Page 49 of Greed: The Savage
A haze of crimson rage dropped over his vision, blinding him.
When it cleared, Addien was giving him a strange look. “You all right, Malric?”
Was she mad? “Am I…?” The rest wouldn’t come.
He tried again. “Am I—bloody all right?”
The look she gave him said she already knew his answer—and that it wasn’t good.
“Dynevor’s going to sack us,” she said.
“I don’t want to speak about Dynevor,” he gritted out.
“Yeah, because you can afford to be sacked and thrown in the streets. You ain’t going to end up on any streets like I am.”
This is what she’d worry about. Thornwick looked incredulously at her. She’d been handled by Lord Dunworthy and worried instead about her future at the Devil’s Den?
“Did he rape you?” Thornwick bluntly asked the question that had tortured him since he caught sight of her limping through the baroness’s gardens.
Her brow wrinkled the way it ought if she was confused about a question that didn’t deserve to be asked. As if she hadn’t had a face-to-face meeting with the baroness’s brother and found herself subsequently assaulted, all while Thornwick had been occupied with the tiresome widow.
“I asked a question, Addien,” he snapped.
Dread and rage lent his voice a harsh, hoarse quality.
“Dunworthy?” she asked. She snorted. “Nah, I handled him.”
He stared incredulously at the unfazed spitfire. Staring at her, it was all too easy to believe her disaffected tones, ones that were both fatally amused and insulted. But Thornwick stared so penetratingly at her that he saw the show she put on.
God, she was breathtakingly proud and as much as he wanted to hold her close, she’d hate him for it. Granted, she hated him anyway and already. But he had too much damned respect for her to not allow the woman her pride.
Only selfish bastards sought comfort from women who’d been assaulted to make themselves feel better. That experience hadn’t been about Thornwick, but rather her. As such, he took his cues from Addien and looked outside.
“I’m going to hang,” Addien said after a while.
Her quiet pronouncement drew his focus from the passing window scene of Grosvenor’s Square, giving way to the outskirts of respectable London.
He stared at her with a question in his eyes.
“Hanged.” She made a motion of holding a rope and tilting her neck to the side in a macabre rendition of the scene described.
He snorted.
“I never took you for the melodramatic sort,” he drawled.
Addien glared at him. “And I did take you as the entitled, privileged nob who doesn’t know shite about anything.”
His shoulders tensed.
“I hit a lord. I hit the viscount,” she hissed through her teeth. As she spoke, her voice grew increasingly pitchy and panicked. “People like me don’t put their hands on a noble person for anything. We get the noose.”
And it was a humbling moment where he was laid low for a second time this day, to discover how right Addien was. Thornwick did come from a place of privilege. His elevated status shielded him from everything except maybe murder. And even that with the right connections and money and power exchanged, maybe not even that.
It haunted him that she, his undaunted warrior princess, should show her first cracks.
“Do you believe I’d let you hang?” he asked quietly.
Whether it was the question or the tone, something in her panic stilled.
