Chapter 64
GRACE
“I agree!” Grace shouted, seeing Drasko being led away.
Her heart pounded. Bile rose to her throat. She was dizzy and sick with the thought of what was inside her body, with the realization of what this dreadful deal was.
She rushed after Drasko, but a man caught her by her waist and held her back as she tried to fight him. She kicked and thrashed but to no avail.
The man finally let go, Drasko already gone, the absence of him making her dizzy with horrible realization.
She whipped around toward the elder man who calmly watched.
“You are a monster!” she shouted at him.
His lips curled in an ugly smirk.
Tears streaming down her face, Grace stared him down.
Uriah Mawr—she had hated the man before she knew him, felt the spite the same way as Drasko when he had told her the stories of the past. Uriah Mawr was her relation, the only relation she had in this world. Yet, she wanted him gone, was disgusted that the same blood ran in her body.
“What is going to happen to Drasko?” she asked, afraid of the answer though she already knew it.
“He. Dies,” Uriah said, accentuating every word, and studied their effect on her. “I put years into this bet with my brother. I won. I put years into making Drasko what he is, showing him what it means to be a true king. And he didn’t learn.”
“You can stop this… this… this game. You make the rules.”
“I cannot. I made sure the rules couldn’t be changed.
It’s out of my hands. Men who were paid a hefty sum will wait for the Crimson Tear at the auction until six o’clock sharp and execute the terms accordingly.
I removed myself from such decisions for the precise reason that someone might try to manipulate the events. ”
Panic wrapped around her, making nausea rise to her throat. She knew what the man was capable of.
She remembered Drasko’s stoic expression, the pained one at the doctor’s the day before, him kneeling naked before her last night while she demanded answers but he wouldn’t give her any.
Tears streamed down her face—he knew all along the gruesome truth and was bidding farewell to her this morning.
Blood thrummed in her ears. Drasko wasn’t supposed to forfeit his life, not according to Uriah’s plan. She knew it, and she knew the man waited for her answer.
“You know what makes men weak, my dear girl? What turns the strongest of them into mopping rags?” he asked.
“Women. Yes. The gender that is only good for breeding. That silly notion called love? It ruins men’s grand plans.
When you were little, I already knew you were growing up just like your whore mother.
So, I got rid of you the night we arrived in London.
You were only five then but already a menace.
Yes. Hmm… A wonderful year. A year when Drasko dedicated himself to his true path.
Well, not quite. There would be others. That Indian girl who tried to turn him into a commoner. She didn’t deserve him.”
Grace flinched. She knew the story. Yamuna was her name. Grace felt her hair stand on end at the thought that her death was Uriah’s doing.
“You killed my mother,” Grace said. “You killed my father. Your brother. Drasko’s lover. You killed”—she held the words back, still not quite at terms with the truth—“me,” she said quieter, “in a way.”
She spat at him, angrily, her spit landing on his shoes.
Uriah smirked. “You give me too much credit, dear. I should have killed you, indeed, but the story wouldn’t be the same. Look at us!”
“You are a pathetic man,” she gritted out, her hands balled into fists at her sides.
“I knew you’d become useful one day to teach our dear Drasko a lesson.
I saved you. Yes. Be grateful. I cut off all communications so you’d never know where you came from or who you were.
No correspondence. I made arrangements with a family who were decent enough to raise you with the utmost attention and greedy enough not to care about what happened to you afterward.
They were paid well. And look at you—the perfect example that a woman would do anything for money.
Including marrying a stranger. A wealthy one, of course! ”
“I didn’t have a choice,” she argued.
“But you did. You could walk out of that church and spend the rest of your life sweeping floors and playing at taverns. But that wasn’t to your liking, was it, my dear?”
The man was right, and she didn’t like that.
“So, you chose a wealthy stranger.”
She didn’t answer.
“You know what amuses me?” Uriah said. “My instructions did not say anything about marriage.”
She frowned, confused.
“Drasko was following my instructions, you see. He had to. But those particular ones were simply to present the earl with the documents, and once the earl walked away from you”—Uriah smiled crookedly—“they said, ‘The bride is yours.’ Nowhere did it say that Drasko had to marry you. He could make you his mistress. He could lock you up. He could set you up in a house and wait for what came next. But Drasko! Oh… As much as he is brilliant and determined, everything that had to do with you always made him sentimental and reckless. He got carried away. I knew then that this game would be perfect. So more the reason to show him that it’s all for nothing. ”
Elias’s words came back to her, the words she’d disregarded during the dinner at their house. She didn’t know a fraction then of how she and Drasko were connected through decades and continents.
“What you see in him is a powerful man,” Elias had said.
“But beneath this strength is a wounded heart. The biggest heartbreak of his life is what makes him carry on. What gives him meaning. I hope you get to know about it one day. That heartbreak might just save him. What he wants is for you to see past what everyone else sees.”
She was Drasko’s heartbreak, she now knew.
Her death, her absence for years, her not-so-amiable reappearance—all at the hands of the cruel man who stood in front of her, his eyes piercing her to the core.
Uriah had separated them for years yet didn’t understand what he had truly done—he had made their bond so much stronger.
Grace had never had anything to fight for. Her talent was a gift. Charles—perhaps a souvenir. But Drasko… Drasko was worth living for. Dying? She thought of the night before, thought of her life before him, and nothing in it ever was worth much. She simply would not live if he weren’t by her side.
“I agree,” she said quietly. “I agree to give you the diamond. Take it. Bring Drasko back.”
A sinister sparkle flickered in Uriah’s eyes. “You do know the consequences.”
“You will let him go and all this is over.”
“I meant for you, dear. You will not survive this.”
“But I might.”
“But you won’t.”
She flinched. Her heart galloped at the words. “But he will,” she said quietly. “If the diamond gets to the auction? He will. Those are the rules, am I right? You promised?”
The victorious glint in his eyes didn’t escape her. Yet she wasn’t scared. What scared her was that she might not see Drasko again. But there was no way around it. She would never accept Drasko’s sacrifice. And this vile man would never grasp the reason for her decision.
Perhaps, there was a chance she would live. And that minuscule chance, the hope to be with Drasko again, was worth a savage surgery, the sharp knives, and a thousand more pains. Years of it. Those pains had taught her how to fight. They had led her to Drasko. What was one more?
Grace took a step toward the man, her chin lifted high.
“You have a deal,” she said quietly.
Uriah’s eyes narrowed on her. “I figured this might work out one way or the other.”
He nodded to his men. They nudged Grace to move—toward that same door where Drasko had disappeared.
Her chest tightened. Perhaps, she would see him. Perhaps, she would get to kiss him, hold his hand while this awful thing would be taken out of her.
There was another giant space behind the door, another room, filled with equipment, a factory of sorts, suddenly loud with banging sounds and the motors working.
Men in soiled work robes gawked in their direction but didn’t stop working.
Young boys in dirtied clothes sat on crates, smoked pipes, and stared.
Grace moved on reflex, humming a song in her head, trying to calm her raging heart. And when she slowed, Uriah’s cane tapped the back of her skirt.
She was escorted toward another door at the end of the giant room. Only as they were approaching it, did she feel dizzy, stepped aside, and rested her hand on a barrel, catching her breath.
“I need a moment,” she whispered, closed her eyes, and tried to calm the shakes in her body.
Fate was cruel. But life was a miracle. Hers was, now that she knew what had happened to her, where she had come from, and how it had reunited her with Drasko.
For him, she would cross oceans. And for him, she would risk it all, including her own life.
The cane tapped her skirt. “If you intend to trick me, it won’t work,” Uriah rasped behind her.
She opened her eyes and right away saw two boys only several feet away, who sat on the crates and polished tin jars.
One of them smiled and nodded in greeting, his hand reaching for his blinder and flicking it with his fingers.
A sudden memory jerked her upright.
The blinder. The fingers. The Bankee salute.
She sifted through her memories and blurted quietly, not believing that it would ever work, out of sheer desperation, “So strikingly blue…”
The boy’s expression changed, his smile gone.
“Get going!” Uriah pushed her with a poke of his cane into her back, ushering her toward the door as she heard a whistle behind her, then another one echoing on the opposite side of the warehouse.