Chapter 21
“ I wondered if you were coming home tonight…” Cordelia’s sweet voice greeted Dorian when he staggered into her bedroom.
The hour was late, and it would have made perfect sense for her to have already been asleep. Despite the last vestiges of whiskey still soaking his mind, he had not meant to make her wait around for him. He had just needed to mentally sort through some things before he had been able to return to her.
There was absolutely nothing about the conversation that he was going to have with her that was going to be easy. He had made up his mind that this was going to be the right move for them, but it made nothing easier. Dorian pulled off his boots and started to undo his waistcoat. He was moving with deliberate slowness in an attempt to compose himself or think of the best way that he should mention thighs… where to even start. If he was being wholly honest, he was stalling.
“You missed quite an eventful evening,” Cordelia continued when he did not speak. “Though, that might be for the best, considering one of the events was less than pleasant.”
Oh, he had missed her tea, had he not? He had been so distracted, so consumed with his own thoughts that he had been careless about it. Now he would have to make that up to her, too.
Dorian glanced at his wife; the way she was holding the blankets clutched to her chest, waiting for him to join her, or to say something. She looked so very beautiful like that, with her hair loose around her shoulders and her cream-colored nightgown slipping off her shoulder just ever so slightly. It would be easy to go over there and crawl into bed with her. Even simpler to affix his lips to hers and seduce her, to quiet her troubles with his tongue and hands until she was writhing under him. But, if he did, then he knew that he would not tell her anything.
She was so painfully beautiful that it made his heart clench.
“What happened?” He asked, hoping he did not slur his words. It had been… more than a little liquid courage that he had needed.
“My mother invited herself to my tea party, for one,” she said as she shifted in bed so that her legs were in front of her, her arms wrapped loosely around her knees. “And then Matthew came to call after dinner.”
Dorian paused, his hands untucking his shirt and quickly thinking better of it. “Debonaire?”
“Mmhm,” Cordelia agreed with a hum.
As if Dorian had not made his feelings toward the man perfectly clear on all fronts. At least, he had thought that he had. “What did he want?”
“Honestly, I do not have a proper answer for that question,” she started with a sigh, her eyes seeming to follow his movements as he loosened the fit of his clothes but did not wholly remove them. “He said the strangest things.”
“Such as?”
“Well,” she laughed humorlessly. “First, he tried to convince me that you murdered my father.”
Dorian’s shoulders seized. How was that possible? A cold sort of dread froze his lungs and threatened to stop his heart in his chest as she continued speaking.
“I told him that he was being ridiculous and threw him out, of course.” Cordelia shrugged one shoulder, smiling until she seemed to realize that he was not smiling back. He could not even blink as he stared at her. Here it was, the moment and opportunity; it was now or never. He had no idea how Debonaire knew or if he had merely been grasping at straws that happened to be factual. Whatever the reason was, he could not lie to her anymore.
“Dorian? What is the matter?”
“He is correct.”
“What?” Cordelia rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Dorian, that is not funny. You know how sensitive of a subject that is.”
Dorian nodded, his focus shifting to his hands as he took a seat on her bed close to where she was. “I am being perfectly serious.”
“No. You are not,” Cordelia insisted as she scooted away from him.
There it was, the wary look full of caution on her face that he had been dreading. Next would be the outright horror and demanding to never see nor hear from him ever again. He deserved it all.
“I am afraid that I am, Cordelia. I cannot lie to you any longer. I apologize for being dishonest with you about such things. I came here tonight to tell you the truth, to tell you that I have fallen in love with you,” Dorian said softly, feeling a touch rawer than he had expected to feel.
“What… what are you saying?”
“I am directly responsible for your father’s death, but I had no other choice. I am sorry that his passing caused you pain. Believe me, that was not the intention, but… let me explain,” Dorian continued. He struggled to speak directly and without too much inflection, but he found himself nearly choking up at the words coming out of his mouth.
“I cannot hear this.” Cordelia shook her head, her hands lifting to cover her ears. “I will not hear any of this!”
Dorian shifted, pressing a knee into the bed as he pulled her arms from her ears. “You can, and you must. I will only say this once, so please lend me your full attention. Then, if you wish never to see me… if you…” Dorian could not get the words out, he feared the outcome of this conversation far too much. “Just listen.”
Cordelia’s breath was sucked in so deeply that her chest heaved.
Dorian mustered his courage and started to speak. “Two years ago, I was leaving a pub in some back alleyway of London in the hours before dawn. I was on foot, staggering through the streets, hoping that the cold morning air and the long walk would help sober me up enough before I got home. I had not made it more than halfway home before the sounds of distress came screaming at me from another alleyway. A woman yelling for a man to get off of her, to leave her alone, punctuated by soft sobs…” Dorian trailed off as he noticed Cordelia shudder. “Well, I did what anyone would do—I ran to her aid. I might be a terrible man, but I will not stand by and allow a woman to be harmed if there is anything that I can do to stop it.”
Dorian paused, the memory of that night two years ago flashing so vividly in his head. No doubt, since it often was a focal point of his nightmares, that he was destined to keep reliving it. The poor barmaid was shoved up against the brick wall, her nails torn and bloody from the struggle as the man shoved her face against the wall. He had hiked her skirts up over her rear, exposing her to the world as he worked on opening the front of his trousers when Dorian arrived.
He had seen red.
“The young woman was being accosted by your father. I did not know who he was at the time, but I ran into the alleyway, grabbed him by his shirt, and shoved him off her,” Dorian continued.
Her father’s mocking laughter still echoed in his mind. Dorian would not tell Cordelia how he offered for Dorian to wait his turn as Dorian pulled the woman’s skirts down where they ought to be and told her to run. That was when her father’s expression had soured. The moment Dorian had deprived the man of his alleged ‘prize’ something in him had snapped. He had charged at Dorian like he was more animal than man. Dorian had barely caught the glint of something metal flashing in the moonlight before the burning hot pain in his stomach.
Dorian cleared his throat carefully, giving himself a minute to speak. He dared a glance at Cordelia, and the tears ran freely down her cheeks as she kept her hands firmly clamped over her mouth to let him finish speaking.
“We fought, and he pulled a knife. I shoved him away from me… the marquess fell back into the wall and hit the corner of the brick.”
The sound of his skull hitting brick was one that he would never forget. The man had gone from a near-snarling rage to being off balance to sounding indignant, and then… nothing. The marquess’ eyes had unfocused as his fingers twitched, and he slid down the wall slowly, his eyes wholly unseeing by the time he hit the ground.
“I am ashamed of the fact that I ran instead of taking proper accountability for my actions. I should have… maybe then I could have arranged for better care for you and your mother from the beginning. But I disappeared instead, trying to keep as good of an eye on the pair of you as I could from a distance. When it all happened, I never imagined that he would have been a titled man, let alone a man with a family. When I learned who he was…”
Dorian shook his head and scrubbed his hands up and down his face. He had taken the cowardly way out, in his opinion. He had panicked and run. The woman had never come forward with what had almost happened to her, to his knowledge. Nobody else would have had any cause to know that he was even in that alleyway.
“No matter how it happened, nor my intentions, does anything to change the fact that his death is in my hands. I am nothing more than the murderer that everyone presumes me to be.”
With his story concluded, Dorian waited. He had no idea how much time must have passed between his final words and when the tears stopped pouring down her face and over her fingers. He longed for her to say something, to do something, anything.
“Cordelia,” Dorian said when he could not take the silence for a moment longer. He turned toward her, his hand reaching—but she flinched away.
“Do not touch me,” she hissed, her eyes still brimmed with unshed tears. “You promised me that you would not lie. And you have done nothing else since the day I met you.”
Dorian flinched, out of all of the things that he had expected her to say, it was not that.
“I–I did not know how you would react; this is not exactly the ordinary sort of secret.”
“The scar on your stomach is not from the greenhouse then, like you claimed that it was, but it was from my… when he…” Her breath hitched, wholly unable to say the words, and he could not blame her. Dorian had been worried that she would call him a liar in the capacity that he had made up the story or that she was going to try to defend her late father or something of the sort.
“Cordelia, I–”
“No lies!” Cordelia choked as she swallowed back the tears in favor of what seemed to be rage. “You had the nerve to marry me, to bring me here! All the while sitting there, giving my mother false hope of stories or closure when you have known this whole time.”
“I did it to help you.”
“Help?” Cordelia asked incredulously. “Get out of my room.”
There it was, the look that he had been dreading this whole time—the look of pure disappointment and heartbreak that she was finally seeing him for the monster he truly was. All he had done was prolong the inevitable.
“Get out!” Cordelia sobbed. “I never wish to see you again!”
Something in Dorian’s chest broke, seeing her shudder like that, the pure desperation in her voice as he pushed off of her bed. What else could he do? While every instinct begged to pull her into his arms and make it all better, he knew that would never be possible.
Dorian left her room and softly shut the door behind her.
He heard her sobs all the way down the hall.
Sleep was an impossible goal for Cordelia.
Outside of her window, the sky was still and quiet. She had sat in her window seat for a good long while, watching the stars above her. She must have played the conversation with her husband in her mind at least a dozen times over. It did not make better sense the twelfth time she had replayed it any more than it had when it had first happened.
For hours, she had been drifting in and out of sleep. It felt as if every time she closed her eyes, she drifted back into the nightmare that normally only plagued her when it rained. She kept waking herself, over and over, with the intention of pushing the nightmare away. Yet, it just kept coming back, pulling her further and more deeply into the nightmare.
First, she was lost in the storm.
Then, she was lost in the maze.
Every time, her childhood self would start screaming, pleading for help, and wishing to be rescued. She woke up each time, only to fall fitfully right back where she left off. Hours of restlessness as the moon moved further across the sky.
Most troubling of all, was when she found herself in the clearing in the middle of the gardens.
She was looking up at the sky in her young body, and the sky seemed so far, and so high up over her and such a plain gray. The rain had stopped, it was like the scene that she found herself in was frozen in time, the moment still. Impossibly, her adult self walked behind her own smaller frame. Each step perfectly mirrored. Surreal as it was to see herself from outside of her own body as it was, it felt as if she could see more of the nightmare than she had ever been able to before.
Up ahead was their gazebo, the focal point of so many of her parent’s parties. Mama liked to have her tea out in the gazebo more than anything else. But, the person up ahead of her had frightened her so deeply last night that she had had this nightmare, and no one was there to rescue her.
The body of the second person had been hidden behind the other. The man’s broad shoulders nearly obscured the woman’s body from view entirely until she could see hands, pushing at the man’s shoulders—a scream that was just barely hidden under the clap of thunder as the nightmare suddenly spurred right back into motion.
Rain poured down as the couple in front of her struggled with one another. The man’s hand lifted, striking the side of the woman’s face, and she collapsed to the ground in a heap. Cordelia could hear herself yelling, screaming even louder and the man spun, looking at her with wide, frightened eyes.
Cordelia woke in a cold sweat, and could not sleep again.