Chapter 14 #2
She strode toward him, abandoning all pretense of deference, quite forgetting that she was merely a paid companion speaking to an earl.
“I have been attacked, threatened, and terrorized. I have earned the right to know what I am facing. So tell me, Lucien, tell me the truth, or I shall go mad trying to guess at it.”
Lucien stared at her, and for a moment, she thought he might actually answer. The mask of control wavered, revealing something raw and wounded beneath.
“I cannot,” he said at last. “The secrets I keep are not mine alone. They belong to my family, to generations of?—”
“I know about that.”
The words fell between them like stones into still water. Lucien went very still.
“Know what?”
Verity drew a breath, steeling herself for what must come next. “I know about your bloodline. About the … the moon-madness that afflicts your family.”
The color drained from his face. He said nothing, but neither did he deny it.
She pressed on, her voice steadier than she felt. “I know that you change. When the moon is full. I know that you become …” She hesitated, but there was no gentle way to say it. “A werewolf.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Lucien stared at her as though she had struck him, his golden eyes wide with something that looked very much like horror. He did not move. He did not speak. He simply stood there, frozen, while the seconds stretched into an eternity.
Finally, when Verity had begun to wonder if he would ever speak again, his voice emerged, hoarse and barely above a whisper.
“How?”
“Because I saw you.” Verity held his gaze. “Last night. In the courtyard. You saved me from Robert Fynn.”
Lucien’s brow furrowed, confusion replacing the horror in his expression. “What are you talking about? What do you mean … I saved you?”
Lucien stared at the woman before him and felt the last remnants of his carefully constructed world crumble to dust.
She knew.
Verity knew.
She had seen him, seen the beast, and she was still here, still standing before him with her chin raised and her green eyes blazing with that magnificent defiance that had captivated him from the first moment they met.
How was that possible? How was any of this possible?
Her scent filled his nostrils, that intoxicating blend of lavender and woman, and he had to fight to keep his thoughts coherent against the tide of longing that threatened to overwhelm him.
Even now, even in the midst of this impossible conversation, his body responded to her presence with a hunger that bordered on pain.
“What are you talking about?” His voice came out harsher than he intended. “What do you mean … I saved you?”
A crease appeared between her brows. “Do you not remember?”
“I never remember.” The admission cost him more than he could afford to pay. “During the quickening … during the time when the beast holds sway … I have no awareness. No memory. I wake with moonset and know nothing of what transpired in the darkness.”
The words hung in the air between them, heavy with all the years of terror and isolation they represented.
Four mornings he had woken, naked and shivering, with no knowledge of what he had done.
He had searched his hands, his mouth, his body for evidence of violence, dreading what he might find.
The not-knowing was its own particular torment, a wound that never healed because it was inflicted fresh each morning.
Understanding dawned in her eyes, softening the fierce determination that had animated her moments before. “You truly do not know what happened last night.”
“Tell me.” He crossed the distance between them, seized by an urgency he could not name. “Tell me everything.”
And so she told him. Of Robert Fynn’s mastiff materializing from the darkness like a nightmare made flesh.
Of Robert himself, emerging from the shadows with threats and violence in his eyes.
Of the attack. The brutal hands, the desperate struggle, the certainty that she would be violated or killed or both.
Lucien’s hands curled into fists at his sides as she spoke, rage building in his chest like a storm gathering force.
Robert Fynn had dared to touch her. Had dared to put his hands upon her, to threaten her, to attempt the very violation that had driven her from Somerset in the first place.
Here, at Blackfen, under his domain. The thought of it, of Verity alone in the darkness, fighting against a man twice her size, made something primal and savage rise up within him.
If Lucien had been in his human form, he would have torn the man apart with his bare hands and felt no remorse for the doing of it.
And then she told him of the wolf.
“You came out of nowhere,” she said, her voice softening with wonder.
“This enormous black wolf, larger than anything I had ever seen. Your eyes …” She paused, and something shifted in her expression, something soft that made his heart clench painfully in his chest. “I knew they were your eyes even before I understood what I was seeing. That same gold, with the black flecks.”
Lucien listened in stunned silence, trying to reconcile her account with everything he believed about himself and his curse.
The beast was supposed to be mindless, driven by instinct and hunger.
It was not supposed to recognize people.
It was not supposed to protect them. And yet Verity was describing something that sounded almost like …
loyalty. Like the wolf had known her. Had chosen her.
It was impossible. It went against everything he knew about his terrible transformations. The beast was a thing of violence and appetite, nothing more. It did not love. It did not protect. It only destroyed.
And yet.
“Robert’s dog fled at the sight of you. Simply tucked its tail and ran.
And Robert …” A grim satisfaction entered her voice, and Lucien found himself grateful for that edge of steel in her.
She was no wilting flower, his Verity. She had spine enough to face monsters of both the human and inhuman variety.
“Robert tried to use me as a shield, then shoved me toward you and ran like the coward he is.”
“And I did not harm you?” The question emerged before he could stop it, rough with desperate hope.
“You did not harm me. I was so certain I would die.” Verity reached out and took his hand, a gesture so simple, so trusting, that it nearly undid him.
Her fingers were warm against his, steady where his own trembled with the force of emotions he could not name.
“But you approached me. You … sniffed me, I suppose. As though you were memorizing my scent. And then you disappeared into the night.”