Page 72 of A Wicked Duke's Arranged Marriage
He loved her past the point of distraction, past the ghost of his past.
“And now I might lose her,” he whispered, his voice cracking.
All because he had been too blind to see the threat in front of him. All because he had been too distracted and arrogant even to consider that Catherine might be capable of doing what she had.
“Your sister …”
How had he missed it?
Maybe it might have been excused in the beginning, before she had made that first pass at him. Before she had threatened Josephine.
But after?
“I should have put the pieces together,” he groaned, the whisky sloshing in the bottle as he lifted his opposite hand to scrub it down his face. “I should have known. I should have protected her!”
Like he’d failed to protect Martha.
Now, the price of two lives might be on his hands.
His breathing was ragged, his heart stuttering in his chest as he tried to blot out the pressing dread that gathered around him. As he tried to convince himself not to drown himself in that bottle in his hand.
“I thought I might find you here.”
Henry jumped as Simon entered the room, his face a mask of understanding and concern as he looked from Martha’s portrait to Henry.
“Is it over?” Henry asked hollowly, that beat of his heart in his chest almost ceasing then and there.
Simon’s eyebrows rose, his eyes darting one more time before understanding fully dawned.
“Henry … the physician came out a half hour past. Has no one come to tell you?”
Henry staggered, his hand catching the wall as he felt those iron fingers in his chest constrict even further.
No, no one had come to tell him. But they were probably too consumed with their own grief, with–
“Catherine was taken to the asylum. She’s being admitted under her husband’s permission now.”
Henry didn’t care about Catherine, though he knew he should. The knowledge of what she had done, what she had done again, rendered any familial concern nonexistent in its wake.
“And Josephine is fine. The doctor packed the wound, Henry. She stopped bleeding. She woke up about a half hour ago. She was stable and alert. Her parents were filling her in on what had happened.”
She was stable and alert.
She was stable and alert.
She was stable!
Everything else Simon was trying to say fell to the wayside, a nondescript hum in the back of Henry’s mind as those words punctured through the seal of his grief.
She was alive.
He stumbled forward, the bottle of whisky shoved forward into Simon’s chest thoughtlessly.
She was alive.
Simon spoke from behind him as Henry blindly left the room, but whatever he said was lost to Henry. Whatever he called after him was just the buzzing of bees.
All he could think about was Josephine.
