Page 32 of Mortdale

“I’ve highlighted all the best parts,” she threw over her shoulder. “Have fun.”

I ran a hand up and down my throat, watching her disappear inside the mansion. “Would you like to have a drink with me?” I called out to her.

She paused in the middle of the foyer, her lashes fluttering fast. “A drink?”

“I collect liquor,” I said, for some stupid reason.

She followed closely after me as I led her to the smoking room just across the foyer. I watched her take everything in, from the books on the shelves to the baubles I’d been collecting from my years in the naval regiments when I was younger. Raking her fingers over the brown brocade wallpaper, feeling each dent and dip before she moved to brush them over the burgundy leather armchairs. “Impressive,” she mumbled. “There isn’t a grain of dust anywhere. Christof should be awarded a medal.”

“I pay him enough sterlings per month to surpass the value of any medal,” I said, handing her a tumbler filled with two fingers of whiskey.

A few warm chuckles left her lips, and she slowly reached to take the glass tumbler from my hands, her delicate warm fingers brushing against mine. “You’re stingy for a lord,” she said, shaking the liquor in her tumbler.

“It isn’t wine, Willow.”

She sniffed the drink, her nose wrinkling as she carefully took a sip. And before I could tell her whiskey was meant to be sipped, her head tipped back and the liquor had disappeared from the glass. “Doesn’t taste as bad as it smells,” she said, smacking her lips as she handed the empty glass back to me.

Taking her time, she touched and picked up anything she could get her curious fingers on. She did that a lot—felt everything with her hands and dissected everything with her eyes. I could tell when she was pulling things apart in her head, slicing them open and digging for answers, from the way she got lost in her head, ignoring every sound and motion around her. After a week of watching her from afar I’d found out her biggest flaw and strength were the same—her curiosity was a weapon, but also a weakness of hers. She became near blind when she dug her teeth into the next best thing after a corpse.

Dropping onto an armchair, she tipped her head against the headrest to look at the room. “You should call Henry and Arthur to come and have a drink with us,” she said, tucking her feet under her thighs and leaning on her hand. “I hear you three share everything together.”

They were so fucking dead.

My tongue pushed against my fangs. “Not everything.”

She swallowed. “I heard that, too.”

My teeth scraped against my knuckles. “Having fun testing me?”

“Having fun following me around?” Her head tipped to the side. “Ghosts are good gossip.”

“What else did they say?”

“That I should be scared of you.”

Her heart was scoring numbers in her chest. Testing the muscles to see just how much they could bear before bursting. “And are you scared of me?”

“I’m not.”

I hummed, nodding. “I can hear every single heartbeat in the entirety of the estate—farther back, too, if I concentrate long enough and filter through the noises of nature. Christof’s should be the most recognisable one since I’ve known him all my life. Especially when it is at rest. Age is doing that to him. Slowing him down, wearing it out. But that’s not the one I recognise the easiest if I were to close my eyes. Yours is. Especially when it is locked in the same room as me. Like a metronome switching from allegro to vivace. And—” I raked my gaze down her shoulders, past her naked arm poking from the blanket, down to her delicate, long fingers grasping the material of her nightgown tightly. “When I look at you, it hits presto. I’ve tortured men and they’ve been less scared of me than you are.”

Every letter leaving her lips shivered. “You make me nervous.”

“Is that what Agnes told you to tell me?” I asked, my fangs burning the longer I stayed in here with her. Every instinct in my body recognised her as prey, roused by the wide, trapped look in her eyes, the quick gulps of air she drew in, the shivers coating her skin, her pulse hitting her breastbone in staccato. Maybe my trip to the Bloodhouse had been too short. I took in enough blood to stay alive, never allowed myself to indulge—not that I could. For the first time in a long, long while, I wished I’d indulged. Whiskey tasted like poison down my throat as I went on, “What else did she teach you to do? Did she tell you to act submissive, make me happy, flatter me? Did she teach you how to get into my bed, how to please me so you could get what you want?”

She wasn’t a red maiden, but nothing could have stopped Agnes from preparing her like the others. A spy who’d do anything to get what Agnes had ordered her to. Maybe even more capable than her red maidens.

Blood trickled down her nose and she wiped it with the back of her hand as she sat up straight. “Is that what I’m supposed to be doing? Pleasing my vampire master? Servicing my vampire master?” She pushed up on shaking legs and gathered up her skirts as she climbed on my lap to straddle me.

Fuck.

I could feel the venom dripping from my fangs, souring the taste in my mouth. My gums were sore as I pressed my tongue to the back of my teeth, fighting every urge my nature had granted me.

Her arms wrapped around my neck, her warm skin near sizzling as it rested against mine. “Tell me then, Lord Duncan. How do you like to be kissed?” she asked, pressing small, shivering kisses down my jawline, not even realising the situation she’d put herself in. “Touched,” she went on as her trembling hand slid between us to grasp the buttons on my shirt and undo them.

I swallowed down a groan when her hips rocked against mine. “That’s enough.”

“That’s what I thought,” she whispered against my skin, and I felt something wet and warm hit my neck. Limbs still shaking, she pulled back. Her dark eyes were swallowed by what I knew very well to be fear, watery and red. “What am I doing here, Lord Duncan? Did you marry me to collect a witch as a trophy?”