The flinch set Eamon’s face into a hard mask while blood welled in the corners of his eyes. So gently it made my throat ache, he touched my cheek where the gash lay and the bruise that blossomed across my neck from where she’d held me down. His voice was low, rumbling with the growl he only barely kept at bay.
“Who did this to you?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Adrienne was dressed in the same clothes she’d left in.
Her face was smeared with dirt and blood.
I barely paid any mind to the cut across her face—that could be healed in a matter of moments. But there were deeper wounds here that I could do nothing to soothe. Not a single image came to me, not even a whisper of a thought. Whatever happened to her had forced her mind to close up tight. Her mouth trembled as her shoulders did, lips tensing into a thin line, as she worked to swallow back the tears standing in her eyes.
Slowly I scooped her into my arms. Though she did not fight me, she didn’t melt into my hold the way she had before. Her spine went rigid, knuckles straining white against her fists, and a soft huff slipped through her locked jaw.
Ralph’s voice had roused me from my daylight rest, screaming inside my mind: Adrienne’s face, covered in blood, the way he’d found her walking empty-handed into the small center of the outer city dressed in yesterday’s clothes. I hadn’t cared that the sun was still peeking through the sky—it had barely bothered me as I’d darted from my coffin and toward the estate.
But no amount of Ralph’s warnings had prepared me for this.
Every fiber of my being told me to take her through the bedroom and into the bathing chamber. To run her a bath and brush her hair and fill her with my blood and my seed until we could never be parted again. Instead, I took her to her music room, settling her onto the settee beneath the window. Bernard appeared through the door a moment later carrying a tray laden with supplies.
“Bring some tea,” I murmured to him.
He nodded, slid the tray onto the side table and disappeared. Adrienne didn’t so much as move from where I’d sat her, even when I dragged the table a little closer and the legs scraped across the floor. She stared at her hands, her tangled hair hiding her face from view. I grabbed one of the many cloths on the tray and dipped it in the steaming water before sitting beside her.
“Look at me, my heart.”
When she didn’t move, I drew her face toward mine. Her eyes squeezed shut, hands fisted in the wrinkled fabric of her skirts. I swallowed the urge to repeat myself, to push her to speak.
The first pass of the cloth over her face barely did anything to disturb the dried blood across her pale skin. I re-wet the fabric and pressed it over her cheek, waiting for the warmth to release some of the worst of it.
A few times I opened my mouth only to shut it again, my throat clicking with a swallow. The silence was deafening as I worked, choking on all the words I wanted to say.
Tell me what happened.
Tell me who did this to you.
Do not leave me again.
Please.
Stay.
Eventually Bernard returned with tea, placed it on the tray and took back the ruined cloths saturated with blood and dirt.But when I picked up the brush he’d left to comb through her hair, she grabbed my wrist.
“Stop.” Her voice was nothing more than a rasp and almost at once her hand fell away.
I set the brush down, watching as her eyes opened. They were bloodshot and tired—full of so much sadness it made my throat ache with something other than thirst. Though I’d told myself I wouldn’t, I heard the words I’d shoved away. “Tell me what happened.”
Adrienne shook her head and rose from the settee, turning her back to me. “I will not.”
My teeth ground together and I stopped the growl right before it left my throat. If she would not tell me then I could not force her. As if in a trance, she padded toward the pianoforte, settling on the bench with stiff, almost mechanical movements. But she did not play, only stared at the keys as if she was seeing something else entirely.
A single image slipped through her walls to me: a windowless room, tiny fingers moving over keys drawn into thick dust across a tabletop.
“Adrienne…” I breathed.
The first note sounded, followed by a flowing melody I’d only heard the beginning of. All the pieces of my heart fractured into fragments so small I feared they would never come back together again. But that was not the greatest fear I felt as she played, as her face contorted in pain, as her breaths came in quick gasps.
I feared for what had been broken in her and all the things that now would never be.
