Page 85 of The Devil in Her Bed
“Chandler. Can you not at least—”
“I saidno, Francesca.” The hard ire in his voiceechoed off the walls and battered her with fractals of rejection.
“If you cannot be agreeable, then at least be sensible for once. I will contact you when I can.”
Turning, he slammed the door behind him, right in her face.
She stared at the iron ingots in the frame and counted the scratches from untold years of wear as she finished her sentence.
“Can you not at least kiss me goodbye?”
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
It fucking ended tonight. One way or another, this saga was done, and blood would be spilled. Final blood.
Chandler kept a stranglehold on his emotion until he’d put enough distance between him and Francesca. From that goddamned letter.
He wandered at a fast clop through the city, searching for a place for his wrath to land.
When other people ran from danger, Chandler had always found the grit within himself to run toward it. He was the sort of man to douse a raging fire, or to charge someone with a weapon. He was the antithesis of chaos and at his best in a crisis. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t look away from pain, horror, blood, or suffering. Nothing overwhelmed him, or repulsed him, or disturbed him so much that he could not confront it.
He’d wager he’d seen just about everything and hefound a certain Viking-like freedom in the knowledge that his stars were cursed. That the fates would fuck him every time he reached for happiness, and so the best he could hope for was to never again be shot in the back.
When his enemies claimed him, which was an inevitability, they’d stare the Devil of Dorset in the eyes, and he’d take a fair share back to hell with him.
But for the first time since Mont Claire, he retreated. He ran away. He fled.
His first instinct had been to go to ground. Not because he wanted to hide, but because he needed a place to come apart. The rage injected into his veins could only be released by destruction no less than biblical. He wanted to break something. Someone. No, he wanted to dismantle the entire city, burn the empire to the ground.
And it was from that instinct that he fled, just as much as anything else.
But… where to run to? He had more dwellings than most, one for each of his personas. In any one of them he could find a hammer. He could topple things, punch them, dismantle and break them. He could pit his strength against the world and exhaust this need with destructive violence.
He’d start with the mirrors.
Ultimately, he decided against that. Though a temper tantrum of epic proportions would certainly wear him out enough to make him feel somewhat better, it would weaken him. And he could not afford to be weak, not if he was going to save Francesca. To sacrifice himself for her.
It was what they both deserved.
Chandler closed his eyes and summoned her to mind. For all she’d been through, all she’d survived, to reach her age with such vivacious ambition… it was no small feat. When so many allowed their tragedies to defeat them, she’d become stronger.
Stronger than him in many ways. Certainly, he was physically more powerful, but even that didn’t seem to faze her. She used her grace and skill, her beauty and her brilliance to fell him. And beyond that, she’d managed to do what he never could.
Not just to survive, but to truly live.
To live safe in the knowledge that none of this was her fault.
She might have lost her family, but she surrounded herself with friends just as close. People of rare substance and quality. She’d a title of her own, a fortune, an education, and the enviable status of being both the quarry and the heroine.
She’d done it through sheer strength of character.
And what had he accomplished compared with that? He couldn’t even claim anidentitylet alone a life.
Yes, he technically had in his possession many properties, but he’d never had ahome.
He could claim a few things, however. Like the blood of innumerable innocents on his hands, an accursed soul, and…
A responsibility.
