The Rented Heart (Inconvenient Ventures #2)

Prologue

“I do not care for the confusion of waking. It is far more efficient to arrive at consciousness already composed.”

From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, reflecting on how certain prescriptions eased her day.

* * *

Sleep had visited late.

The leg had seen to that. It had conducted its usual nocturnal argument with the rest of him.

It was patient, thorough, impossible to ignore, while the wind off the Cornish cliffs poured through every gap in the ancient stonework and made its cold sentiments known.

He had lain in the dark for what felt like a geological age, rearranging himself with diminishing optimism, before exhaustion had finally outbid pain and dragged him under.

Now Nicholas had awoken, startled in the dark room by … something.

Then he heard it again.

He did not move. He kept his eyes closed. And his breathing was even as he lay with absolute stillness, abruptly remembering that announcing oneself is not always wise.

His mind, clawing its way out of sleep, began sorting what his body had already perceived.

The wind was there. Perpetual, westerly, carrying the sea in it.

The house was demonstrating its nightly inventory of creaks and whistles.

The iron grates set into these ancient walls, threading their thin complaint into the dark.

But beneath it all was something that did not belong. A soft displacement of air. A silence with a shape to it. The very distinct quiet of a person trying not to be heard.

Gabriel’s voice sprouted in his memory with inconvenient clarity. Nicholas’s host had chosen his words with care weeks prior. He had explained how he had become entangled in this quest with the economy of a former intelligence man, conveying danger while withholding panic.

Horace Pelham was found dead in Oxford.

The viscount’s former tutor. A scholar. A man who had been gifted a valuable first edition to feed his love of Arthurian legend and had encountered, in lieu of answers, a considerably more permanent resolution to his curiosity.

The Dominus?

Nicholas recollected that he was at Grimsfell Hall.

It was the black heart of the night. And someone was moving in his bedchamber.

He opened his eyes.

The room was not dark. That was wrong. He had extinguished his taper before retiring.

He was a conscientious man about fire, whatever parliament of failings his family had assembled against his name over the years.

A thin, wavering light moved near the writing table.

Candle, shielded by a hand. The shadow of a figure bending over his papers, reading them with unhurried attention.

Unhurried.

That struck him.

He turned his head, very slowly, toward that light.

The figure was slight. Much slighter than the word assassin had, in the past thirty seconds, suggested to his imagination.

A dark traveling cloak, hood pushed back, and beneath it a pale fall of curling fair hair turned warm gold in the candlelight.

The intruder was replacing each page of his correspondence precisely where it had been found before lifting the next. Methodical. Focused.

Then the figure moved toward his open book on the corner of the table, and the candle caught a glint of metal perched on the end of a small, resolute nose.

Wire-framed spectacles. On a length of ribbon. Scarlet ribbon, shocking against the dark wool of the cloak, tied neatly at the back of the neck.

Nicholas regarded the ceiling for a moment.

The Dominus, he was fairly certain, did not adorn.