Page 40 of Bride of the Fae Duke

Now she’d reduced herself to some heartbroken idiot, hurting like hell over a man who would have hurt her far, far worse. She knew, andstillshe couldn’t stop seeing that desolate look in hiseyes. Couldn’t stop feeling his gentle hands on her skin. Couldn’t stop hearing him, most of all –I’ll take care of you, Eleanor.

Bastard.

She turned onto her back, staring unseeing at the ceiling. The facts. She couldn’t get lost in the mire of her feelings now; she had to stick with thefacts. No curse. Six deaths. Simple, damning truths, and so …

So Othrys Locke had to be a murderer.

Why, then, wouldn’t her heart accept it? Why was that persistent itch of doubt still gnawing at the back of her mind, as if he hadn’ttoldher in so many words what was going on.I’ll never be the victim here …

Although that was, admittedly, an odd thing to say.

She blinked as the thought took root – a desperate, nonsensical thought, but a strange one all the same, a little anomaly waiting to be explained. Because if her husband had single-handedly murdered his six previous wives – if he had been the one to drown Jeanne in the marshes, the one to whack Alis on the head in the stables – then shouldn’t he be going out of his way to paint himself as a victim, too?

It would be rather stupid, wouldn’t it, to call himself a perpetrator to her very face? And whatever Othrys Locke may be, he wasn’t stupid.

So then … why had he said it?

She scrambled upright on the bed as thoughts rushed in, as if that tiny inkling of doubt had been enough to open the floodgates. No curse, six deaths … but she’d had that discussion with Anne before, hadn’t she, back at the Eyestone household? And Anne had cited guard reports. Outcomes of the investigations that had made their way into the hands of every gossiping Elidian – because of course the law had been suspicious about the deaths in Locke Manor, too, and yet theguards had found that the duke had not even been around on the day Rosamund had taken her own life in the attic …

They might have been wrong, of course.

But what … what if they hadn’t been?

What if, rather than assuming her husband must be a violent killer, she took a moment to consider the wild, disturbing possibility that he may be … innocent?

Her heart was a pounding drum against her ribs as she swung her legs out of bed and blinked at the clarity of her own uncoiling thoughts. It was hard to even let herself stray this way.He loved me, Mother still keened in her memory, broken and delusional … but divines be damned, Nellie was not Mother, Othrys was not Father, and why,whyhad she immediately assumed that that whole dratted history was doomed to repeat itself?

If Othrys was innocent, then someone else had killed his wives.

Which seemed nonsensical, too. Who in the world would have a motive to do such a dreadful thing? And yet … was it that much more nonsensical than gentle, dutiful, principled Othrys Locke murdering six innocent women?

The world seemed to slide off-kilter around her – slipping sideways, inside out, in all directions at once.

Who else?

Who had been around the family all this time? Who had been the first to blame the curse for the rising death toll, the last to have seen at least one of the previous ladies alive? Who had tried to getherout of the house, too, from the very first day she’d set foot on the doorstep?

But why …

You could join Uncle Ambrose.

And just like that, she understood.

As if in a dream, her legs lifted her from the bed, sent her floating from her bedroom and into the corridor that stretchedthrough the full back wing of the house. There, mere steps away, was the door to the landing. The door that gave access to the stairs, the entry hall, the only way out of the building …

She wrapped her hand around the doorknob despite knowing with sudden, bottomless certainty what would happen.

Indeed, it didn’t turn.

It was midsummer day, there was no other living soul in the house … and she and Anne had been locked into their rooms, like prisoners awaiting their sentence.

Chapter 14

Othrysneededalongday of midsummer revelry like he needed another funeral – that was to say, he’d sell his soul to be able to avoid the blasted jollity and merrymaking on this particular day.

He hadn’t slept for more than two hours. He’d barely eaten breakfast. How in the world he’d completed his morning rituals without storming into his wife’s bedroom to beg her forgiveness, he no longer knew; perhaps it was the knowledge that she needed his regret over their miserable dinner even less than that bloody funeral.

They had a deal, after all. Evenings and nothing else.

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