Chapter Seventeen #2
I should have pawed at Nick, begging him to stop, despite what Tom had been about to do to me. I knew any decent, moral woman would instinctively want to stop one man from killing another, no matter what he’d done.
But I had no such instinct.
I watched, fascinated, as Tom’s limbs went ever more limp, giving up their fight. Nick paused, his chest heaving with every laboured breath.
“Did you think I would let you touch her, you filth?” Nick asked through bared teeth. He held Tom around his throat. A hideous wheezing came from Tom’s bloodied mouth.
“She’s...murderer.” Tom managed to force out the words, followed by the gargle of blood in his throat. “Killed...them both...”
Nick glanced at me over his shoulder. He looked back at Tom and dealt him a final blow with his sore and bloodied fist. Tom shuddered beneath him, the gargling sound increasing, coming from within his chest, now.
It rattled and churned like a drain backing up.
It was a new sound for me. A fascinating sound.
“A turncoat to the last,” said Nick.
My body pulsed in all the places it shouldn’t. I crept nearer, closer, wanting to see Tom’s face. When I did, I gasped. It was red, sickeningly bloodied, and swollen beyond recognition. Nick retrieved something from his coat pocket and, hunching over him, began winding it around Tom’s neck.
“What are you doing?” I hissed, looking nervously around us. The forest was desolate. We were alone, but still, I was afraid he would be caught.
“He’s too far gone,” he muttered. “I buckled his windpipe. It’s too late to save him.”
I knew just as well as Nick did that he’d had no intention of saving him. That every punch was intended to end him. My womb tightened as I watched Nick pulling the ligature taut. I crept closer, the leaves soft underfoot.
“Don’t look at this, Grace,” said Nick, his voice tight and breathless as he pulled.
I paid him no mind and crouched beside him.
The rain had stopped, and now the moon peeked out from behind the wandering clouds.
It allowed me to see him better. Tom’s bloated face turned a deeper red, his chest stilled, eyes bulging, as he gave way to death.
I heard a soft whistling sound. I pressed his nostrils shut with my thumb and forefinger, pinching them.
I held them until the whistling stopped, and for a short time longer, just to be certain.
I watched the light fade from his eyes so elegantly that it threw me deeper into ecstasy.
Pure, uninhibited, rapture.
When it was done, I felt Nick’s eyes on me, watching my chest heaving, overwhelmed as I was with desire.
He drew me into his arms and kissed me, while his fingers found my sex.
I groaned against him, tears streaming from my tightly closed eyes.
Within seconds I was falling, shattering into thousands of pieces, crying against his mouth.
I bucked lustily as he finished me, unravelled me, and left me limp in his arms.
But Nick wasn’t finished.
He spread open my legs and entered me, slamming me into the dirty ground, clutching handfuls of soil either side of my head. It was so good, and so right, to feel him inside me. I forgot the world. I forgot Louisa. But I could not forget Tom’s dead body beside us.
All I needed or ever wanted was him. Our bodies. The cold, wet soil. This exquisite death.
He reached his end and collapsed in my arms, panting, as his lips sought mine once more. Nick understood me so completely, on a visceral level, that I knew I could never accept another man. It had to be him, always. Forever.
“I’m sorry, Grace,” he cried between kisses, clutching at me, as if begging me to stay when I had no intention of leaving.
“Hush,” I said, stroking his face. “It’s over now. Listen.”
Nick listened, softening his hard breaths. Only the sounds of the night returned to us; the moaning wind, the groan of the trees. The hum of the cars on the motorway.
“Why did you go with him, Grace?” he asked, cupping my face in his hands. “Why did you do it?”
Sadness flooded my eyes, making them sting. I looked down at the forest floor.
“I’ve no place with you,” I said mournfully, my voice thickening as the words left my mouth. “I don’t belong there. You knew it. You always knew it.”
“I made monumental mistakes, Grace. I betrayed your trust. I wish I could take it all back. It was out of fear of losing you, fear that if you knew of Louisa, you would never stay. That you would never understand that my soul is still yours, that it belongs with you.”
“How could that be if you still take care of her? Still visit with her? You held her to your chest like you – ”
“Because I have to, can’t you see?” He moaned his retort with such despair that I closed my mouth, and was unable to say another word more.
He let out ragged breaths, leaning over me, hunched and broken. The strain of keeping his secret had tortured him.
“I do it because she is my wife and she needs me. She’s alone without me.
She’s lost, and very, very sick. If I’d been a good enough husband to her then I wouldn’t have allowed her to dissolve like she did, to become so unrecognisable,” he said, shaking his head in hopelessness.
“But I need you to think about this. What I do for her, I do because of the love we once shared.
She is living proof that I am a man of my word, that I cherish the ones I love, always.
“What I do for her, I would do for you tenfold. I would be a slave for you, your loyal servant, always, because my heart belongs to you, Grace. I would keep your secrets. I would cherish your darkness like it was my own, because it is my own.”
Tears fell from my eyes, my heart heaving.
He’d proven that. There was no denying it. My still-pulsing sex and Tom’s lifeless body beside us was proof enough of that. I knew he loved me.
“But she would never accept it. Even in her right mind, she would never, ever want to lose you to someone else. Even if a life with her was impossible.” I remembered how content she looked in his arms when he held her. How easily he made her feel safe.
“You are the woman I please now. You are my priority, Grace. I vow, if you can forgive this, to never let you doubt my loyalty to you again,” said Nick, taking my hand in his and pressing kisses to my knuckles.
“Even if you mean all that...and I believe you do,” I said, eyeing Tom’s body. There had never been a greater example of his loyalty to me than now. “Why did you ask me to marry you?”
He sighed, sounding exhausted and broken.
“Because I want you to be my wife,” he said, with a slight smile detectable as he kissed the sapphire on my finger.
“The process of divorcing poor Louisa has been painstaking. It took years to get to the point where it was almost finished, when I only needed to say the word to have it finalised. I baulked. Long before I met you, I left its status in limbo, so certain that I was simply incapable of moving on. It had been twenty years, and still, I felt I was betraying her if I severed our marital ties, even though she could never again be a wife to me. When I fell in love with you, all that changed. I saw a future; a lamplight in the distance, glowing just faintly, promising a way forward.”
We shared a heavy silence. The rain began again, dripping through the treetops.
“How long, then, would it be?” I asked.
Nick looked up, his face close to mine, still clasping my hand tightly.
“A matter of months. We could be married by the spring, darling,” he said, kissing my fingertips.
I drew him to me and kissed him, long and hard. When we parted, I felt dizzy.
“There’s just the matter of what to do with him,” said Nick, frowning down at Tom’s body. “If his disappearance gives us grief, there could be no wedding and no future for either of us.”
I chuckled.
“People, even the police, aren’t as smart as they like to think,” I said softly. “Despite all the rumours in the Dales about my parents’ deaths, nobody has ever called for my arrest.”
A silence passed between us. Nick looked uncomfortable.
“You must never speak of it again, Grace, to anyone. Not even Eugenie. Especially not her,” he said. “Or your luck will run out.”
That sparked another question in me. I wondered how he could be so calm with what he’d learned, and what he’d just seen, of me – his innocent Grace.
That, and how he came to have a ligature in his pocket.
..and how he knew so precisely how to use it.
For the moment, I didn’t wish to know, but I would find out.
“I just want to ask one thing about Louisa,” I said into the darkness, my breath a cold white mist.
“Anything,” he said.
“You say she had an obsession with fires. Did you really play no part in that final fire? The one that killed your parents, and Alexander?” I asked, my voice shaking. Now that I knew Nick was capable of murder, anything was possible.
Nick bowed his head and cleared his throat before he answered.
“My parents were accidental casualties. They loved Louisa. But Alexander...his death was revenge for me. She started it in his room.”
I remembered the locked door right beside the pink room.
“But it was never meant to take down half the house and destroy all her things, let alone kill my parents, and almost kill her, too. I managed to rescue her. I tore down a curtain and threw it over her, sparing her, just, from the worst of the burns. I didn’t know she was planning it, or else I’d have committed her long before then.
She left me with this legacy, this suspicion among the public, that I had killed them all.