Page 52 of The Devil in Her Bed
He whirled around. His countenance wasn’t just dark, but demonic. His brow was cruel and his eyes no longer burned. They were cold. Hard. Abysmal. “Are you ready to give me all your answers, Francesca?” He advanced on her, that predatory swagger returning. “Do you want to explain how you survived? What you saw that day? What knowledge you’ve gleaned since then and what you’ve done to get it?” He stopped only when he towered over her. A smarter woman would have stepped back. Retreated. But Francesca wasn’t in the habit of yielding ground. “Are we ready to rip our truths open and bleed them all over each other? Is that what this moment is for?”
They held gazes. Everything both spoken and unspoken filled the spaces between them, threatening to drive them apart.
She looked away first, deciding to yield something else. “It was me the other night. At the safe house…”
He chuffed out a breath. “I won’t ask you where you learned to fight, or to vault, not tonight,” he said wryly. “But I will ask what the hell you were doing there?”
“Same as you. Searching for answers.”
“And?”
“And, what?”
“And did the Lord Chancellor provide you with any?” he asked impatiently.
Francesca chose her words very carefully. “He told me a little about the power structure in the Crimson Council. He said there is a Triad and at the time of the massacre, there was a vacancy in the third spot. As there is right now.” She could feel her own dark desires gathering on her face. “It seems there will be a second opening as well, if fate is kind and the Lord Chancellor hangs.”
“A vacancy…” Chandler tapped his chin thoughtfully, and Francesca wondered how she’d ever thought the large hand with its calluses, rough skin, and a network of veins only dissected by scars could belong to an aristocrat.
“A vacancy they thought to fill with several people we know. Some of whom are dead.”
That sparked his attention. “Such as?”
“Cecelia’s aunt, the obscenely wealthy Henrietta Thistledown, known to all as the Scarlet Lady, for one. Lord Ramsay, for another, as he was the Lord Chancellor’s protégé.”
“Did Ramsay know of this?” he asked alertly.
Francesca shook her head. “He knew nothing of the council until he ran afoul of it.”
“Strange, then, that they’d consider an outsider for their leader.”
“They want power, and he has it in spades.”
His lips twisted into a wry grimace. “Now that Cecelia is the Scarlet Lady, and she’s attached herself to Ramsay, they’ll be an unstoppable force, God save us all.”
Francesca agreed with a fond noise before she lit up with an idea. “Was it possible Cavendish—my father—was a part of the council? That he wanted to be on the Triad?”
Chandler scrutinized her from beneath a lowered brow. “Your father?”
“The Lord Chancellor said that at time of the massacre, the place in the Triad was open to two individuals. He intimated one of themmighthave been the Earl of Mont Claire.”
“And the other?”
“The other was Kenway, which is why I singled him out tonight.”
“FuckingKenway.” Lashing as quickly as a viper, Chandler reached for the glass on the nightstand, turned, and hurled it into the fireplace.
It shattered with a disproportionately loud vibration, echoing his fury through the room before the shards fell to the ground in sharp aftermath.
The fit of pique seemed uncharacteristic, and Francesca desperately wanted to go to him. She sensed that he needed to find his composure, that he wasn’t ready to face her without it, so she waited for several beats before voicing her thoughts.
“Is it possible that the Cavendish household was massacred because they got in the way of what the Earl of Kenway wanted? Not because of the Hargraves?”
He took two deep breaths and then exhaled mightily before touching his chin to his shoulder to look back to her. “It’s a theory.”
“One you’re ready to embrace?” She did her best to keep the hope out of her voice.
“One I’m ready to entertain.”
