Page 62 of Ravished By the Revenant

The door closes. The lock turns. It sounds heavy. Expensive even.

I stand there and breathe and try really, really hard not to cry, because the bastard would probably like that.

“Okay,” I tell the wine. “Team meeting.”

The wine says nothing. God, I miss my cat.

I don’t know how much time passes, because in order to tell time I’d need windows and I’ve been robbed of mine. Long enough that I inventory the cellar twice. Long enough that my stomach starts rumbling.

Nobody brings food. I’m not sure I could eat it anyway. Every time I picture chewing, I picture the trout going cold on the table at Blackthorn Keep, the chair beside Aldric’s sitting empty, and my throat just closes up shop.

He’ll know by now. He’ll have walked to the lake looking for me. Maybe he’ll have found the phone.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” I whisper to a bottle of Barolo. “You hear me? They have guns. You have a sword. This isn’t a fair⁠—”

Somewhere above me, something thuds.

I freeze, my ears straining. The cabin is old-money solid. It’s thick, and I’m in a cellar, and maybe I imagined it.

Another thud. This one’s heavier. A piece of furniture, or a body meeting a wall? Then voices. They’re muffled, but rising, and there’s something there I’ve never heard from Marco’s men before.

Fear.

Boots hammer across the floor overhead, fast, scattering in different directions. A man shouts something in Italian too strangled to translate, and something made of glass explodes—the chandelier, the sliding doors, I can’t tell. I can’t tell what the hell is going on, and my heart is climbing my ribs like a ladder because either the mob war finally came home to Marco or…

Or.

There’s a gunshot, and I’m off the chair before I tell my legs to move.

“HEY!” I’m at the top of the stairs, banging both of my fists against the door. “Hey! What’s going on? What was that? Somebody answer me!”

Nothing. My knuckles sting, but I just hit the door harder.

“I swear to god, if anyone can hear me—what’s happening up there? WHO GOT SHOT?”

Silence. Then… footsteps.

Slow, even, unhurried footsteps crossing the floor toward the cellar door, each one landing with a thud that makes the wine bottles hum faintly in their racks. I take two steps back.

Maybe calling out was a terrible idea. Maybe I should’ve kept my mouth shut. What if it’s something worse than Marco? Rival mobsters or scorned business partners. Will I be sleeping with the fish in Aldric’s lake?

The lock turns and the door swings open. They must’ve taken out the light in whatever scuffle just occurred, so all I get is a silhouette filling the frame. A man. A tall man.

A very, very tall man, standing in the shadows.

33

ALDRIC

The greatsword comes off the wall easily, and it feels as if it has never left my hand.

Seven centuries of dust have not touched it—I would not permit that—and the grip settles into my palm much like Clara settles against my side in sleep. I strap the scabbard across my back over my coat. No armor. Armor is for men who fear dying, and I have been denied that particular luxury.

Schmetterling waits on the courtyard wall, a gray shape against the last of the light.

“Guard the keep,” I tell him.

He stares at me, tail still, and for the first time in three hundred years he does not argue.