Chapter 13
Paths shifted without warning. Sounds carried strangely. Even seasoned men admitted, when pressed, that the forest had a way of observing those who passed beneath its boughs.
Lucien woke to the sensation of drowning.
Not in water, though there was water nearby.
He could hear it, a low murmur threading through the silence.
No, this drowning was of a different kind.
It was the slow, suffocating certainty that something had changed in the night, something fundamental and irreversible, though the particulars of it remained locked behind a door to which the beast held the only key.
He lay on his side in a depression of snow, his body curled inward like a child’s, knees drawn to his chest and arms crossed over his bare torso.
The cold had settled into him with the patience of an old enemy, numbing his extremities and stiffening his joints until every small movement produced a symphony of protest from muscles that had been twisted into shapes no human frame was designed to endure.
The first thing he did was raise his hands to his face.
His fingers were clumsy, thick with cold, but he forced them to obey.
He pressed them to his lips, his chin, the hollows beneath his cheekbones, searching for the telltale stickiness that would confirm his worst fear.
His nails scraped against skin that was raw and wind-bitten, tracing the line of his jaw, probing the corners of his mouth.
Nothing. No blood. No copper reek clinging to his teeth, no rust-brown crust beneath his fingernails. He exhaled. The relief was thin, a threadbare blanket thrown over an abyss, but it was enough to allow him to think.
He rose unsteadily to his feet, swaying as the blood rushed from his head and the world tilted sickeningly before righting itself.
The trees around him were old growth, massive oaks and elms, their bare branches lacing together overhead like the vaulted ceiling of some ancient cathedral.
Frost clung to every surface, turning the woodland into a glittering, crystalline realm that would have been beautiful under any other circumstances.
He needed his bearings.
The nearest oak was a giant, its trunk wider than Lucien’s arm span, its lowest branches thick enough to bear the weight of a horse.
He approached it, placed his hands upon the frozen bark, and began to climb.
The roughness of it bit into his palms and the tender soles of his feet, but the pain served a purpose.
It kept him anchored in the present, tethered to his body, to the human form that the night had seen fit to return to him.
The ascent was slow and graceless, nothing like the effortless scramble he might have managed in his youth.
His fingers cramped and his arms trembled with the effort of hauling himself from branch to branch in the frigid air, the cold robbing his muscles of their usual strength.
Or was it his melancholy to find himself thus?
But he climbed with the dogged persistence of a man who had done this before.
From the highest branch that would support his weight, Lucien steadied himself against the trunk and surveyed the world below.
The forest spread in every direction, a vast quilt of white and gray and the dark, skeletal fingers of leafless trees.
To the south, barely visible through the haze of distance and the pale morning light, the outline of Blackfen Castle rose above the tree line.
Its eastern fa?ade caught the wan light, the castle stonework softened by distance, rendered almost gentle, like a sketch in charcoal on gray paper.
Between him and the castle, a thread of smoke curled upward from the trees, from Ephraim’s cottage, the chimney already at work against the morning cold. The sight of it provided a direction and a destination, though neither brought him comfort.
The climb down was easier, gravity doing the work his exhausted muscles could not. He dropped the last several feet, landing in a crouch that sent pain lancing through his ankles, and stood to take his bearings from the ground.
His own tracks surrounded him. Not the tracks of a man, no bootprints or the drag of bare feet through snow.
Instead the deep, heavy impressions of enormous paws circled the spot where he had lain, overlapping and crossing in patterns that suggested pacing, restlessness, a creature that had prowled this clearing before the dawn had forced its retreat.
Lucien stared at the prints with the hollow resignation of a man examining evidence at his own trial. They led from the clearing toward the river and the village beyond.
For a moment, he considered following them.
The trail would tell him where the wolf had been, what it had done, whether the night had passed in aimless wandering or in something far worse.
The knowledge might be terrible, but at least it would be knowledge, and the not-knowing was its own particular torment.
But he turned away from the trail with a deliberation that cost him more than the cold. He did not want to know. Not yet. Whatever truths the tracks might reveal, he was not strong enough to face them barefoot and half-frozen in the gray light of a January morning.
He set his course for Ephraim’s cottage and began to walk.
The forest was silent around him, that peculiar winter silence that was not truly silence at all but the absence of the sounds one expected to hear.
No birdsong, no rustle of small creatures in the underbrush.
It was in this silence that Verity came to him, the memory of her as vivid and inescapable as the cold.
He could still feel the press of her body beneath his, the way she had opened to him with a trust so complete it had undone him more thoroughly than any chain or silver manacle.
The way she had looked at him, her green eyes luminous in the firelight, as if he were something worthy of such tenderness.
He was not worthy. He had proven that conclusively.
Lucien’s jaw tightened as he walked, each step driving the thought deeper.
He had taken her virtue on his study floor like some rutting beast, driven by the very animal nature he had sworn to contain.
It mattered not that she had been willing, that she had wanted him with a ferocity that matched his own.
He was the earl. He was the one with the curse running through his blood, the one who knew the danger he posed to every soul beneath his roof.
The responsibility was his, and he had failed it utterly.
He should send her away.
The thought landed in his chest with the weight of a musket ball.
He should settle money upon her, enough to establish herself comfortably in some distant town where Robert Fynn would never find her.
He would write a letter of recommendation under his own hand, one that would open doors no forged reference ever could.
He would ensure her safety, her comfort, her future.
And then he would never see her again.
The pain of it was astonishing, sharp and immediate, as though someone had reached into his chest and closed a fist around his heart. He stumbled in the snow, catching himself against a birch trunk, and stood there for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing through the anguish.
He was very much afraid he was in love with her.
Not merely attracted, not merely intrigued by her wit and courage and the stubborn set of her chin when she was determined.
This was something deeper, something that had sunk roots into the very bedrock of his being and refused to be dislodged.
The wolf knew it. The wolf had known it from the first moment her scent had reached him across the great hall, carried on the draft from the open door like a message written in a language only he could read.
But love, in a man such as himself, was not a gift.
It was a weapon turned inward, a blade pressed against the throat of the very person he wished to cherish.
He could not guarantee her safety. Three nights running, the chains had failed.
Three nights running, the wolf had broken free to roam the darkness, and Lucien had woken with no memory of where it had been or what it had done.
To keep Verity at Blackfen under such conditions was not love. It was recklessness.
Unless it was he who should leave.
The thought arrived unbidden, but once it had taken root, it would not be shaken loose.
Perhaps Verity should remain at the castle, safe in the warmth of his mother’s apartments, performing the duties for which she had been hired.
And perhaps he, the source of the danger, the vessel of the curse, should be the one to disappear.
He could build a cottage deep in the woods, far from the village and the castle and every living soul whose safety he endangered.
Ephraim’s dwelling was proof enough that a man could survive in such isolation.
Lucien would need nothing more than four walls, a hearth, and a door strong enough to hold whatever he became when the moon rose full.
He could lock himself away each month and wake to harm no one but himself.
It would be a kind of death, this exile. A burial of the living. But it would keep the people he loved safe, and that, in the end, was the only duty that mattered.
The trees thinned as he approached the edge of the gamekeeper’s clearing. Ephraim’s cottage sat in its customary place, squat and solid as a boulder, smoke curling from the chimney in a lazy thread. The windows were dark, however, and no movement showed at the door.
Lucien crossed the yard and knocked, the sound of his knuckles against the weathered wood startlingly loud in the morning stillness.
He waited, shifting his weight from one frozen foot to the other, his arms crossed over his bare chest in a futile attempt to conserve what little warmth remained in him.
And his ballocks, dear God his ballocks were frozen.