Seventeen
Louis dragged Gisele into the great hall, George quietly following behind. She cursed when he shoved her toward the tall, slender man seated in a huge chair at the head table. So hard did Louis shove her that she stumbled and was barely able to right herself before falling into the tall man’s lap. Gisele took a deep breath to steady herself, brushed off her clothes, and looked at the man.
Her heart briefly skipped to a stop, and her blood ran cold. For a moment she thought she was looking at her husband, then shook away that mad idea. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that her husband was dead. She had seen his body. This had to be Vachel, but the resemblance between him and his cousin was so strong it terrified her. Vachel was tall, almost delicate in his slenderness, and nearly beautiful. He had the same perfect features as her late husband, the same perfect skin, even the same thick, long, raven black hair. When she found the strength to look into his eyes, she felt ill. He also had the same beautiful but cold, dark eyes, eyes that held the same look of sly viciousness that Michael’s had.
“At last we meet, cousin,” he drawled, his voice deep and soft, almost musical. “May I be so bold as to say that you are not looking your best?”
“I am wounded to the heart,” she drawled, and ducked just in time to avoid another knock on the head from Louis.
“Do not touch her,” commanded Vachel
Even Gisele felt inclined to step back when she heard the ice in Vachel’s voice. A quick glance at Louis revealed that the man had grown a little pale. He had taken at least two steps back and clasped his thick fingered hands behind his back in a show of obedience.
There was at least one difference between Vachel and her husband, she mused, as she looked back at the lord of the manor. Michael would have just leapt on the man and beaten him senseless. She knew in her heart that Vachel had that same streak of violence in him but had learned how to refine it, how to imbue his voice with it without shouting or raising his fist. She knew that that made Vachel much more dangerous than Michael ever was. It also made him much more evil and frightening. Michael’s cruelty had come forth through anger or a very evident sort of madness, blindly enacted without thought or planning. Vachel could remain calm, would act with complete knowledge of the cruelty he was inflicting and how to make it as horrifying as possible.
“Afraid he may kill me before you can?” she asked, determined not to quail before this DeVeau. She had done it once and found it not only bitter, but useless.
“And what makes you believe I am going to kill you?” Vachel asked, watching her over the edge of his ornately carved silver goblet as he sipped at his drink.
“I have been condemned to death since I fled your cousin’s manse. Has my sentence been altered while I was hiding?”
“Your sentence, your punishment for ending Michael’s poor, miserable life, is whatever I choose it to be.”
Gisele inwardly trembled, praying her fear was not clear to read on her face. She suspected that Vachel could make the slow, choking death of a hanging seem merciful. It was going to be very hard to maintain her act of bravado. Vachel terrified her, far more than her brutal husband ever had.
“Sir,” George said as he stepped up beside Gisele. “I was told that there was a bounty on this woman’s head?”
“Of course, business should always be done before one indulges in one’s little pleasures,” Vachel murmured, and he signaled to the cold-faced man seated on his right, who quickly and silently left the room.
Pleasures?Gisele thought, silently repeating the word in her head. That sounded chillingly ominous. She found it a little unsettling when she tried to calm herself by thinking that Vachel was just one of those sick men who would enjoy watching a woman hang. If that were the least of the horrors she thought he would inflict on her, she decided to try to not think of the worst. Such musings could easily cost her her slim grip on courage.
Vachel’s man returned with a small sack of coins and handed it to George. She noticed that George had the wisdom not to look inside and chance insulting Vachel with that show of mistrust. As George turned to leave, he met Gisele’s gaze. She saw that look of doubt there again, but he quickly looked away and hurried out of the great hall. It did not matter, for even if she could have made use of that doubt she could not do so now, and George would soon be gone. Louis looked after him, obviously wondering if waiting to be dismissed by Vachel would cost him his share of the bounty.
“You had best hurry away, Louis,” Vachel drawled. “George may forget to give you the coin you earned.” He smiled coldly as Louis hurried out of the room, and then glanced at his man, who had reseated himself on his right. “How many do you think will survive the quarrel over that bounty, Ansel?”
“Half,” Ansel replied, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper.
Vachel turned his full attention back to Gisele, caught her looking curiously at the muscular Ansel, and said, “His voice was forever softened by my father’s hands about his neck. Ansel’s loyalty to me is absolute. He objected to my father trying to beat me to death for sleeping with his third wife.”
The curse of her overwhelming curiosity almost made Gisele ask what had happened to the father that had made him stop before Ansel died, but she quickly came to her senses. “If you try to shock me with tales of depravity, do not waste your breath. You may recall that I was married to one of your kinsmen.”
“Michael was but a pale shadow of myself.”
“Especially now,” she murmured. His soft laughter startled her.
“Oui, Michael is not the man he used to be. You must have bound him to the bed whilst he was in one of his drunken stupors. Even Michael could have fought off a tiny woman like you.”
She rolled her eyes in a gesture of weary frustration. “I did not kill Michael.”
“From all I have heard you made no secret of how much you loathed him.”
“Loathing him is a long step away from strapping him down, then cutting his member off and choking him with it as I slash his throat.”
“Truly? I have always found that loathing and murder are very compatible. And it sounds like a most suitable way for a wife to kill her husband.”
“You may think so.” She knew there was no talking sense to the man, that he thought in dark, evil ways, that she could not even imagine.
“I do. So much more interesting than poison or hiring someone to slip a knife into his back.” He looked at Ansel. “Show her to a room to bathe, and get her a gown.”
