Color flooded into her cheeks. Her shoulders rose and fell as she drew in a breath.
Together they honored her revelation with silence. And just breathed.
“Aurelie,” he said quietly. “Please know that I speak absolute truth. It was in no way your fault. You didnothingto deserve it or cause it. I know this isn’t a comfort, but there was likely nothing in the moment you could have done to stop it. It was an act of violence committed by a man who is so very good at seeming noble and fine that for a time even I believed he was. He is not. He takes what he wants. And you know that I’m difficult to fool, because I’m an old cynic who trusts no one. It was a hideous crime for which he ought to hang.Nothingabout it was your fault. Do you understand? Do you believe me?”
He heard the hint of command in his voice. The urgency, though he tried to disguise it. He desperately needed her to believe it. He needed to offer her something of value from his singular store of experience, hard and bloodily won.
And after a moment of studying his face, she nodded slowly.
He closed his eyes briefly. His own breath was still coming short.
“I cannot adequately express how sorry I am that it happened to you.”
His military training—his English reserve—usually steadied every word he spoke.
But in the middle of the sentence, his voice nearly broke with grief.
The radiance in her weary face then was a gift to him. “Thank you.”
“You can stop running now. You are safe from Brundage now and will be as long as I draw breath,” he said abruptly.
He went outside.
He was propelled there almost reflexively.
Because he felt like a feral thing. Not fit to be indoors. He needed to think, and it seemed, suddenly, he required the entire sky and all the air in the world to restore him to anything like equilibrium. He hated himself a little for what he’d just done to get her to tell him.
And right now, she likely hated him a little.
He took two more blind steps out into the night.
He dropped his hand on the neck of the horse he’d hired to get him here, and was answered with a little whicker.
Four weeks. She’d waited four weeks, pretending everything was well between them, because if she’d been with child, she’d have had no choice but to marry him. To be bound to Brundage forever.
He dragged in a long breath of cold air, released it, then partook of another in order to keep from retching.
He felt both poisoned and intoxicated.
He stared up at the impartial beauty of the stars. They winked down with equanimity on the evil and the good all over the world. Where did he fall on that spectrum? He had done his duty to his country; he had ruthlessly used his charm and talent for deceit and subterfuge and quick violence in the name of a country that had almost forsaken him, but which he still loved. And while his conscience had on occasion twinged him during his career, he was proud of every bit of that filthy business. He couldn’t begrudge any of it, even if it had led to him being locked up. They’d won that war.
But there had been a cost to him.
What did he deserve now, if anything?
All he knew is that he might not have known howirrevocably, fatally he was in love with her if not for this pain.
But damn, wasn’t he still alive, after all of it? After all he’d endured? All he knew for certain was that his life was his own and he knew now he would fight like a dog in the street for it with anyone who tried to take it from him. Aurelie was clearly just as bloody-minded. She had made a run for it, an act of extraordinary courage and pure raw nerve, in the hopes of finding something better.
And damn, hadn’t she almost succeeded?
He was going to make sure she found whatever that was. No matter the cost to him.
And Brundage...
Oh, Brundage was going to pay.
Aurelie.To hear her name, on Hawkes’s lips. At last, at last. He hadn’t howled it. He’d made it sound like the prayer he said every night before he went to sleep. The thing he’d yearned for.
