10. Aftermath and Atonement
AFTERMATH AND ATONEMENT
It was Bran who carried Guin’s limp body home and laid her in her bed. She was unconscious as he cleaned her wounds and left her in Susan’s care so he could clean himself.
He climbed into the copper tub and called his heat to warm the water as it poured around him.
He could stoke an inner alchemist’s heat when necessary, for small tasks, but he was no proficient.
He could do just enough to help him kill or protect, could use it to wield a blade, not forge one, and to heat the water as it rose, warm and steamy.
But it wasn’t enough to wash away his sins. Or Guin’s memory.
A bloody nightmare. She would never forgive him.
He held his arms out in front of him—naked for the first time in months. The glamour gone.
There was a soap on the table next to the tub that had only begun to be there after Guin had moved back home.
He lifted it, sniffed it—mint. It smelled like her, and he scrubbed every inch of his body with it, scratching it deep into his hair, his scalp.
A soapy film floated over the water when he was done, and the bar was nothing more than a sliver.
He dunked himself under the water where he could still see the red eyes of their attackers, still hear Guin’s cry of anguish not because she’d been injured.
But because she’d seen him. The real him.
And it had ripped her fucking heart out.
He broke the water with a great gasp of air and leaned his head on the back of the tub.
What now?
What now?
Now… he must still keep her safe, and he would not negotiate on that point. It could be no other Shadow who walked alongside her. Not after tonight. The attack had been like no other—men with red eyes who barely acknowledged injury. Potion mad.
It had been eight months since she’d sold her last concoction, but the men of London still held a vendetta Guin might not survive.
She would survive.
He stepped out of the tub, rivulets of sudsy water snaking down his legs and disappearing beneath the stardust glamour clinging tight to his right shin and foot.
“Damn.” It wouldn’t yet release him fully, and he was fucking tired of it.
He dried off and pulled on a clean pair of trousers, a shirt, and padded back into the duchess’s chamber. Susan sat watch over the bed where Guin lay sleeping. Bran joined her.
“I’ll keep watch.”
“Yes, Your Grace. She woke up once to change her clothes, then took something from a small bottle. She went to sleep soundly after that. Do you need anything else?”
He felt too lost at sea for food, and his need for a clear head was too great for drink. “No, thank you. But… do you know where her grace purchases her mint soap?” She probably made it herself.
“I will find out.”
“Do, and purchase as much as you can.” For Guin when she awoke. And for him when she left.
Susan curtsied and left, and Bran dragged an armchair close to the bed. If Guin were awake, she’d tell him to go to hell. Or at least get out of her bedchamber. But he couldn’t leave. When she opened her eyes, they’d be brimming with betrayal.
And he deserved it.
He wanted to look at her a little while longer, before hatred lined every muscle of her body.
She was peaceful, lips slightly parted and hair a tangle of sunbeams across her pillow. Beneath the blankets she’d crawled under before the sleeping draught took her, she wore a snowy white shift, tugged haphazardly down and revealing one creamy shoulder with a smattering of freckles across it.
He pulled it back up close to her neck and pulled the blanket up, too, careful not to let his fingers brush against skin.
She did not sleep peacefully. Worry was grooved between her brows and pinched her lips.
He laid his head on the mattress and watched her, taking comfort in each rise and fall of her chest and knowing he would rather die than she never take another breath.
The sleeping draught had tied chains around Guin’s eyes, and she thrashed against them.
In her dreams, just below a waking surface she could not reach, a shadow stalked her.
Eyes that flashed green then gold peered at her from the darkness.
She was never alone, never free, so long as the eyes were there—ever watching and easily lying.
Then flashing red as the silver glint of a blade arced toward her.
Finally, the chains broke.
And she awoke with a gasp, rolling over to shove her face into her pillow. Her eyelids were still heavy, and her limbs ached, and a fog rolled through her brain thicker than that which rolled often through London.
She knew what she’d seen last night with a certainty that made her heart brittle. But she didn’t want certainty. She wanted to be wrong, wanted her eyes to have been fooled by a trick of the light, her nerves to have finally been overcome by an attack.
Rolling onto her back, she knew she could not lie to herself.
Not when Braxton had been lying to her so thoroughly.
Bran.
A sound jolted her heart into a frantic rhythm, and she jerked away from it, pulling the blankets against her chest and finding a body half in a chair and half sprawled across the very edge of her mattress, his arm outstretched toward her, large blunt fingers loosely curled toward his palm.
The oddest body she’d ever seen.
The man was split in two, vertically down the center so that he appeared to be two half men invading her privacy.
The bottom one, whose ear was pressed against an outstretched arm, had a scar carved up the side of his face, silvery and sinewy.
His long dark lashes fanned against pale skin, and his messy tangle of unkempt hair was a dark ink spill across his plain lawn shirt.
He was wrinkled and rumpled and the sight of him was too much.
She focused on the other man instead of crying. He was a head shorter than the first, and even in sleep, his golden hair was perfectly placed, and his formal suit was perfectly pressed.
Not two men.
A man and a glamour, muscle and bone, shadow and light. A reality and an illusion.
Looking at them this way, she found commonalities she might not have found otherwise. But for the bump where Bran had broken his, the glamour’s nose shared the same shape and slope. The eyelashes were similarly thick and long, the brows both heavy slashes, the lips firm and well shaped.
Family resemblances. She should have seen it. What a fool she was.
She rolled out of bed and dressed quietly, braiding her hair and pinning it in a simple coil near her neck. She slipped out of her bedchamber as Susan came whistling down the hallway.
“Oh, Your Grace, you should return to bed! Last night was horrid, and—”
“I have too much to do to return to bed.”
“His grace—”
“Is sleeping. I do not think you should wake him.” Guin strode down the hall without waiting for a reply.
She found Ned guarding the front door and gladly let him take up place behind her as she stepped into the cool morning.
Fog curled around her boots and made the street a miasmic soup.
The sun was only just rising, and it charged the fog with a broken pink and purple light.
“Where’s the duke?” Ned asked.
“Sleeping.”
“Does he know yer out and about?”
“It does not matter.”
“The queen might disagree. The duke certainly will.”
“Funny you should mention her, Ned. Set your steps toward Buckingham. Keep your guard high today. We met with trouble last night.” She told him about the attack, the red eyes, the mad behavior.
“The duke met trouble with trouble, no doubt.” Ned chuckled. “He’s a curious good bruiser. Never would have guessed it. And you likely won’t believe it, Lady G, but he reminds me—just his fightin’ style, mind you, and p’raps also how short he is with words—of Bran.”
“I would believe it, Ned. I would.”
They reached Buckingham as the fog began to dissipate and the sun began to heat the day. She did not intend to be put off, even by the queen. But thankfully, she was led with little fuss to the conservatory behind the palace.
She wasted no time, saying as soon as she rose from a curtsy, “Braxton cannot act as my guard any longer.”
The queen studied her over the top of a letter she held lightly in her hand. She folded it meticulously and set it aside. “Is he indisposed?”
“He is perfectly well. But we do not suit. It is why we have lived apart all these years.” Ha! They’d lived side by side, day in and day out. Only she’d not known. “I do not wish to harm your majesty’s soldier, but I fear I may harm this one.”
“Is he… a danger to you?”
“No.” Only to her heart, which he’d already stomped on. Only to her trust, which he’d strangled.
“Then I see no need to change—”
The door at the front of the conservatory slammed open, and bootsteps stomped their way.
Guin knew before she saw him exactly who it was, and her heart kicked up its speed in greeting. “Please, ma’am,” she said, cringing only a little at the desperation in her voice, “it is of the utmost importance I cannot work with him any longer. You must replace him.”
“Replace me,” Bran intoned with a full Scottish brogue as he stepped up beside her, “and she dies. No doubt in my mind about that, Your Majesty. After the attack last night, it is clearer to me than ever. Someone wants her dead and will stop at nothing to see it done. If you want your potion, Your Majesty, you’ll keep me in charge of the operation. ”
The queen’s keen gaze slid from Guin to Bran. “Who are you?”
“Ah.” Bran—and it was Bran, glamour entirely gone—reached for a cravat to tug at and, finding nothing but neck, dropped his arm to his side.
He looked like he’d left the bed as soon as he’d found her missing, threw on his boots and stormed out of the house.
“Braxton. I’m the Duke of Braxton. Only…
my glamour is not precisely under my control at the moment. ”
“Braxton,” Queen Victoria said, dragging her gaze down his body and back up. “I knew the Lennox line had a Scottish branch, but I did not realize it was quite so… prominent.”