Page 21 of The Business of Blood
Tears? No.
Dread? Perhaps.
Croft.
Croft had wrapped one arm around my waist and the other about my chest, pulling me from the doorway that day. Away from Mary. He’d said I’d been screaming. I didn’t remember making a sound. When I fought him, he’d bent the other arm at my throat, effectively immobilizing me by sheer necessity for breath.
I could not feel him now. I could not smell his fragrant tobacco nor hear his thick, exasperated voice.
Thissomeone was above me. I was on the ground. Incense and exotic, aromatic oils cloyed at my senses, beckoning me away from the room I visited in so many nightmares.
No, this wasnotCroft subduing me at the doorway to 13 Miller’s Court. This pressure also burned my throat. Burned and stung and…
A mortifying whimper of pain escaped me, and the fingers at my throat tightened.
The heavy lids of deceptively gentle amber-grey eyes met mine as the darkness began to recede.
“Do not move, Fiona.” A familiar, accented voice slid into my ear with the ease of a honed blade. “If you do, I shall hurt you irreparably, and neither of us wants that.”
He did hurt me then.
The sharp pain in my neck was more a jab than a slice and did a great deal to clear the dreamy fog from my vision.
I blinked up at the Hammer rapidly, my mind following at a slower pace. The cloudy darkness of the nightmare lingered for longer than I wanted to bear.
Once I realized that his hold on my neck was meant to steady and not to strangle, the tension in my body eased if only enough to allow facts to reveal themselves in no particular order of importance.
I was in a place foreign to me.
Gold had always been something the Hammer dealt in, not decorated with. In my experience, he painted his world in varying shades of red. Crimson wallpaper for the ladies in his employ, wine for his customers, and blood for his enemies.
This cavernous room, foiled in butter-soft arabesque paper contrasted with bold, bronze draperies made me absurdly question if I were even in London anymore. It’d the feel of a country chamber—earthy, spacious, and pleasantly perfumed.
I wanted to look around, but another sharp pain brought more alarming actualities into focus.
I lay on a carpet, sprawled on my back.
The Hammer had cropped his dark hair very close to his head, as though to hide its propensity to curl. Though, why I noted the detail before my own state of undress would likely remain a mystery to me.
Warmth from a fire glowed over the right side of my body, even though I wore no pelisse.
Or blouse.
I gasped and would have covered my breasts, only half-concealed by my corset, if the Hammer’s body weren’t hunched over my prone form, imprisoning my limbs as well as he could whilst sticking my neck with a needle thrice more to stitch it closed.
“You are fortunate my father was a doctor back in Russia,” he informed me blithely, his gaze flickering to mine before focusing on his work. “I learned many things from him. How to slice flesh in the correct way, and how to stitch it back together.”
When confronted with a virile, attractive, but unthreatening magnetism such as his, one’s immediate response upon meeting the Hammer was often an overwhelming desire to hold him in one’s good graces.
Until he quirked a lip and said something like, “You are unfortunate, however, that I have less opportunity to practice stitching than slicing, which is why you must remain still, even if this causes you pain.”
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the Hammer’s ever-pleasant expression and illusorily mild, kind eyes had helped him attain unimaginable power.
Where Aidan was beautiful, and Croft brutal, the Hammer’s appeal appeared in hints of the exotic, masterfully crafted with the familiar. His skin was just a bit too golden to be strictly Teutonic. His nose a little too prominent. His eyes tilted down, fringed with long, sooty lashes.
In fact, everything about the Hammer was deliciously lengthy. His limbs, his cheekbones, his fingers…
His influence and ruthlessness.
