A flush rose in her cheeks as she’d grown increasingly aware of the naked man beneath her hands. She shivered. She needed to remind herself she was washing a dirty dog—and a bad one, at that—not a human man.
Terence grumbled and winced as she lightly dabbed around the bullet wound.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated in a hushed murmur and pressedthe rag over the shallow hole. “I needed to do something to save myself. You ought to count yourself lucky that I am a horrible shot.” She laughed at her joke, mostly for her own sake, but the laughter softened into stiff silence again once she realized Terence wasn’t laughing with her. His gaze was still firmly fixated on the opposing wall, his mouth set in a thin line.
“This was how my brothers died,” he mumbled instead. He raised a hand from the water to cover hers that’d been tending to him. “They killed themselves, one by ingesting lye as a boy and the other asking to be shot in the night—hunted like an animal.”
Jane went still, unsure of how else to respond to him. She thought of Matthew’s grave, of the bullet wound that marked both man and beast, not too dissimilar to Terence’s own wound.
“I refuse to die like an animal,” Terence said firmly, his grip tightening over hers. “If I die byitshand—becauseof it… then that means it has consumed me, and that it has won. And I refuse to let it hold that sort of sway over me.”
Jane worried her lip between her teeth as she traced her gaze over the scars all across his back. His skin was etched with his efforts. Hidden beneath pressed clothes, high collars, perfumes, and charms. In her hands, she held a gentleman in wolf’s clothing. She was on the cusp of understanding it—wholly.
His hand abandoned hers to cup his brow. His shoulders slumped and a thin whine pealed from between his lips. “It’s hopeless.”
“For now,” Jane whispered, daring to reach and tuck loose hair away from his face. The touch was featherlight and hesitant. She placed the cloth on the edge of the tub and rose to her feet. “In the meantime, I’m sure cleaning yourself and getting some rest isn’t too hopeless a task.”
She left Terence to soak in the tub, closing the door behindher. It wasn’t until she was on the other side that she realized how steeped in blood and misery’s coppery scent the washroom’s steam was.
She lingered at the door, though, her hand cradling the knob as she rested her forehead against the wood with a low sigh. Rain pounded against the roof and she hissed a seething, “fuck” into the air before her. Hopeless, all of it hopeless, just as Terence said. The marshes were hellbent on killing her, it seemed, and she doubted that she’d ever make it back to Cambridge, if not in one piece.
“Thank you, Miss Sterling,” Jane jumped and saw Mrs. Foster standing beside her, still holding the chains. She sighed as, with a free hand, she returned a stray hair beneath her bonnet. She then laughed, a mirthless, breathy sound, as she shook the chains. “You know, the blacksmith in town used to be on the Hayes’ salary.”
The dry laugh and jangling of chains continued as Mrs. Foster turned to walk down the stairs, leaving Jane alone in the hall.
Jane couldn’t place if it was the exhaustion in her bones, the pain she felt everywhere, the irritation of wearing stale, understyled dresses continuously stained with blood, or just a growing desire to give up and let her body be claimed by the marshes, but she somehow mustered the strength to limp back to her room. The echo of bloody chains chafing followed after her.
Jane left the guest room for tea and enrichment sometime aroundthe noon hour, but she paused before she even descended the first step of the main stair. In the entryway Terence and Mrs. Foster were crouched together on the floor, sweeping up wooden bits and stains of the beast’s muddy blood.
His sleeves were rolled up to reveal arms corded with muscle and marred by even more of those pale scars as he continued picking up splinters of wood he cradled in a large palm.
Like a fossil with battle scars, waiting to be deciphered.
Their silence was heavy and tense; Jane sensed that this wasn’t the first time Terence needed to assist in cleaning up a mess, though it was the first time in a long while.
Deciding she could go without tea, she quietly turned on the stairs and returned to her room.
CHAPTER
Seventeen
Jane couldn’t quite place when music began to flitter through the house, but at some point, the distant pluck of the harpsichord drew her attention from redressing her leg in the washroom.
For most of the day, she had been alternating between states of fevered wakefulness and restless dreaming, keeping to the guest room and away from the staff, Terence, and any signs of the beast. However, the beast still seemed intent on seeking her out despite the daytime hour. For she dreamt of it, but also not. For it was also Terence, wearing the face of a beast, with yellow teeth and yellow eyes flashing down at her, dark hair bristling across a naked, scarred body, and claws curled in their eagerness to claim her. And he did claim her—biting her, drinking her blood, marking her as his own, as she writhed beneath the Terence-beast with awhimpering moan.
To be afraid of him or to desire him, to crave for him and his salvation, she couldn’t decide. For the eroticism this nightmare held her with was tender, but the suckling of his fangs was a white-hot pang—an affection battling with the monstrosity lurking just beneath the surface of his skin. Skin that sloughed off to plop beside her on the mattress with every thrust of his body, revealing more of the beastly fur underneath, little by little.
He ravished her. That was when she had woken up with a start. Sweat clammed her skin, pressing her dress flush to her heated body, silhouetting peaked nipples and heaving breasts. Her throat was raw and every attempt at swallowing was like gulping down sandpaper. The Terence-beast’s touch was still imprinted on her thighs and hips, branded into her skin in a way that itched with a burning shame.
That was when she heard the music. It was calling to her, pulling her to its composer with a blood-red string that wove between her ribs.
As she listened to the distant din of the harpsichord, she wondered what emotion inspired its composition this time. Its sadness made for an alluring tune. Perhaps that was why such music had been so attractive in the first place: the knowledge that a man caging such violent horror just beneath his skin was capable of forging beauty and kindness beneath gentle fingertips.
With this attraction had festered guilt, manifested in the Terence-beast that’d pinned Jane to her bed in her fever dream. The two emotions took hold of her hands to coax her to the stairwell.
She made her way downstairs and kept her footsteps as light as possible so as to not disrupt the music, especially when she peeked into the sitting room.
Terence sat slouched at the harpsichord. The notes heplayed were slow, his fingers listlessly plucking at keys with no intended rhythm. He didn’t look any better than when Jane last saw him. Hair hung limply in his gray face, which was shadowed and drawn with deep lines that considerably aged him; silvery stubble roughened his chin. His whole figure sagged with an ashamed, lonesome melancholy that urged her to make her presence known by resting her hands atop the instrument.
