"I don't know! A farmer found him naked wandering the fields and brought him here for help. I will go refill our comfrey; it looks like he will need a lot."
She hurried out and I quickly mixed up yarrow, olive oil, and beeswax.
"Stay calm," I soothed as the man made a heartbreaking moan of pain. "We will do all we can for you and there will always be a safe place for you here."
I dipped my fingers into the healing salve?—
And I looked over at the half-dead man's face to see—the glittering wicked eye of my husband Gideon!
CHAPTER 22
Gideon
Iwas never sure how I made it home to Grayspires, stumbling along through the frozen silence of winter, each of my rasping breaths filled with pain and fury.
How had Deliverance guessed my secret? It must have been that damn Bible. But I could have sworn she knew nothing about it.
It had all been accomplished long before I ever knew her.
But it had been a Pyrrhic victory, hadn't it? The master of Grayspires, but with such a rundown, ill-kept building as my stolen inheritance that I'd needed a great deal of money, immediately, to keep it from falling down around my ears.
Despite my growing business as poisoner, I would need a lot of money. Grayspires must be restored to her former glory. And an heiress with no protectors, just an old family lawyer it was easy to bribe, was the perfect target.
It had been so easy to seduce the sweet, innocent Deliverance, to bury myself deep in that soft cunny.
But not so easy to win her back.
As I arrived back, Grayspires sat like a symbol of elegant decay, the roofdense with lines of slippery dark slime. It hadbeen my one, my great, my only love ever since I had come as a nameless bastard child to Grayspires Manor.
Toiling year by year in the stables and on the grounds would have made some men noble and strong, patient and pious.
Not I.
Poisoner by name, poisoner by nature, twistedand dark in mien and heart.
I spent that time plotting how I could take possession of the manor. Grayspires–dark, foul-natured, twisted. Just as I was.
And instead of loyalty to my father, the man who had sired me?
I had only hatred. He had brought me to Grayspires, but never given me a name.
I took it anyway.
My father I killed first, chose the slowest, rawest, deadliest berries to do so.
It had been a beautiful death, elegant in all ways, to watch the terror fill his eyes and see the bubbling contents of his own stomach in his mouth.
And I loved that feeling of power, tightened it in my grip, drove it into my own heart so that it dug sinuous tendrils around every organ.
I was only limited by my own intelligence and audacity in becoming the county's foremost purveyor of deathly nightshade and other poisons.
The other bastards of my father's that littered the grounds were either driven away or killed.
Because Grayspires Manor wasmine.
But now my triumph sat on me like a scab, like a hard crust over a raw wound.
I had achieved all that I wanted. But I could not rejoice in my murderous gains without my ill-gotten wife.
