silence, his avoidance, stole every last bit of her resolve, her hope.

  His gaze lifted to her, his light blue eyes storming. “If I find a place with you, Ness, which is where I want to be, I have to give up what I am in London. Give up what I am at the Alabaster.”

  A flicker of relief shot through her chest. His hesitation wasn’t that he thought her fickle. That he thought her love depended upon his station in life. “Which is what?”

  “An arse. A man with little compassion. A man with loose integrity. A man not deserving of a woman like you.”

  Her throat clenched. She turned around fully in the tight tub, shifting to balance on her knees. “Talen, you don’t need to give up anything for me.”

  “But I want to. That is the difference. I want my place in this world to be with you. With you where I can laugh and be free and not be constantly glancing over my shoulder, searching for the next man trying to take me down. I want simple. I want a life where seeing you puts a smile on my face and I don’t have to fight it, don’t have to hide it in order to keep you safe. I want to lie under the night sky with you in peace.”

  Her eyes went wide, the spark in her chest exploding. “You want to be my hero, don’t you?”

  The right half of his face lifted, close to pained. “Maybe I do.”

  She splashed forward in the tub, her hands clasping around his face. “Talen, you already are. I’ve just been waiting for you to admit to it.”

  He reached out, grabbing the full of her wet body and yanking her out of the tub, dragging her onto him as he stood, soaking his shirt, his trousers. His lips found hers as her slippery feet found traction on the wet floor.