Page 59 of Ravished By the Revenant

Half a second is all I get.

The goons are on me before I finish turning. They wrench back one arm, then the other, and I’m kicking and screaming, well aware it’s two hours before Aldric expects me home.

Marco straightens up slowly, smoothing his coat, and his expression isn’t genial anymore. Not at all.

Suddenly, he backhands me.

I never see it coming. My head snaps sideways, and my mouth fills with the taste of copper. Blood trickles over my lips, my chin. My nose is bleeding, my lip is split, and yet I hardly feel it through the shock. In all my time with him, despite the prison of control, despite the small comments that made my hair stand on end, he never once hit me.

“You broke my rib,” Marco says, conversational again, flexing his hand. “When did you become so brazen, Clara?”

I don’t answer. I can’t. My ears are ringing, and blood is dripping off my chin, and my body is just frozen solid. He hit me. He actually hit me.

“Andiamo,” Marco commands his guards.

They turn me toward the treeline. My boots drag furrows through the needles as they force me along, and my phone slips out of my numb fingers, screen up, the last butterfly picture still uploading itself faithfully to the cloud.

The forest swallows us, taking me away from Blackthorn Keep where a dead man is making me dinner.

31

ALDRIC

The mole surrenders at half past four.

I hold the wretched creature by the scruff and consider execution—I have executed for far less—but Clara’s voice lives in my head now, so I carry it to the far edge of the orchard and release it with a warning it does not deserve.

“You live because of a woman,” I tell it. “Reflect on that.”

Schmetterling watches from the fence post, tail curled around his paws, unimpressed by my mercy. He follows me back through the garden where I wash my arms at the well pump. Then he follows me into the kitchen where I build the fire, stationing himself on the flour barrel with his pale eyes fixed on my every movement.

“The first trout is not yours tonight,” I inform him, laying the fish on the cutting board. “You had yours yesterday. Even feudal taxes had limits.”

He blinks at me slowly. He doesn’t care about my limits. He has never once cared about my limits, and in three hundred years, I have never once enforced them, and we both know how this ends.

I fillet the fish the way I demonstrated for Clara, one long draw along the spine, and I catch myself thinking about the moment she walks in. About how she’ll lean in the doorway, and say she’s supervising. She thinks I don’t know that she has a fixation with my forearms. I have known since the first week. I roll my sleeves higher on purpose now. A strategist uses the weapons available to him.

I butter the pan, add wild chives, then crisp the new potatoes she likes, the small ones, in the fat. I set the table in the great hall myself tonight, and I light the candles even though the electric bulb hangs right there.

Finally, I plate the trout, pour the water, and sit.

The chair beside mine stays empty.

I check the tall windows. The shadows of the firs stretch long across the courtyard. Two hours, I told her. It has been closer to three.

“She is photographing insects,” I tell Schmetterling, who has abandoned the flour barrel to sit on her chair, which he usually never does. “She found a butterfly, and then another butterfly, and now she is lying in the lavender making that device take pictures. She loses all sense of time when the little screen is involved. You have seen her. Four hundred photographs of you sleeping. You, sleeping, from nine angles.”

Schmetterling stares at me.

“She is fine.”

He doesn’t blink.

The trout is going cold. I stand, and the chair scrapes back louder than I intend. I’m already moving through the kitchen, then through the garden door, telling myself I’m walking to meet her on the path because dinner is ready. That is all. If I meet her halfway, I will carry her back on my shoulder, and she will call me a gothic something-or-other, and all will be fine.

The path through the forest is empty.

“Clara!”