Chapter 13 #3
“And yet the beast roams free.” Lucien pressed his fists against his temples, as if he could crush the horror from his own skull. “Every night. Every night it roams free, and now a man is dead because I could not hold it.”
The silence that followed was vast and pitiless, filled only by the whisper of wind through bare branches and the distant cry of a crow.
Lucien remained on his knees, his body folded in upon itself, and felt his soul splinter into a million pieces.
Each fragment carried a different anguish.
The face of old Mr. Milton, whom he had known since boyhood, a quiet, stooped man who mended fences and fed the birds outside his cottage door.
The terror the old man must have felt in his final moments, alone on a dark path with death bearing down upon him in a form too monstrous to comprehend.
The daughter who had found him. The village that would mourn him.
The blood. There would have been so much blood, staining the snow in the vivid crimson.
And beneath all of it, woven through every thread of grief like a dark counterpoint, was Verity herself and the absolute, devastating trust in her eyes as she opened herself to him, body and soul, offering everything she had to a man who had no right to accept it.
He had taken her virtue and given her his heart, and now both gestures were revealed for what they truly were, acts of monstrous selfishness performed by a creature that could not be trusted with the safety of a field mouse, let alone the woman he loved.
A terrible decision crystallized in his mind with the cold clarity of ice forming on still water.
He should see to his affairs. Settle the estate.
Make provisions for his mother, for Verity, for every soul who depended on the Northwood name.
And then he should send for Ephraim, walk with him into the deepest part of Blackfen Woods, and ask the man who had served his family for these past decades to place a silver musket ball between his eyes.
Just as Lucien had done to his own father.
The symmetry of it was almost poetic. Father and son, both brought down by the same curse. The bloodline would die as Lucien had always intended it should, only sooner and with more violence than he had envisioned.
He could only pray that Verity was not with child.
The thought rose up from the wreckage of his composure and seized him by the throat.
He had withdrawn, yes, spending himself upon her belly rather than within her, but he knew enough of the mechanics of conception to understand that such precautions were not infallible.
If she carried his child, a child that might inherit the curse, then his death would not end the bloodline at all.
It would merely pass the burden to an innocent who had never asked for it.
The possibility was too dreadful to contemplate, and so he set it aside with the numb pragmatism of a man who had already exceeded his capacity for horror.
Ephraim moved at last. The gamekeeper lowered himself onto his haunches beside Lucien, his great bulk settling with a creak of leather and the soft exhalation of a man who had seen too much of the world’s cruelty to be surprised by any new installment.
He placed a rough, calloused hand upon Lucien’s shoulder.
Not gripping, not pulling, merely resting there with a steadiness that spoke of a loyalty deeper than words.
He said nothing. There was nothing to say. He simply remained, a solid, weathered presence at Lucien’s side, offering the only comfort available to a man who had been asked to witness his master’s destruction, the comfort of not looking away.
They stayed like that for a long time. The wind shifted. The light strengthened. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell tolled, its sound faint and mournful, carried on the cold air like a requiem for the dead.
At last, Lucien lifted his head. His eyes were dry, for the grief had gone too deep for tears, but he was ravaged, pain etched so deeply he might have aged a decade in the space of an hour. He drew a breath that shuddered through his entire body, held it, and released it slowly.
“I must return to the castle,” he said, his voice scraped hollow.
“There are arrangements to be made. For the estate. For my mother. For …” He could not bring himself to say her name.
“I will send for you later, Ephraim. There is something I must ask of you, but not yet. Not until I have set my affairs in order.”
Something shifted in the gamekeeper’s expression, a flicker of understanding, perhaps, or of dread at what that request might entail.
His mouth opened as if to speak, the words visibly forming behind his lips, gathering weight and urgency.
But whatever he wished to say, he swallowed it back with a grimness that tightened his jaw.
He nodded once, a single, curt movement, and stepped aside to let Lucien pass.
Lucien walked on without looking back, his borrowed shoes crunching through the snow, each step carrying him closer to Blackfen Castle and further from any hope he had ever harbored of a life worth living.