Page 79 of The Hunter
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
Millie had been right when she’d assumed Argent had a lair. Dark, cold, and frightening, it was everything she’d imagined it to have been but for one detail. It happened to be located in one of the grandest ballrooms she’d ever ventured into. Even the windows stood two stories high, heavy drapes drawn, and the ivory ceiling with gold embellishments and handpainted icons vaulted higher still. The two grand chandeliers required to light the immense length of the space dripped with expensive crystal and, tragically, more than a few cobwebs.
Her slippers made a forlorn sound as she glided to one of the flickering gas lamps and turned the intricate knob. The flame gleamed off the strange and terrible tools of his trade. Blades of every conceivable length hung from mounts on the wall. Pistols rested on a misshapen stand covered with black velvet that Millie suspected had once been a pianoforte. Other things, for which she couldn’t even begin to imagine their uses, hung from hooks or rested on stands, just waiting to inflict themselves on someone’s flesh.
Which of these, she wondered, would he have used to end her life? The weapons, already macabre, took on a menacing gleam, and Millie’s first instinct was to cringe away. To flee this place.
Turning from the wall of artillery, she gasped as hulking shadows rose from the glossy, dark wood floor, the effigies of violent practice, human-sized statuary upon which to enact the art of execution.
Why had he wanted her to come here, to meet him in this terrible place?
Upon returning from her apartments, his carriage weighted down with a few days’ worth of clothing and sundries, he’d ordered her to convene with him in the grand ballroom alone within ten minutes.
Apparently, he was fond of that distinction of time. Ten minutes.
Perhaps he felt the most at ease in this room, surrounded by his arsenal. Maybe he didn’t want her to forget who he was,whathe was, whilst they formulated a plan on how to rid her of those who would see her dead.
She supposed there were many who would be revolted by this room and its contents, and maybe she ought to be. But somehow, during all of this, Millie had begun to leave her trepidation of Christopher Argent by the wayside. Strange, opaque emotions began to take the place of her apprehension. Some she dare not name, and others she shouldn’t allow herself to explore.
Curiosity chief among them.
Stepping forward, she reached trembling fingers toward the rack of knives, selecting one with a large handle and a wicked-looking blade. It was heavier than she’d expected. The handle cool and unyielding beneath her grip. It felt dangerous to hold it, as though it made her a more treacherous person. And, she supposed, it did.
Lifting the blade up to the light, she caught her reflection within it. Just one wide eye and a pale cheekbone. What must it be like, she wondered, to take a life? To thrust such an innocuous device into someone’s flesh, severing their veins and spilling their life’s blood on the ground.
Her reflection tightened, as the thought made her want to weep. It must be just dreadful. To gaze upon the fear in someone’s eyes, to see their pain, to witness the moment they knew their life was over. To witness their regrets. No wonder Argent was so cold, so passionless. How could he perform his hateful employment otherwise?
He’d been unable to execute his duty the night he’d come for her. What had truly stayed his hand? He’d admitted that his physical desire for her was the impetus for her survival. Deep down, Millie knew she had to believe it was more than that. That somewhere in his broken heart, Christopher Argent didn’t want to be an assassin. That he found no pleasure in the taking of a life, but was merely a victim of circumstance and the product of a society that had failed him, utterly.
Was she being a fool? Was she excusing an evil man because he was going to do an evil thing on her behalf?
What did that say about her own culpability?
Millie’s sad sigh echoed back at her as she pushed the thought from her mind. This room was the most well used in the entire spare mansion, she observed as she turned to inspect it. Helivedhere. His very essence permeated the warm shades of the walls and turned them into something eerie. If Millie had to conjure a manifestation of his mind, of Argent’s very existence, this grand ballroom would be it. Bones and structure of rare beauty, indeed, of flawless design and composition. A dark and phantasmal interior, unable to fulfill its intended glory because instruments of death, of cold violence and merciless destruction, dominated the entire vast room until it was filled with emptiness and the expectation of pain and blood.
Even the shadows.
It was from one of those shadows that Argent melted like a silent apparition. His cold blue eyes glinted like the steel in her hand from an expression equally as hard.
Startled, Millie gasped when she saw him, the knife slipping from her fingers and clattering to the floor with an ominous echo. Her mouth opened, though no sound escaped, as she took in the pure awe-inspiring vision before her. Though she’d given her body to the man, she’d never truly had the opportunity toseehim.
Not like this.
Naked to the waist, he wore only a pair of exotic-looking blue silk trousers that flowed about his long, thick legs as though to hide their movement. Bare arms bulged at his sides from the golden slopes of his massive shoulders. Millie’s mouth went dry as moisture collected somewhere lower. So many, many scars marked him. His thick torso, ribbed with strength and muscle, was a lesson in violence. Gashes interrupted his ribs and the hard, straining ridges of his stomach. And, dear God, his shoulder and the swell of the bicep below it was a webbed mess of gnarled skin. Like a burn, but perhaps worse.
This was a man who evoked fear in the hearts of all who would see him thus. So why not her? Why did the thrill that washed her spine in shivers have nothing to do with apprehension?
Because she hadn’t known. Hadn’t had a clue that he was this—thisbeautiful.
“Did I alarm you?” he asked, correctly interpreting the cause of her astonishment.
“A-a little,” she confessed. It was a very different thing, Millie realized, tofeelthe strength of a body and togazeupon it. Many times over the handful of days she’d known Christopher Argent, his unequaled size and might had been manifest to her touch. In the way his hands gripped her. In the swells of his arms beneath his coat, or the hard planes of unyielding muscle she pressed her cheek against in order to hear his heart beating.
But to appreciate his raw, brutal masculinity with only the sense of sight was a truly unparalleled experience. He was, in a word,magnificent. Again he evoked the image of a fallen angel, for it seemed to Millie that such obvious physical power could belong to no mortal man. That here in the realm of coarse and inelegant humanity, such precise and chiseled limbs could not exist unless shaped of some other earth than flesh. Marble, perhaps. Or iron.
Hadn’t he mentioned that he’d worked forced labor on the railway? He had been forged in the quarries and iron yards of prison.
“Do I frighten you?” He stalked closer, taking a circular approach instead of a straight line.
