Chapter 13 #3
“I wish I knew.” She was back to barely above a whisper now, a bleak thread reaching through the dark to lance him with her pain.
“It started when I was nine. This…this overwhelming need. I would have such fits, such bouts of pure physical suffering. My chest would feel like it might explode, my skin would be raw, my lungs refusing to work. The doctor said it was nerves. Tried to dose me with all sorts of tonics, but nothing worked… At least not well. The first time I took something, it was after my mother had berated me for an eternity. The relief I felt was indescribable, and so then next time I was in trouble, I did it again. And again. And each time I did…I’d gain control over the sensations threatening to rip my heart from my chest.”
Eli swallowed around a lump of sympathy.
Caleb had suffered something like she described.
Conniptions of heart palpitations and uncontrollable shaking.
Especially in times of stress. He’d become convinced that he couldn’t breathe.
That his throat was closing over. They went to the doctor several times, only to be told he was fine.
But he wasn’t fine…
“Does your family know? Does Morley?”
She shook her head. “Don’t blame Morley, he has no idea.”
“I was asking if anyone ever offered to find you help… Did no one else realize? Your mother, or father?”
“Only my Uncle Reginald, but…” She shifted again, her shadow becoming smaller. “He…he made it worse.”
“The fuck did he do?” Eli demanded, his entire being screaming at the stars to not let his dark suspicion be true.
“I’d stopped for a while, after finishing school,” she remembered aloud.
“Emmaline and I realized that I seemed to get worse during times of stress, and if I cultivated other behaviors, I could keep the need at bay…but then Father stopped coming to visit often, and Uncle Reginald moved in with us at Fairhaven.”
“Did he touch you…where he shouldn’t?” Eli asked from between clenched teeth.
She exhaled slowly, and his heart shriveled at the stress he heard in the sound.
“Not in the way you mean. Not really. He’d a cane we all detested by the time he was killed, and he used it on me the most. As a rapping reminder against my shoulder blades to remind me to keep my posture.
As a painful snap against the hand if Emmaline or I were to eat more than he’d portioned for us.
Sometimes, he’d lift my skirts with it, claiming to examine whether or not I’d properly situated my underthings. ”
Eli didn’t allow his teeth to unclench, so he couldn’t threaten to kill the perverted fuck. Again.
“He made it clear every single day that he was crafting me into his idea of the perfect woman,” she continued.
“Assiduously clean. Endlessly elegant. Words never above a whisper. Footsteps never heavier than an autumn leaf’s fall.
He spoke to me of things he ought not to.
Happened upon me while bathing or dressing, and then punished me for impropriety.
He never touched me. Not with his hands.
He treated other people as if they were filthy, and shrank from physical contact.
I suppose I should be grateful… But there was a malevolent light in his eyes when he punished me.
And it was not unlike the sexual interest of other men.
“He enjoyed it, my pain. My humiliation. That was what he craved. What he lusted for. He watched me so very closely in order to catch me in any crime against the family’s extraordinary strictures, so that he could be the one to mete out my consequence.”
Eli realized now why she’d such an intense reaction to his threat to do the self-same thing.
“Living under such intense regard seems to exacerbate my proclivity. Indeed, often the anticipation of punishment would drive me to steal. Little things. His shaving brush. A favorite Bible. A pair of spectacles. The black bishop off the chess set in his study. He’d caught me once, at seventeen, swiping a brass button from a shop in town.
Rather than have me return the pilfered item, he gave me five sharp swats with the ruler on the open palm of my hand.
When my skin broke and bled upon the final blow, I noticed how…
” Her breath hitched and she swallowed convulsively.
“I noticed how aroused he’d become, and I fled the house.
“I was caught, of course, and became little better than a prisoner in my own home. I’d taken to stealing things from my siblings, from the staff, and from Uncle Reginald when I had no alternative and could no longer stand it.
I hardly ate. I never slept. I was a ghost waiting for this…
this monster inside me to finally do me in for good.
My mother died, and then my father and his counterfeit Baroness, leaving everything to Felicity.
Uncle Reginald was so livid, he enacted a plan to murder Felicity, and was subsequently thwarted and… killed by her husband, thank God.”
“Jesus…”
“After all of that, I’ll admit I was perilously close to…
to giving up. I’d a plan to climb to the top of Fairhaven and pitch myself off the roof.
But then, the Goodes gave Emmett his title, and invited us into their house.
Into their family. And for a while, I was happy.
I was better. I was better, until Emmett’s fiancée and her mother stayed at our home.
She is so hateful to poor Emmett. So critical of everything and…
that night when I crept into the observatory, I really did only mean to use the telescope.
But my demon scratched and scratched at me, and as I looked over your treasure, I took the thing that seemed the least valuable.
And then I lied about it so no one would find out.
So that Emmett wouldn’t lose everything.
And that…that is how we came to be in this predicament. ”
By the time she finished, Eli felt as if he’d swallowed an entire sack of nails, so cutting was his guilt. So sharp was his rage.
“Perhaps I should have pitched myself off the roof of Fairhaven, after all,” she whispered.
Reaching for her, he opened his mouth to protest at the exact time someone opened the door to the closet, startling them both.
“I thought I heard voices in here.”
Whirling, Eli found himself eye to eye-patch with the one and only Dorian Blackwell. Sleek as a witch’s black cat, and every bit as sinister, the so-called King of the London Underworld sized up the tableau before him immediately.
Likely aided by the undergarments clutched in his wife’s hands.
“Mr. Wolfe,” Blackwell said with a mischievous half-grin. “And Mrs. Wolfe, I presume?”