Whether Sylum was truly there or not, I no longer cared. In that moment, I just wanted to be with him.
His hands moved up my body, slowly at first then feverish as if my own desire spurred him onward. I was scarcely aware when my gown slipped from my shoulder, my breast spilling out into the chilled autumn air. He broke the kiss, but his lips never left me, trailing over my too exposed skin.
And that, dear reader, was the precise moment that lanternlight flared behind us, followed by footsteps, startled gasps, and someone calling out sharply.
“Lord Blackthorn?”
The illusion shattered. I turned back to look at the very real man before me, breath heaving, gown half-fallen.
Sylum simply smiled.
Chapter 3
When consciousness returned, it did so with the gentleness of a guillotine.
Light cleaved through the thin curtains in merciless white slashes, striking my eyes with the precision of a blade. I gasped, recoiling instinctively, one arm flung up as if to defend myself from a blow. The pain in my skull pulsed violently as though the orchestra from the masquerade had followed me home and continued tuning its instruments inside my head.
For several disorienting heartbeats, I could not name the room around me. The ceiling looked warped, the shadows unfamiliar. The air felt too thin. I didn’t know where I was or who I had been the night before.
My body answered before my mind did.
Everything ached.
My corset hung half-unlaced, digging cruelly into my ribs. The taste of champagne lingered on my tongue, stale and metallic. My dress—wrinkled, smeared with London’s grime, and sagging off one shoulder—still clung to me like a second skin that wished to be shed. One glove was missing entirely. The remaining one was torn straight through the palm. My hairpins, bent and crooked, pressed into my scalp with the unkindness of tiny daggers.
Then memory, slow at first, gathered speed.
The masquerade.
The waltz.
That voice.
The garden.
Sylum…
A tremor worked through me, and I pressed both hands hard against my face, as though I could keep the truth from seeping through the cracks. As though I could stop the memory forming shape, stop it from becoming something I might have to believe.
“No,” I moaned into my palms. “No, that wasn’t real.”
It couldn’t have been.
Yet I had seen him, touched him, felt his breath against my skin. But he was a ghost from my past, not a man who would kiss me under a silvered moon. My heart insisted he had been real, but my mind recoiled,refusing the possibility.
I laughed weakly, though it sounded more like a sob. “A dream,” I muttered. “A drunken, ridiculous dream.”
Dreams could resurrect the dead. Dreams could make monsters look like lovers.
The silence of my little room pressed in, close and claustrophobic. For several months I’d been renting a one room flat in the shadiest part of London. It certainly wasn’t the townhome in Mayfair I’d grown up in, but it was all I could afford.
Outside, the world continued indifferent to my unraveling—carriages rumbled through morning slush, street vendors shouted their prices, and my landlord’s wife berated some unfortunate servant with her usual venom.
I swung my legs from the bed. The floor bit into my bare feet with icy teeth. A shudder wracked me, violent enough to force my arms around myself.
I lifted my gaze toward the mirror hanging crookedly on the opposite wall… and immediately wished I hadn’t.
A stranger stared back.
