And this Violet would be stronger and more resilient than all the rest. The carriage reached her now and slowed. She was hot and flushed and angry, perspiration dripping from her forehead into her eyes and blinding her for a moment with its angry burn.
“Violet?”
It was a familiar voice, one filled with question, but also dripping relief.
She blinked furiously, and there was her brother, leaping from the carriage before it had come to a complete stop. How had she failed to notice the familiar markings upon the exterior?
“Lucien!” she cried out.
He swept her up in his arms, and she clung to him. Only then did she allow the tears to fall. She returned his embrace with everything in her. It was just the two of them once more, brother and sister against the world. They had always had no one but each other, and she had betrayed him.
“Please forgive me,” she sobbed.
He jerked back, looking down at her, studying her face. “Did Strathmore hurt you, Violet?”
Yes, but not in the way Lucien meant. He had broken her heart.
She shook her head, answered on another wracking sob. “N-n-no.”
“I’m going to tear him limb from bloody limb,” Lucien gritted, his jaw clenching. “What the devil are you doing out here wandering in the road?”
“Escaping,” she answered, and then burst into a fresh wave of tears.
“Hush, Violet.” He embraced her again, hugging her to him as if he could impart some of his strength to her. “I have you now. All will be well.”
But all was not well.
All could never be well again. And neither could she. She was broken inside. Numb.
“There is something I must tell you, Lucien.”
He stiffened, looking down at her, searching her gaze. “What must you tell me?”
“I married him,” she confessed in a whisper, closing her eyes so she would not have to see the expression on his face as realization took hold. “I am his wife now.”
Her brother did not answer her revelation with a single word.
Instead, he roared.
Violet was gone.
In the horrible silence of her chamber, the place where Griffin had made love to her all night long, and then once more that morning, understanding washed over him. He was ill with it. His stomach clenched, and he had to swallow down the bile.
She was gone. She had left. She was not there. She was not anywhere.
He had looked. After he had left Ludlow’s study, he had thought to seek her out in the drawing room where the other ladies had gathered, only to discover Violet had excused herself in favor of seeking him out.
The news had instantly beset him with discontent. First, because he knew what he had been discussing in the study with Ludlow, Carlisle, and O’Malley. And second, because Violet had never interrupted their discourse. Not even with a knock.
Which meant one thing: she had heard him.
She had heard what he had said.
He had been all over Harlton Hall, searching for her, and though he had already scoured this chamber once before, he had returned anyway, in the foolish hope she would be there waiting for him the second time. That she would give him her saucy smile and open her arms to him and the awful, driving sense of doom erupting within him at her absence would dissipate.
But she was still gone.
“Fuck,” he growled aloud. And then, because he was alone, utterly alone, and because it was his fault Violet had left him, and because he did not deserve her and likely had no chance of winning her back, he said it again and again. Then again. “Fuck. Fuck.Fuck.”
