Page 104 of The Devil in Her Bed
Seeing his chance to escape, he turned to the door and yanked it open. “I warned you I was a monster. You should have listened, and I shouldn’t have been so blind.”
He slammed out of her room, but she opened the door not a second later.
“You were never a monster,” she called after him, her voice chasing his retreat down the marble stairs. “Do you hear me? You were not a monster, not until tonight.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-SIX
“’Tis done. Though I doona ken whether to offer my condolences or my congratulations.”
Ramsay’s gently delivered pronouncement stirred nothing inside of Chandler.
It should have. The newly appointed Lord Chancellor was, after all, conveying the news that Kenway’s death sentence had been carried out.
Chandler was now the ninth Earl of Devlin. A disgraced lord. King of the ashes.
Earl of emptiness.
Disgusted by his own melancholy, Chandler couldn’t bring himself to face the man he’d come to know and respect over the past two months of pure, unmitigated hell. So he simply nodded his head curtly to signal that he’d marked the words. He remained at the window of his study, looking down over Harigate Square, from one of his father’s—no—one ofhismany West End properties.
One he’d never lived in as a child.
“I was surprised not to see ye at the… event,” Ramsay admitted. “Ye attended every session of the trial, staring at him or, rather, staringthroughhim. I thought ye’d want to see him along to hell.”
“He’d have wanted me to watch him die,” Chandler explained dispassionately. “I wouldn’t dream of granting him the satisfaction.”
“I ken that.” After a hesitant silence, Ramsay asked, “So… what now?”
Chandler tossed a droll glance over his shoulder. “What do you mean, what now?”
“What will ye do next?” Ramsay gave the impression his question was laden with more meaning than mere idle curiosity.
Chandler knew they were skirting the subject they’d studiously avoided these past weeks while they worked together to put the Crimson Council to death forever.
Francesca.
His eyes immediately locked onto the black oak tree in his garden, its foliage ablaze with the vibrant scarlet of autumn. He couldn’t pass that tree and not think of her.
Not burn for one more taste…
He’d always had a well of darkness in his chest. A fathomless bit of emptiness he knew made him incomplete. Other men with this same void sought to fill it with vice or power. Drink or danger. Chandler had attempted all of these at one time or another and had learned early on the futility of it all.
As petite as she was… Francesca had filled that emptiness for a while. Filled his life and his heart tooverflowing, in fact. With the threat of happiness. With hope.
Until Pippa had ripped her out, leaving an unfathomable chasm in her absence. Some bottomless, swirling, arctic abyss that seemed as if it would yawn open and swallow him whole.
He rather wished it would hurry.
He stared at his ghostly reflection in the window. His skin had lost any hint of sun; his eyes were bruised for want of sleep. His muscles ached all the time. He’d lost maybe a stone. A shade gazed back at him. A husk crafted around naught but sinew, bone, and blood with a heart that no longer beat. It merely ticked away the minutes of his increasingly unrecognizable life.
And for what? So he could spend the rest of his days tortured by loss?
Byherloss.
“Will ye go to her?” Ramsay murmured the question. “Francesca.”
At the mention of her name, something within him stirred to life. A dormant and hungry beast. Prowling the cage of his ribs, roaring with possessive hunger. Growling in tormented captivity.
Something like a tiger.
