Chapter 14
C H A P T E R
F O U R T E E N
no candlelight vigil
He tied her to the chair so she couldn’t hurt herself or get away while he figured out next steps.
The hunt—that part was easy. It was what happened after the capture that was new, that made him question the darkness gilding his heart.
She was the mirror to his graces; every time he looked at her, it was like seeing a new portrait of himself inked in unfamiliar colors and lights.
That image was splintered now, gouged by his own cruel hand, but Cal longed for its beauty nonetheless, just as he longed for her.
“Wake up, darling,” he said. “Daddy wants a word with you.”
She woke as if in pain. Cal watched keenly, waiting for the first glimpse of her eyes. There had been a moment in Gideon’s office where he fully believed that the precise grey color of her irises would be lost to him, existing only in memory. Another shade in a catalogue of ghosts.
Her eyes focused dully. The pupils shrank and she backed against the chair, still confined by the bindings. Then she jerked, like an animal caught in a trap, and that wicked part of him whispered, She fights so beautifully.
“Hello, little sparrow.”
Her eyes swiveled around her, taking in the sight of the room—and him. She seemed to find him difficult to look at, however, and averted her gaze, lingering on the fire behind its grate. Her bound hands flexed behind her back as the flames danced in the whites of her eyes.
“Am I—dying?”
“No, Nadine,” he said coolly. “Despite your best efforts, you’re still very much alive.”
Her throat was so dry that he heard the click when she swallowed. “What did you do to me?”
His eyebrows lifted. “Nothing. I’m not sure what you were trying to accomplish, though. Running through town like that. Making wild accusations. I warned you about your sister.”
She lunged forward as far as the restraints would allow. “They were true accusations.”
“Nadine.” His touch made her flinch, even as he raised goosebumps in the wake of his gentle caress. “If you really want to find out what happened to Noelle, I’ll show you. But you’re going to have to give me something in return.”
“Like what,” she said, but her voice cracked and her eyes flicked to his fly and then away. “Like what?” she repeated again, when he didn’t respond.
He kept his eyes on her face. “We’ll come back to that. First, let me tell you a story.”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
“But you know part of it already, darling—that’s right. You read it in the journal.”
All the color drained from her face. “No.”
“Caledon Cullraven was a jaded and dissolute man who believed life wasn’t worth living if you didn’t burn it at both ends.
The dictates of the Victorian uppercrust had no appeal for him and he left his home of England to come here, to the very edges of the mountainous California wilderness: a place where he could live as he wished, how he wished.
Which is how our story begins, because none of it was ever enough. ”
His namesake: the libertine who could quote de Sade from memory and spent the coin earned on the backs of the laborers of his family’s blood mine on brothels and opium until he finally left England and came here, to exploit this forested enclave in the middle of the mountains and burn through the tedium of his various excesses like a white sun through fog.
But none of that was enough. Caledon Cullraven hadn’t wished to leash his depravity. And out here, isolated from the very society over which he wished to exert his peculiar brand of dominance, he began to stagnate and turn restless.
“He grew bored,” Cal said, “again, until for the very first time in his life, he felt something close to the passion that he had always secretly craved.”
Nadine’s lips drew back in a grimace. “Murder.’
“He was a gentleman, so he gave them a choice. He always gave them a knife. Even deer have antlers. He told them if they survived the night, they could live in peace. But they didn’t survive, Nadine. Ever. Because he was very, very good at what he did.”
She looked up at him in horror, as if realizing that this was the answer to her earlier question. Like what—what did he want from her? Everything. Her body, her fight, her surrender. Her life.
“When he married his second wife,” Cal said, “he told her how much he loved the killing and the blood. He said it filled him with vigor and made him feel like he was god. God, that power. It was more addictive than opium and infinitely more illicit, but that only gave it a flavor that was all the more suited for his perverse tastes. So he gave her a choice, too. She could keep her silence and fuck him when his blood was up, and for her, the hunt would be bloodless. Or she could try her luck in the woods, and see if she could outlast him.”
“Outlast . . . him?”
“In a fight for survival,” Cal said. “To the death.”
She had never looked at him like that before—a charged look of awareness, nearly sexual in its intensity. She sees me, he thought, and there was relief in that, as well as a certain carnal satisfaction. This was no mirror, no flattering intimist’s portrait.
This was him, unleashed, in all of his carnal glory.
“The sparrows—” Bravely, she struggled to maintain eye contact even as her words faltered. “Oh god, they’re . . . they’re women, aren’t they? So—what, y-you’re going to kill me in the woods?”
“Sparrows get to choose, Nadine.” She winced as he traced the still-tender edges of those broken blood vessels blooming violet and scarlet against her skin. “For you, it doesn’t have to be destruction. Evangeline Cullraven was the very first sparrow. She saved herself.”
“Because she married a psychopath,” Nadine said hotly. “Why do you do it?”
“There’s a will. Each generation writes their own codicil, since a will can only dictate a life in being.
The parents distribute their wealth to those who ‘uphold the tenets of the past generations.’ There’s an in terrorem clause built in so anyone who contests the will loses their portion of the inheritance. ”
And their life.
“You do it for money?”
“Well.” He let her eyes drift to her shirtfront. “I don’t.”
Nadine made a wounded sound, like he’d struck her with an arrow.
Fighting against her restraints and him so bravely, like a cornered animal lowering its head to charge one last time.
He wanted to soothe her, but from the way she held herself now, a single touch might only cause her fragile facade of valiance to crumble like melting ice.
Cal leaned back and some of the tension ebbed from her shoulders. “Yes. Ben didn’t want to tell her. He didn’t trust her to make the right choice. But he still wanted her anyway, so he lied to our father and said that she knew, even as he kept her in the dark.”
And in that darkness, she beckoned like flame to a moth.
“But Father found out anyway, when he lost the book—and she found it. Oh, he was furious, my father. He told Ben to make it right.”
“To kill her,” Nadine whispered brokenly.
He bowed his head.
“Like a deer.”
“Oh, Nadine.” He cradled her head closer, letting her hair tangle through his fingers.
Her breaths glanced off his stomach, quick and halting.
“What am I going to do with you? You read the whole fucking book, didn’t you?
I thought for sure that this—” he flicked the bruise on her neck “—would make you run.”
“I didn’t,” she said stubbornly.
“No, you didn’t. Selfishly, I hoped you wouldn’t. And you’re here right now because you’re exactly the woman I thought you were: brave, sweet . . . na?ve.”
Her eyes filled with a blaze of hatred, body coiling as if she were prepared to lash out.
And he would have accepted that but she was not his goal—not yet, anyway.
The papers on the desk were, which Gideon had given him back along with the unconscious Nadine, the message clear: this would be his body to bury, his kill to clean.
(This time you’ll be culling your own heard)
She cried out as he began feeding the papers into the fire. “No! What are you doing? Those are mine! She wrote those to me—”
“I’m doing this for your own good, little sparrow.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over her quiet sobs. The flames warmed his cold fingers through the grate. This felt like killing Noelle a second time, the blackening vellum even giving off the scent of burning hair.
Cal stood taller, locking his shoulders.
“I’ve grown rather fond of you, you know. And I know it hurts now—our kind of love always does. But I can still be gentle, even when I’m being cruel. Poor darling.”
“Fuck you, Cal.”
“Yes, and you were very good at it.” He ran his hand over his bare chest and watched her follow his fingers. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m going to do to you now?”
Nadine didn’t respond but that was all right because he didn’t expect her to.
Closing the fire cage, Cal brushed off his hands and approached her slowly, watching her grow stiffer and stiffer in her seat.
Bracing herself—for what? Did his poor, tame little sparrow think he was going to take her out back and shoot her?
She belonged to him now.
She flinched when he knelt between her legs, bucking involuntarily. Meeting her eyes again, Cal leaned forward, his head bowing over her right shoulder as he reached around her waist to undo the knots binding her wrists.
She smelled like the outdoors, like soap and clean sweat, and something inherently her. He inhaled against her hair, breathing it in. Breathing her in. Wanting to fucking devour her.