Page 26 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
“What happened here?” he asked her evenly.
Pru felt her face crumple with confusion. He didn’t sound like himself. Where was the accent from before? Rough and low-born.
She’d have recognizedthataccent anywhere.
Thisman spoke like his betters. Was she going mad, perhaps? Was her desperation and shock so prescient that she’d summoned a memory and layered it over reality?
“Prudence, you answer him,” her father barked.
“I-I was waiting for Father to gather me for the ceremony,” she recounted, wanting to appease him.Needingto explain. It was so important he didn’t think she had anything to do with this. No one wouldreallybelieve that she would commit murder, would they? “There was a knock on my door and a note pushed under,” she continued. “The note was from George.” She pointed at the dead man at her feet and immediately wished she hadn’t looked down.
Oh God. She’d thought the wedding was the worst thing that would happen to her today. She’d never been so wrong in her life.
How did so much blood belong in one body? How would she ever forget the sight of it? She doubted she could even look at her own veins the same way.
“Look at me,” the inspector ordered. “What did the note say?”
“That he had to see me. That he had to apologize.”
“Apologize,” he echoed. “Had you reason to be angry with the Earl of Sutherland?”
Her brow furrowed and she cast an accusatory look at him. “YouknowI did.”
“How wouldheknow?” her father demanded. “You’ve never been introduced.”
A glint of warning frosted the inspector’s eyes impossibly colder.Don’t.It warned.Don’t ruin us both.
“I meant…” Pru turned to her father. “Y-youdid. I told you George was unfaithful, and you insisted I marry him regardless.”
Her father, a powerful man with the build of a baker who enjoyed his own work, put up his hands against Morley’s attention. Such large hands for such fine white gloves. “It was little more than wild oats,” he defended George. “And Prudence has always been a romantic, fanciful creature. I wasn’t about to see her future ruined by rumor.”
“Itwasn’trumor,” she argued, even though everything inside of herself told her not to. “Everyone knows George had bastards. He conducted a very public affair with Lady Jessica Morton. And yet you insisted I invite her to the wedding.”
Why was she having this discussion covered in blood? When all she wanted to do was flee. Or fling herself into the inspector’s arms.
She knew how strong they were. How capable they’d be of carrying the weight threatening to drag her beneath the surface of an ocean of despair and desperation.
She had to tell him—
“And so, you came to meet him before the ceremony,” the Chief Inspector prompted very gently, as if he were talking to a child. “You came to receive his apology. Then what? What did he say to make you angry?”
She shook her head with such vehemence her eyes couldn’t keep up. The beautiful Chief Inspector became a golden blur. “Nothing! He said nothing. I opened the door and he was… like this.” She gestured to George’s body, unable to look down again. “Blood poured everywhere, the knife was already in his neck. He was rolling on the floor trying to pull it out, so I ran to him and tried to help. I was thinking if he took it out, it would bleed that much more. That maybe he should keep it in. I was trying to hold it.”
“Nonsense, you’d put it there!” her brother-in-law accused, jabbing his finger toward her. William’s features were purple with rage, his thinning ashen hair stuck out in disarray. He wasn’t a large man, but he was tall, imposing. And not for the first time, Pru wanted to shrink away from him.
How did Honoria stand him?
“I wastryingtostopthe bleeding.” She turned to Morley, beseeching him. “I know it was silly, I don’t know why I thought I could. But I had to try, didn’t I? He wasdying. And finally, he dislodged the knife and blood sprayed…” She held out her arms to show him. “And he was gone.”
“That’s not what it looked like when I came in,” William hissed through his disorganized teeth. “She was pushing the knife into his struggling body. He was thrashing about and she was sliding it into his neck.”
“I never!”
“If the Earl took the knife out of his own neck, how did you come to be holding it?” The Chief Inspector held his hand up against further comment from William while he assessed her from deep set narrowed eyes.
His suspicion lancing through her like a spear thrown by an Olympian.
Don’t you remember me?she wanted to ask him. In the middle of this lake of blood. All she wanted was to go to him. He had to understand why—
