Chloe (Made Men, #3)(53)

The coppery taste of blood gathered in his mouth. How accommodating. He amassed a glob of blood on his tongue and sent it flying at the commodious mammoth. Then he grinned, no doubt looking utterly ridiculous with crimson covering his teeth and dribbling down his chin.

The man growled, his hand flexing around the knife. “I can make you cry. I can make you beg for your life.”

Grey’s grin turned into a grimace as the knife dug into his shoulder. He was accustomed to pain. He could handle it.

He shut his eyes as the blade slowly began tearing a jagged trail across his chest like a sash, agonizingly deep. Every inch was unbearable. His hands fisted and his teeth ached from the pressure of his jaw, but hell if he would scream so easily. Not out loud, at any rate.

Progress on the new canal halted midway through.

“Rather unsporting to stop now,” Grey forced out. “Carry on.” Get the bloody thing over with! was what he meant to say.

He heard voices, people arguing, and then liquid was splashed over the wound, rendering the pain a hair past excruciating. A moment later, the knife was back to finish its work.

The rut the colossus was gouging reached his cracked ribs, and soon, Grey was growling through gritted teeth. His were not the torturous screams Johnny’s had been. Those would come later—he had no doubt—but not yet.

He was distantly aware of a door swinging open and the knife being lifted, but by then he was fading in and out of consciousness. Reality rippled into obscurity. Only the pain kept him rooted in the present, reminding him where he was and what was happening to him.

There was so much blood. He felt it streaming off his torso like a damned waterfall onto the table, but he couldn’t open his eyes to survey the damage. He hadn’t the strength. He had been held in a cell without food and with very little water for days. How could they possibly expect him to rattle off the twenty-two names if he hadn’t the strength to speak?

Of course, he would cut out his own tongue before he gave them a single syllable.

“Greydon!”

The Earl of Grenville’s voice echoed in his head, but Grenville was still in Calais, heading up the other team there. Grey must be dying or already dead.

“Too fast,” he mumbled. “Should hurt more. Don’t deserve—”

“Greydon, goddammit, pull yourself together. It’s merely a flesh wound!”

It was just like Grenville to understate the circumstances. Control panic, he always said, control the situation.

Grey laughed feebly, but it cost him. The pain was monstrous. His fractured bones vied for precedence over the nasty geyser of blood across his chest. Then he was sinking again into the black depths of unconsciousness where the pain ebbed, where the duty and disappointments of this life slipped away to nothingness. There were no more shadows to chase, innocents to protect, or king and country to defend. He had been waiting some time for this kind of black abyss to swallow him up.

Now he let it, gladly.





One





London 1819





Arctic winds cut through London, exacerbating an already harsh winter and causing the snows of February to linger into March. The cobblestones were transformed into a generous layer of muddy slush as horses and carriages passed through the streets with their usual ferocity. The gray sky, thick fog, and slush, which splattered over anything and everything daring to venture out of doors, quickly turned the beautiful capital into a dirty heap of depression.

Kathryn understood exactly why so many decided to quit such a condensed package of cold, miserable filth for the solitude of the country or warmth of Italy.

They were sane.

The unlucky few who were forced to stay or too dense to leave would not part with the warmth of their own parlors without promise of diversion in a well-lit, fashionable, and quite clean venue. Kathryn might have been born with enough brains to avoid London’s winters, but she had never had the best of luck, which was why she, along with a couple hundred of her peers, had crammed into Covent Garden to attend an opera they had all been to before.

Kathryn sat patiently in her seat well into the second aria as the latecomers straggled in to take their seats. However, now that everyone was nicely settled and properly pretending to enjoy the production below, Kathryn was slipping out. Thankfully, Lord Huntly and her mother, Lady Grenville, were seated in front of her, so they shouldn’t see her leave. As for the gentleman sitting next to her, well, he ought to wake up in about half an hour.

Kathryn had business to tend to that she had been painstakingly piecing together for weeks, important business for the Home Office. The Home Office might not exactly be aware she was taking care of it for them, but it was something they would be grateful to have done once it was off their plate. Surely.

She was bored with the little tasks the Home Office had been handing her, so she had taken the file from the Director of Covert Affairs’ desk when she had brought him the fruitcakes. Father’s old military crony, he might be; organized, he was not. He hadn’t even noticed it missing. Now she finally had an adventure amidst the humdrum of the London season.

And here she thought this would be just another year of enduring pitying glances and barely veiled insults toward being six and twenty and unwed. As if that were all a female could want in life. A man who could tempt Kathryn to a life of boring matronly duties did not exist, not after the horrors her aunt had faced under a husband’s booted heel.