Page 104 of The Hunter
The chains clinked ominously as he pulled them from around the bars, one by one, as though each link represented the last of the minutes in which she had to live. The gate swung open, and Dorshaw oozed into the small room.
He studied her with the most terrifying gaze. He looked at her in the way she imagined a proud father would regard his grown progeny, a strange mixture of accomplishment and anticipation for the future.
“For a moment there, I thought you’d slipped through my fingers, Miss LeCour,” he said pleasantly. “But with Argent at Lord Thurston’s, I knew you’d be vulnerable.” Turning, he secured the chain again, wrapping it twice around the bars, and clipped a lock the size of her hand through the links. Then, he set about turning the wicks up on the lanterns that were set in both of the far corners of the small room, flicking his gaze back and forth from her to them and then adjusting. She’d seen Mr. Howard, the stage manager, do something quite similar before each performance.
Millie wondered what sort of horrific production Mr. Dorshaw had planned for the evening and a succession of tremors overtook her.
“Where is my son?” she demanded in a surprisingly steady voice. “What have you done with Jakub?”
Plucking his white gloves from thin, graceful fingers, he regarded her from beneath his lashes with a cryptic smile. Small lacerations interrupted his handsome visage, none of them deep enough to scar, but they added to his menace. “I assure you, I don’t know where your son is at this precise moment.”
“If you’ve so much as touched him, I’ll see your heart separated from your chest,” she threatened, surging against her chains.
More of the mortar gave way, but if Dorshaw noticed, he didn’t mention it.
Lust flared in his eyes. Lust, possession, and unholy anticipation. She’d seen it before, on the face of a different assassin, but she’d welcomed it then.
He sidled closer, that terrible little smile lifting the corner of his split lip. “My, my, Millie, does Argent know how fierce you are? How merciless? Is that why he wanted you so badly, I wonder?”
Wanted… past tense. Millie couldn’t fathom why that should matter at a time like this, why she would even mark it, but she did, and it pierced her like a hunter’s arrow.
“Where is my son?” she screamed at him, kicking out, but falling short as he stood just out of reach.
“I didn’t lie to you.” He shrugged, his expression never changing. “I don’t know where your son is, I never had him to begin with. I imagine he’s back at the Blackwell residence by now.”
It was relief that did her legs in. She sagged against her chains until her shoulders protested. “Oh thank you, God,” she whispered.
“Don’t thank Him just yet, perhaps save that for when you meet Him.” Dorshaw strolled to the left wall and removed a gray stone, uncovering a generous nook. From within it, he pulled a satchel and replaced the stone. The satchel he set on the long table, and each instrument he withdrew from it was more horrifying than the last.
Millie’s eyes widened and her heart leaped another increment with the appearance of every new item. A bone saw, a hand drill, a scalpel, some sort of forceps, and a few things she’d never seen before and couldn’t comprehend. Dorshaw was a madman with a doctor’s implements.
In that momentshe knew. She knew he was the man who’d killed Agnes all those years ago. Knew that he’d left her friend’s womb and her own bloodied gloves for the police to find.
“Why do you do this?” she asked. “How can you be so evil?”
“It’s my vocation,” he explained patiently as he organized his tools with the precision of a physician. “We all have to eat, don’t we?” He let the disgusting implication of that statement hang in the air, and Millie felt the blood drain from her face.
“If this is nothing but a bargain for you, might we strike another?” It had worked for her before. If money was his motivation, she’d give him everything she had.
He tossed her an apologetic look. “It’s too late for that sort of thing.”
“Why?”
“Because, my darling, what we have here is a triangle of Olympian proportions.”
Millie shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“We all have our singular talents, don’t we?” He picked up the scalpel and turned to her. “And yours, dear lady, is capturing the heart. I’ve seen you do it on stage, delivering your lines in such a way that by intermission, everyone is already besotted with you, including myself, I’m not ashamed to admit. I’ve watched you on many occasions.” On any other face, his sly smile would have been charming. But as he moved closer, Millie’s blood turned to ice.
“But your talents reach beyond that, don’t they?” he continued. “You beguile men. You understand them. You’ve made a boy that is not of your body love you as fiercely as he would any mother. You’ve stolen the heart of the man evenIwas convinced was the most coldhearted, unfeeling killer in the empire. To be loved by the frigid, disciplined Christopher Argent… what must that be like?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Millie spat. “He doesn’t love me. We had a… physical arrangement, that is all.”
He laughed then, a musical, happy sound, ruptured by the stones. The echoes of his mirth turned demonic and brought unhallowed tears to Millie’s eyes. “Don’t be a willfully blind fool,” he said tenderly, approaching her from the side this time to avoid the lash of her foot. “You have, indeed, beguiled the poor man, so much so that he doesn’t even know which end is up anymore.”
Reaching out, he caressed her cheek with the back of his fingers, and she flinched away from him, though her chains held her fast. “So lovely,” he whispered.
Millie wrenched her neck as far away as she could. “You disgust me.”
