Chapter 12
Older maids spoke of a household as if it were a creature with moods of its own.
On nights when the wind pressed close and the corridors felt longer than they ought, they said a prayer, tightened their shawls, and carried on because experience had taught them that some things were not improved by curiosity.
“Lucien?”
Her voice emerged as little more than a breath.
But the wolf heard. Its ears shifted forward.
The creature cocked its great head, staring down at her with an expression that no beast should have been capable of wearing …
something between recognition and anguish, as if her voice had reached across an impossible divide and found whatever remained of the man within.
For a moment, they regarded one another. His eyes held hers, unblinking, and she perceived in them a war she could not fully comprehend, a struggle between instinct and something deeper, something achingly human.
Then the wolf turned and ran into the woods.
It vanished with a silence that belied its size, swallowed by the shadows between the ancient oaks as if it had been nothing more than a figment conjured by moonlight and terror.
Verity lay upon the snow-covered ground, her breath coming in ragged gasps, staring at the space where the creature had stood.
The impression of its great paws remained in the snow beside her, undeniable proof that the encounter had been real.
The cold seeped through her gown and into her bones, numbing her fingers and stiffening her limbs, but she could not bring herself to rise. Not yet. Not until her heart remembered how to beat at a pace that did not threaten to shatter her ribs.
The shock of what she had witnessed held her thoughts hostage, as surely as if iron manacles had been clasped about her mind. She had seen something impossible. She had spoken a name, and a wolf had recognized it. Her mind grasped at reason, but reason slipped through her fingers like water.
Lucien.
The name reverberated through her thoughts, a bell struck in an empty cathedral.
It cannot be. And yet …
A wet nose pressed against her cheek, and Verity startled so violently that she nearly cracked her skull against the frozen ground.
She turned her head to discover Braccus looming over her with an expression of what she could only describe as paternal concern.
His wiry gray muzzle hung low, frosted with silver, and the lantern light caught the grizzled threads through his iron-colored coat, lending him the distinguished appearance of a general surveying a battlefield.
He huffed a warm breath across her face, the sound low and reassuring, before sitting back on his haunches with the dignified air of a sentinel resuming his post. One enormous paw rested near her hand, close enough to touch but not presuming, as if he understood that she required comfort but wished to allow her the dignity of requesting it.
Beyond him, Eirin paced in tight circles, her graceful fawn-colored form cutting through the snow with restless energy.
The wolfhound’s intelligent eyes darted toward the trees where the wolf had disappeared, then back to Verity, as if she were cataloguing threats and calculating the most efficient method of dispatching them.
Even in her state of bewilderment, Verity recognized the hound’s agitation for what it was, not fear but readiness.
Ronan was the last to show himself. The youngest of the three had stationed himself several yards distant, his blue-gray coat ghostly in the dim light, every muscle quivering with barely contained tension.
His silver eyes, pale with their faint blue cast, darted between Verity and the trees into which the wolf had vanished, and she could see the war being waged within him, the fierce urge to give chase battling against some command he had been taught to obey.
A low growl rumbled in his throat, and for a moment Verity thought he might bolt into the darkness after the creature.
Then Eirin paused in her circling long enough to nudge the young hound with her muzzle, and Ronan yielded.
He crossed the remaining distance in three long, loping strides, folded his legs beneath him, and dropped into the snow at Verity’s hip with a huff of surrender, pressing his trembling flank against her.
When Verity reached out for him, he pressed his nose into her palm and whimpered.
“It is all right,” Verity whispered, though she was not at all certain this was true.
Her voice trembled, and she became aware that her entire body was trembling as well.
She curled her fingers into the wiry fur at Ronan’s neck and held on as if the young hound were an anchor and she a vessel adrift in an uncharted sea.
She was safe. The three wolfhounds had circled her in a loose formation.
Braccus was at her head, Eirin patrolled the perimeter, and Ronan huddled against her side.
Verity understood with a clarity that cut through her shock that these animals had been sent to protect her.
Or perhaps they had come of their own volition, guided by some instinct she could not fathom.
Slowly, painfully, Verity sat up. Her gown was damp from the snow and her hair had come loose from its pins, tumbling about her shoulders in a tangle of red waves.
Think, Verity. You must think.
But thinking required a foundation of logic, and logic had been thoroughly purged.
She had looked into the eyes of a wolf and seen the man who had held her in his arms that very afternoon. The man who had kissed her with such desperate tenderness. The man whose body had trembled above hers in the firelit study as he whispered her name like a prayer.
The dowager’s words returned to her with the force of a winter gale, and Verity pressed her free hand to her mouth as the pieces assembled themselves with terrible precision.
She had dismissed her numerous remarks as metaphor, the harmless poetry of a mind that wandered between lucidity and dream.
But Lady Blackfen had not been wandering at all.
She had been speaking with the plain certainty of a woman stating that the sun rose in the east. To the dowager, these were not revelations.
They were facts, as unremarkable as the color of the sky or the chill of a northern winter.
The Earl of Blackfen transformed into a wolf beneath the full moon, and his mother saw no reason to soften the telling of it.
She understood now why Lucien had fled the study with such desperate haste this afternoon, why his face had drained of color at the sight of the fading light beyond the window.
He had not been called away by some estate matter or sudden obligation.
He had been racing against the moon itself, protecting her from what he was about to become.
Or perhaps protecting himself from her horror when she discovered it.
The wolfhounds pressed closer, their warmth a comfort she would not have thought to seek from creatures that had previously terrified her. Now they flanked her like guards, as though she were already one of their own.
The family crest surfaced in her mind then.
The black wolf rampant, jaws parted in a silent howl, clutching wolfsbane in its paw.
She had seen it carved above the great hearth, embroidered upon the household linens, pressed into the sealing wax of Lucien’s correspondence.
She had admired it as handsome heraldry. Nothing more.
How many signs had she failed to read?
The strange magnetism between them. That invisible thread connecting her heart to his, drawing taut whenever he entered a room.
She had called it desire, the natural inclination of a woman toward a man of compelling presence and considerable beauty.
But it had been more than desire. It had been something older, more insistent, something that moved beneath the surface of rational thought like a current beneath still water.
The way her pulse quickened not merely at the sight of him but at the scent of him, that particular blend of woodsmoke and something wilder, earthier, that she could never quite name.
The way her body had responded to his proximity with a directness that shocked her good breeding into appalled silence.
The way she had gone to him in his study not with the dutiful composure of a companion, but with a hunger that had left her breathless and him undone.
Mates, wolves, ancient bonds written in blood. These belonged to the natural world, to the forest and the fen, to creatures that ran beneath the moon, not to women who poured tea and discussed the weather with practiced civility.
And yet it fit. It fit with a rightness that made Verity’s chest ache, because it named the thing she had felt but could not articulate.
It justified the bone-deep conviction that she belonged beside this man, that the universe had conspired to place her at his side and would brook no argument on the matter.
She considered the peculiar designs of providence, which had placed her here, at this time, in these circumstances.
A vicar’s daughter. Sensible, educated, possessed of a practical mind and a healthy skepticism toward superstition, entangled with a man who transformed into a wolf.
If this was divine comedy, the Almighty possessed a sense of the absurd that rivaled the finest satirists of the age.
But perhaps there was a design beneath the jest. Perhaps she had been intended for this all along, shaped by her upbringing, her temperament, her stubborn refusal to be cowed by the inexplicable, to be precisely the sort of woman who could stand beside Lucien and not falter.
A woman who could look into the eyes of a wolf and see not a beast but the man she loved.
Love?
The word settled into her consciousness with the quiet authority of a truth.
She was in love with the Earl of Blackfen. Utterly, irrevocably in love.