Prologue
Coming Soon!
Atone, Adonis
A gale ripped across the downs, drowning the stars and dragging the night into chaos. The rain fell in sheets and the wind was relentless, howling as if it too were alive and utterly incensed to be out in this weather.
Frederick Sedgewick, the man known in parlours and drawing rooms across England as the Local Adonis—a name he loathed as much as he loathed the way his greatcoat was currently plastered to his frame and the brim of his hat was bowing with collected rain—urged his horse down the mud-slicked country road.
He’d dined tonight at neighboring Hawthorne Hall.
It was a tedious affair made bearable only by the Hawthorne’s talented chef, wine aplenty, and the attention of a certain widowed Baroness he’d known would be in attendance.
She had been and she’d attended, one jeweled hand slipped up his thigh during dinner and down his trousers after dessert.
Fred stayed later than he meant to, waiting until the rain began to come down in earnest before excusing himself to make his way home.
The scent in the air alerted him that the storm brewing would be a bad one, but with only twenty years behind him and a devil-may-care streak in his rakish nature, he delayed his departure until the very last moment.
But as soon as the storm erupted over his head he knew he’d made the wrong choice. He should have left earlier. He shouldn’t have gone at all. But he had; of course he had. Some temptations were too difficult to resist.
He’d nearly made it home before his mare reared, her nostrils flaring. He pulled the horse up short with those same thighs the widow had been earlier caressing–thick and hard from his daily horsework–and brought her to a stop. (The mare, obviously. There had been no stopping the Baroness.)
“What is it, girl?” he murmured, stroking the side of her neck to calm her, before his eyes found the reason for her distress through the thick, dark curtain of rain.
There, just beyond the hedgerow’s bend, lay a half-buried wheel.
He squinted harder only to see….Christ. Splintered wood and twisted iron strewn across the road. No wonder the mare had been skittish. He was too at the sight of that carnage.
Fred dismounted, heart pounding, boots squelching through the mud as he made for the wreckage. What he saw when he reached it would be seared into his mind for the rest of his days.
The overturned carriage belonged to the Harrows.
Thomas Harrow, also twenty, was his closest friend; their families had been neighbors since childhood.
Thomas’s parents, Ignatius and Eliza, had always welcomed Fred as one of their own, and their bright-eyed daughter, twelve-year-old Julianna, forever trailed after her brother and him across the fields.
Now the familiar carriage lay crumpled on the embankment, one side caved in as if made from spun sugar instead of wood and iron. And there—dear God—Mr. Harrow’s dark, lifeless hand extended from the wreckage.
Fred closed his eyes and opened them again, hoping he’d imagined this scene. Dreamed it up, perhaps, from the stormy evening and too much wine. But no. Reality would not be subdued so easily. He turned aside and vomited.
“Mr. Harrow?” he called, wiping his hand across his mouth and crouching down to the ground, trying to see anything at all through the deluge and the shadows. But he couldn’t. It was too dark.
He was about to stand again when he heard a voice call out from underneath the carriage.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
“Thomas? Is that you?” Relief coursed through Fred, his whole body sagging with the exhale he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Hold on—I’ll get you out.”
“Fred?”
“It’s me, Tom. I’ll find something to—” His voice trailed off as he looked around for anything that might lift a thousand pounds of metal and wood.
Then he saw it. A second carriage, grander than the first, the lacquered side of it unmistakable even through the rain. “No,” he whispered. “No.”
“Hold on, Tom. I’ll be right back.”
“Fred? Don’t leave! Please. Julianna is with me. You must
get her out first.”
Fred hesitated, the wind and rain roaring around him. Then
he turned toward the darkness.
And the night swallowed him whole.