Chapter 35
TWO HOURS LATER
Vincent slammed into his study at St. John’s Wood. The torrential rain outside was battering the windowpanes like a barrage of blows.
He ripped the sodden cloak from his shoulders, sending it crashing into a velvet armchair. His collar followed—a ruined, wrung-out rag torn away to free his choking throat. On the mahogany desk, that treacherous porcelain mask winked under the dim lamp like a giggling spectre.
Ivory in black felt. And leering at him in victory.
A grotesque monument to his own stupidity.
Pacing the study rug, his jaw flexed so hard it ached. Custor was dead. Seven years rotting in an unholy grave, and Vincent had spent half a decade chasing the shadow of a ghost all across England.
And now, because of it, Emma—
Emma.
The memory of her strike still burned against his cheek. Worse was the absolute horror marring her beautiful freckled face before she delivered that final, chilling blow: ‘I don’t want to see you again, Vincent. Ever.’
The realization settled at last, not in his head but somewhere lower, uglier. He sank into the chair, elbows on his knees, rainwater dripping from his hair onto the rug like a pitiful wretch. “What have I done…”
He had lost the woman he loved over a ghost, over a name already rotting in the ground, over vengeance so stale it had gone to dust in his hands. Worse, he had proved her right. He was the same brute who had stripped ten thousand pounds from a dead man’s children and called it justice.
“You blithering fool!” he roared, swiping his mahogany desk and sending almost everything clattering to the floor.
Before the echo could fade, the door burst open. Weston didn’t knock. The old butler’s face was deathly pale, the candle in his gnarled hand shaking violently.
“Your Grace,” he breathed, his voice dragging with sudden terror. “It’s… It’s Lilian Guthrie. We found her at the Dover coaching inn.”
Vincent’s head snapped up. Caution raked the hairs on the back of his neck.
The rest of the morning came up at once, along with a sickening thought.
Someone had still poisoned Emma. But if it wasn’t at the behest of Gibbs Custor, then who?
He rose from the chair at once. “Did she confess?”
“She… didn’t have the chance, sir.”
“What? What do you mean she didn’t have the chance? I sent you to get her, not—”
“She was foaming at the mouth when we found her from the same brew meant for Her Grace.”
Nausea immediately took root inside Vincent’s stomach.
Weston stepped forward, tossing a heavy leather purse onto the escritoire. It landed with a metallic thud right next to the leering mask. “But before she took her own life, she left this behind,” the butler said. “It hasn’t been opened.”
Vincent snatched the purse. His fingers traced the unfamiliar silver crest stamped into the leather before tearing it open. Coins spilled from it onto the desk, followed by a freshly written note; he could tell by the ink still bleeding down it.
He started reading.
Please don’t blame Mama or the boys, they didn’t know nothing.
He said I only needed to make Her Grace sick so she wouldn’t go back to her old home and that he would take Mama and Charlie and Samuel to a bigger home in Wales and send them to school and let them live comfortably if I listened.
But after I did it, he only gave me a few coins and said to me to run because I was responsible for Her Grace’s death.
If Her Grace has died, please forgive me, but please spare my family.
Mama, Sam, Charlie, if you’re reading this, I love you. I made a mistake.
Vincent’s heart hammered violently against his ribs as the world tilted on its axis.
Who would have cause to push Emma out of her old home and keep her away from her grandmother and James?
The sudden realization hit him like a physical facer.
The brass-bright redhead. The duplicitous cousin with the oily force of habit who sat at Agnes’s table, counseling Emma to let the men handle her affairs and sending her far away from her family at the earliest possible convenience.
“Cillian… That bastard…”
With James deemed unfit, Emma was the sole obstacle standing between Cillian and her brother’s viscountcy.
Before he could even process the betrayal, a terrifying thought choked his throat. “The carriage,” Vincent croaked, his instincts singing sopranos of terror. “The one that took Emma home. Has it returned?”
Weston looked at him, his sorry face turning Vincent’s blood to absolute ice water. “Ten minutes past, Your Grace. The driver saw her safe near the Bloomsbury house and came straight back.”
Safe near the house.
Alone. Still sick. With a ruthless killer holding a clear road to her door.
“Find the maid’s family, he’ll come for them next!” Vincent thrust into action, automatically grabbing for his cloak and the mask—
His fingers froze inches from its ivory horns.
Ten years of crawling through the dark windows of high society. Ten years of blood, blades, and a name whispered like a curse. And it had bought him nothing but the woman he loved’s absolute hatred.
The Phantom had cost him everything.
Sorry Benjy. Sorry Father.
Seizing the porcelain disguise, he hurled it into the low-burning hearth.
The felt caught instantly, flames rushing up and devouring the fabric. The porcelain blackened and split with a sharp crack like a fracturing knuckle. Watching it burn for exactly one heartbeat, Vincent turned away, the last remnants of his hesitation entirely gone.
“And saddle Colossus!” he barked, checking the flintlock of his pistol frantically. His eyes snagged on a plain letter still on his desk, the letter he’d withdrawn to write to Keaton in the morning, and he knew what he had to do.
Snatching a pen, he scratched a quick note, folded the paper, and tossed it to a footman hovering by the door, “Keaton Finch, Earl Blackhill. At once!”
“Where are you going, Your Grace?” Weston stammered nervously, eyes flicking from the mask still burning in the hearth, then back at Vincent.
“To get Emma. The right way this time.”
“B-but, sir—”
Before the butler could protest, Vincent was already gone, sprinting out of the study.
The carriage clattered off into the rainy dark, and Emma stood where she’d asked to be set down, a half-mile shy of home.
She couldn’t face the door yet. Grandmama would take one look at her ruined, swollen face and have a conniption, and then the questions would start, and Emma hadn’t the faintest notion how to answer them…
How can I tell her I married the very man who stole from us, only to find he is just as cruel as we always painted him to be?
So she walked. Mauling her bottom lip until the sharp taste of copper flooded her mouth, she forced her legs forward.
She had given Vincent everything. That was the serrated blade twisting inside her chest, tearing her open with every single painful breath.
Her trust, her body, her pathetic leaping heart, all of it pushed across the table to a man wearing a face that wasn’t even his.
And the worst of it was she didn’t know which answer she dreaded more: that his tenderness had been a performance, or that it had been real and the monster underneath was real too.
Another ugly, wet sob ripped from her throat. She crushed her knuckles to her mouth until it stopped.
Not here. She would not crack open in the middle of the road like some fishwife. She would save her tears for her attic, candle out, where she had done her weeping after Papa died and Duke Highminster had picked their lives down to the bone.
By the time that familiar old gingerbread house swam up out of the fog, she’d dried her cheeks rough with both palms and settled it. If she was lucky, Grandmama might have already put James to bed. Then up to the attic, and tomorrow she could try to find the shape of how to tell them.
“I’ll just tell her that he is gone on a long trip and that I came home to visit after all the chaos in Town,” she whispered to herself.
A candle burning behind the front window gave Emma pause.
Agnes never wasted tallow so late.
With an uneasy lurch turning over in her stomach, she retrieved the secret key beneath the plant pot, unlocked the door, and pushed it open.
Only to stop dead on the threshold.
James was bound to a kitchen chair in the middle of the front room; his wrists brutally wrenched behind the wood, a rag jammed tight between his teeth. His face was scarlet and streaming. He was straining at the ropes so hard the chair legs juddered on the floorboards.
“James!”
Sprinting across the floor, Emma crashed to her knees while her fingers clawed wildly at the wet, knotted gag, “I have you—hold still—who did this—”
James jerked his head and screamed into the cloth but the shape of it reached her an instant too late, “Emmy, behind—!”
Emma whipped around.
A blinding explosion of pain shattered across her temple. The room tilted into absolute darkness, and the floor rushed up to swallow her whole.
“There she is…” The smarmy voice came to her, as if it were from a dream. “See, Jamie boy. I told you she was made of sterner stuff.”
Emma’s eyelids fluttered open to find Cillian crouched before her, balanced on the balls of his feet, watching her swim up to herself in shark eyes framed by sunken cheeks.
“I shall own I’m impressed, cousin. A grown apothecary’s dose of henbane down your gullet, and here you sit, blinking at me.
” Tutting, he muttered, “You were always too stubborn to do the sensible thing.”
The words sank their hooks in slow. Henbane. The tea…
“You…” Emma breathed coarsely, straining at the ropes lashing her wrists, “…it was you. The tea—you poisoned me—”