Then she was picking up her skirts and running, pell-mell, for the courtyard, only vaguely aware of Henrietta waving that serviette in farewell and crying, “Write to me! I want to hear everything! If you don’t, I’ll just get it from my other sources! I have spies everywhere!”
Bess threw herself into the carriage, laughing and crying at the same time. “To London,” she called to Gemma and Hal’s driver. “As quick as you can. There’s not a moment to lose.”
The coachman whistled and the horses took off at a fast clip. Bess settled back against the cushion and closed her eyes. There was a swoop in her belly, a weightless sensation of falling from a great height—no, leaping.
She spread her arms wide and let the great unknown rush up to meet her, smiling all the while.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Nathaniel’s raw knuckles burned and throbbed.
His muscles twitched, battle-ready and exhausted at the same time. Sweat poured down his face, stinging like fire in the cut the first fight had opened up beneath his left eye, at the bottom edge of his mask.
Nathaniel shook his head slowly. There was something wrong with his right ear; sound was muffled in that direction. His vision spangled, bursts of darkness blooming when he blinked, so he didn’t blink. He lowered his chin and focused on his opponent.
Name? Didn’t know. Didn’t care. All he knew was the man was wiry and quick, with a tendency to head butt like a ram when backed into a corner.
The fights bled together, one into the next. Sometimes he slept in Leda’s office. Sometimes he went back to Ashbourn House.
Didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
Because it wasn’t working.
He blocked a vicious uppercut, his arms in tight to his body, and of course his opponent found the spot low on his side where a blackened contusion swelled, courtesy of a sucker punch yesterday. Or was it the day before?
Nathaniel felt the impact of the blow as a sickening explosion of light behind his eyes. Setting his jaw, he breathed through it and used the way his body instinctively crumpled forward to surprise the other man with a full body rush that took them both down to the floor.
Teeth clenched, pain cresting, Nathaniel pinned the fighter with a forearm across his neck, and he held on through the kicking and cursing and clawing until the man finally subsided into the blood-flecked straw.
Nathaniel sank back on his heels, head tipped up, eyes squeezed shut.
He’d won.
But there was no relief.
Everything he fought to forget was still there, churning through his brain in an endless, writhing mass.
He dragged himself to his feet, every joint screaming. He looked down to offer the man on the floor a hand up, and realized his fingers were too swollen to curl all the way closed. They hurt. Everything hurt.
But it wasn’t enough. Not yet. He wouldn’t be able to sleep yet.
Madame Leda strode into the ring and lifted his hand above their hands. “The Berserker! Still undefeated!”
She said some other things, he thought, over the roar of the crowd. Nathaniel ignored it, the same way he ignored the worry in her dark eyes when she looked him over.
When Leda tried to usher him from the ring, though, Nathaniel shook his head.
“Another,” he rasped, his voice in shreds.
With a muttered curse, she narrowed her gaze on him. “You’re near dead on your feet, you stupid man. What are you trying to prove?”
He could only shake his head again. Nothing. There was nothing.
Nothing but the fighting.
Her expression hardened. “You may be the undefeated champion, but this is still my place. You’ll sit the next one out.”
“No,” he growled, shoulders bunching, but she crossed her arms over her chest and gave him a smile full of teeth.
