Yet, she was trembling. Her pale fingers were barely holding onto it, and she seemed as if she would fall unconscious any moment.
It can’t be. It can’t be. It can’t be.
The words kept ringing inside her mind, like an echo of a long-forgotten, ominous promise, which was once again surfacing, threatening to destroy everything in its path. She couldn’t believe it was so. She tried to convince herself that this was probably just a mere coincidence. Perhaps she really had lost this handkerchief here, simply dropped it from her hands. Indeed, she could possibly convince herself that it truly was on her persona when she arrived here.
But she knew better. She had come with nothing to her name, but wet clothes which hung on her exhausted body. Nothing else. That handkerchief was a remnant from her old life, which was not merging with her new one. She couldn’t allow that.
“This man is here?” Rosalie whispered weakly, afraid of the answer, but needing to know. The fate of her world rested on the knowledge of that single fact.
“Yes, Miss. Blake,” Hastings nodded. “He told me that he had found it on the path to the main house, and seeing the initials, I thought it belonged to you.”
She kept looking at the handkerchief as if it was a foreign object the likes of which she had never seen before. As if it was a part of some witchcraft, and now she needed to find out what would set off the magic.
“Does he know I’m here?” She turned even paler than she was. She looked as if she would dissolve into thin air, completely disappear from this world, never to be seen again.
“I… I’m not certain,” Hastings admitted. “He simply asked if there was a young lady here who might have dropped it. I replied I would take care of it.”
“Where is he?” Her lips trembled and her eyes turned watery with fear.
“I believe he is in the study with the Earl.”
Rosalie’s jaw tensed. If it really was him, he could have told Edmund everything by now. She had to stop this immediately and explain it all to him herself. That was the only way.
Quickly! Quickly!
Her mind urged her not to waste a single second. Leaving Hastings in a state of utter confusion, Rosalie rushed upstairs. Her hands kept clutching at the silky piece of fabric which bared her initials, and with it, the truth of her life.
Fighting an onslaught of fears and tears, she reached Edmund’s study. She took a deep breath, but she was still unable to steady the beating of her anguished heart. Her hand crumpled into a fist, and a moment later, she knocked.
“Yes?” Edmund called out from inside.
Her heart was now beating so violently that she could hear its drumming inside her ears. Her palms had gotten clammy, and she tried wiping them against her gown but that didn’t help much.
With her heart in her throat, threatening to jump out of her own body, she pushed the door open.
Edmund was standing by the window. His handsome frame was illuminated by the sunlight that floated in through the window glass. And there, opposite him, in the shadows where the sun didn’t reach, stood a demon in human form, hunched forward, its face as dark as the night.
His claw-like finger arose from the air and directed itself straight at her.
“You!!!” he hissed at her, like a snake hissed in the grass, about to attack its unsuspecting prey and swallow it in one single second.
Rosalie, still gripping at the door handle, found herself unable to move. She was paralyzed with fear, with the possible and probable destruction of her entire future, the future she dared to dream could be hers.
“Rosalie?” Edmund’s voice brought her back to reality.
The look of utter befuddlement on his face broke her heart instantly. How could she ever explain any of this?
With those thoughts plaguing her mind, she slammed the door behind her and rushed down the stairs.
Chapter 23
“Mr. Loveless, what is the meaning of this!?” Edmund roared upon Rosalie’s exit, when he was once again left alone with this most unpleasant man.
His ears burned, and his eyes stung. He would never forget the look on Rosalie’s face upon seeing this man. It was the look of agony, fear, most horrible dread. He had seen that emotion in the faces of soldiers about to die and give away their souls. Never in the face of a woman, the face he loved.
“That woman ‘ere,” Loveless started, scratching the back of his greasy hair, “she be my wife.”
He said it with such insolence and keenness that Edmund found it hard not to walk over to him and punch him in the face. His entire body yearned for him to do that. But he refrained from it. It wouldn’t be the gentlemanly thing to do, even under the circumstances.
