Page 43 of Captured By the Werewolf Highwaymen

Please, please tell him that’s not what it was.

Rather than say anything to the contrary, Des kept silent.

Again. It was happening again. She wasn’t someone to be desired. Only used for an ulterior purpose. Arthur wanted a broodmare. Des needed a lackey.

The warm joy that had filled her oozed away, replaced by cold and abject despair.

Tears blurred her vision, and she turned to creep away. She prayed they didn’t know she’d overheard them.

She knocked into a narrow little hallway table. It wobbled, but before she could catch it, the unsteady piece of furniture fell to the floor with a clatter.

Dismay barreled into her.

“Ah, fuck,” Des said below.

“Kill her,” Cyrus barked.

Two sets of footsteps thudded on the staircase, heading towards her.

Acidic horror turned to cold fear. Instinct had her running for the panel that concealed the secret passageways. She could find safety there.

She slipped inside and closed the hidden door just as someone reached it. Pounding sounded on the wall.

“Clara, please.” Des’s voice was muffled. “It’s not… We won’t⁠—”

But she didn’t want to hear. She ran through the passageway. The twisting corridors snaked in all directions around her.

Luck had her finding the staircase that led to the ground floor, and she hurried down it. Making her way through the passageway at the bottom, she located a specific panel and pulled it open.

Clara emerged in a book-lined room, with a desk at one end. Her study. Though it was intended for the master of the house, she was the manor’s mistress, and it was here that she balanced her ledgers and kept accounts of her household expenses. Windows lined the back wall of the study, the sky dark now with full night. She paid little heed to the bound volumes stacked neatly atop the desk, or all the books that had given her so many hours of comfort and escape into fantastical realms.

She lived in this world. And it was dangerous.

From her pocket, she took a key. With trembling hands, she unlocked a drawer in the desk.

Des appeared in the doorway, and he froze when she leveled a pistol at him.

“It’s loaded.” Her voice wasn’t as steady as she wanted. Far from it. But she couldn’t let him know how badly shaken, and hurt, she was. “Get out.”

Hands spread, he advanced toward her. “Listen, sparrow⁠—”

“Don’t call me that.” She carefully kept the desk between them. “Don’t call me anything. Just leave.”

Before Des could answer, Cyrus barreled into the room. Worse than an expression of anger on his face, he instead appeared icy cold. There was nothing behind his eyes. Only the grim determination to rid himself of an obstacle.

Cyrus’s hand went to his belt, and he started to draw a thin-bladed knife that gleamed with surgical sharpness. It was the sort of blade that could easily cut a throat.

He took a step toward her.

“Stop it, Cyrus,” Des snarled. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“There is no other way.” Cyrus didn’t turn as he took another step in Clara’s direction.

Still holding the pistol, she retreated, until the windows met her back. She hated how much her hand shook as she aimed the gun at Cyrus, her finger hovering over the trigger. Though she knew theoretically how to fire a pistol, it was something with which she had no actual experience. The weapon was heavy and foreign in her hand, and she prayed she wouldn’t have to use it.

“Stop now, Cyrus.” Des sounded almost agonized.

“You can’t survive in this world,” Cyrus said, his predatory gaze still on Clara, “as we are, if you’re too soft. We’ve got to protect ourselves. No one else will.”