Chapter 4
The Looking Glass
Cora frowned at her reflection in the looking glass.
The tired face gazing back at her, framed by the mirror’s curling tendrils of wrought iron vines, was wrong somehow.
It was on the tip of her tongue, that wrongness, a bitter foretaste in the wake of discovery.
Yet like so many times before, it slipped away, a dream half-forgotten upon waking.
She didn’t know what drew her to the standing mirror and its unforgiving reflection.
As if she needed any more confirmation of why Bane had left her, as Teddy had, to the vicious solitude of her own thoughts.
Dark circles ringed her eyes, blue pools with rotten centers, and a deathly pallor clung to her cheeks.
The mask of normalcy she wore in public fed from her innards, and within she was hollow.
There was a motion in the corner of her eye. The bedroom door creaked open.
Malachy Bane, shirtless and sleep-tousled, filled the doorway.
Shock punched the breath out of her. She took him in from his bare feet to his mussed hair.
Clad only in trousers, there was a lot to take in.
Locks of dark copper hair swept midnight blue eyes that drank her in.
The broad expanse of his chest, painted with scars and runes shimmering with enchanted ink.
That narrowing trail of dark hair descending along the planes of his torso and disappearing into his waistband.
Their gazes met in the mirror. Was this a dream? Had her desperate fantasies spilled over, or were their sleeping minds entangled once more, a continent away?
The shock of his sudden reappearance and the hunger in his eyes rooted her to the spot as he banded an arm around her middle, branded her neck with the heat of his kiss.
The familiarity of that touch, as if he belonged there.
A tangle of emotions warred within her, shock and hurt and a stab of pleasure.
“Bane?” She whirled around, clutching a hand to her chest. “When did you come back to London?”
The warmth of his lips, lingering on her skin, cooled as the months of his silence crashed over her in a deafening wave. For three excruciating months, he had ignored her letters, penned out of increasing desperation, and now he was kissing her neck like it had never happened?
She really was just a pawn for Bane to play with. A convenient tool to be used and discarded like she had been before. Mother and Felix had tried to sugarcoat their cruelty, too.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.” The lyricism of his deep voice, achingly familiar, hit her square in the chest. “Just checked the wards. The house must be acting out because I was gone for so long.”
“You were gone for so long,” she repeated in a hollow voice. Perhaps this was not a dream, but a nightmare. “You were gone for most of the bloody year! Or at least, that’s what I thought. How long have you been back in London without telling me?”
His brow furrowed, as if he had found himself in the wrong play at a theater. “I came back last night, Cora.”
She stepped back when he stepped forward. His fingers brushed her bare arm, and she looked down with rising panic. Only a thin layer of fabric protected her.
“Where are my clothes? Where are your clothes?” Rushing to the bed, she wrapped herself in a sheet. His evergreen scent clung to the rumpled silk. Understanding dawned. Her eyes narrowed into slits. “Did you sleep in my bed?”
He searched her face as if she was a code he was trying very hard to decipher. “Do you not remember last night?”
“Of course I remember last night. I was out with Anita and Tim Tambo, then I came back and fell asleep.” During Bane’s absence, Cora had clung to Anita like a rock in a swift stream. The retired courtesan was the only one in the gang that had accepted Cora, abomination and all.
“I don’t understand.” Bane raked both hands through his hair. “You were sober when I came home. We both had a glass—teacup—of whiskey. With dinner.”
Baffled, she could only stare at him. “What on earth are you talking about? Have you suffered some kind of head trauma? I haven’t seen or heard from you since February, and now you’re here, sleeping in my bed and making up stories?”
“You asked me to sleep with you—not like that.” His voice was soft and earnest, which only made her hackles rise further.
“I most certainly did not ask you to sleep with me. Wishful thinking on your part, Bane. You left for months, without a word.”
“That is not what happened, Cora. We talked about this last night. The Tribunal and—” He made a sign of choking, and she stared at him like he had grown a second head. “I can’t talk about it because of the— Well, you know.”
“No, I don’t bloody well know.” Tightening the sheet around herself, she motioned for him to turn, and dutifully, he did.
The only sound as she dressed in a green fringe dress was rustling fabric and the dull roar of her growing panic.
Too many pieces of this puzzle were missing to make sense of it.
“What’s wrong?" He turned back, searching her face as if trying to find the bottom of opaque waters. "Talk to me. I understand if you have regrets, but—”
“Oh, I have regrets, all right. Like every moment I wasted thinking about you while you were off on some mysterious business. Not that you bothered to tell me about it. I had to hear it from O’Leary.
” Updates from the bespectacled solicitor were all she had heard of their boss, other than Anita’s tidbits of gossip that Cora had tucked away like unconfessed sins.
“Some mysterious business,” he echoed, jaw working. “Getting a fuckin’ five-year sentence from the hypocrites on the Tribunal, and then a gobshite conditional release to hunt d— Holy Jesus.” Pinching the bridge of his nose, he expelled a breath. “Please, help me understand what’s wrong.”
The distress crumbling his features struck Cora as genuine.
The calm of his voice no longer rolled like the green hills of Ireland, but sank into the gravelly bedrock, scraping anguish along stone.
She could not reconcile the man before her now with the bastard who had avoided her like contagion. Was he somehow telling the truth?
The hope she had thought dead fluttered to life once more.
It was a fanciful flight of imagination, that hope, a brief fluttering before its death throes.
Since Bane left, she had hidden that hope in the darkest corners of herself, safe from the prying light of scrutiny.
In the echoing silence of his moving house, she had contorted the truth to fit the story she desperately wanted to believe—the pleasing story he was weaving now, that he had not left her, as everyone had, as everyone would.
Though the emptiness inside of Cora clung to that hope, it met its fate when she caught her reflection in the looking glass.
Even without the stain of her Necromancy, she could never compare with Bane’s other conquests, women as effortlessly beautiful as Yvonne Archambeau.
Cora was a pawn to use at his convenience, nothing more.
“Cora—”
“Don’t.” Confused and overwhelmed, she pulled out of his grasp and flung open the bedroom door, speeding her steps as if she could outpace the unpleasantness.