Chapter 30 The Cave
It felt like they had entered another world. Instantaneously, the cacophony of the storm dimmed, the curved walls of the cave offering them shelter. To her right were stacks of old, abandoned crates, the hinges now coppery with rust. It was dry inside, but her breaths still came out in white puffs.
It took a long moment before St. Silas put her down on her feet, and she had to overcome the feeling of being adrift without his arms around her. Her teeth still chattered even though the cave was warmer than the ocean.
St. Silas had already taken off his coat, handing it to her slowly. “Should anyone cast doubt on my being a gentleman…”
She threaded her arms through the sleeves, once more wrapping herself in his scent, before throwing a slanted glance at the man himself.
He is unguarded, Leena thought to herself in bewilderment, for when she did meet his eyes again, it was to see a flash of possessiveness mark his glance as he absorbed her standing wrapped in his clothing, her frame all but lost in his overcoat.
Leena could not articulate why she felt warmth spread across her chest at his look, nor could she stop it.
He turned abruptly away to face the mouth of the cave, loosening his wet cravat.
The well-defined muscles of his back shifted fluidly while he stripped himself of his waistcoat, leaving him in only his damp linen shirt.
Leena tried not to stare, but she was sure she wore the same look on her face as the one he had given her on the shore.
She was glad he was turned away from her.
Thinking of the shore brought back to her mind the compulsion that had led her there in the first place.
“Thank you for your help earlier. I do not—” Leena flushed.
She desperately wanted to be calm when she spoke of the revelation that had flung her into the ocean in the first place.
It took great effort to keep her voice measured.
Already he thought her wild, and there was no need to press that point further.
“I do not regularly frequent the outdoors in my…my…”
He turned to face her once more. “Undergarments.”
“Chemise—it is called a chemise, and it is meant to be—”
“Transparent?” His voice was strained again.
It was her turn to look away, eyes lifted to the ceiling in an effort to contain her embarrassment.
“It is not transparent. Only the water made it…made it so.” Leena tried to subdue her rising panic, but, by the Saints, just how much had he seen?
She raised herself to her full height, once more attempting a dignity she did not particularly feel. “Can we please refrain from discussing my…my clothing any more?”
“Certainly. Although I thought we were discussing the lack of it.” Still she did not look at St. Silas, but she heard the laugh in his voice.
Hearing him like this, the shades of reservation and composure usually hovering between them cast away, Leena almost convinced herself that she could let go of the turbulent emotions welling inside her.
She almost convinced herself that the battlegrounds had all been laid out—that the battle had already been fought, and it had nothing to do with her.
It mattered little that Leena knew St. Silas’s secret, that he was the 17th Lord Avon. It changed nothing within their contract and her task remained the same.
And would it not have been easier if they could have stayed in this moment, pulsating with fragility and humor and something as yet unnameable between them, away from dangerous and painful truths?
Yet Leena, who had never learned to walk away from the things that could hurt her, could not walk away now.
He watched her with his arms crossed across his chest, eyes nearly lost within the shifting storm-wrought shadows of the cave. She wished she could ask him to step into the light.
Whatever levity had existed between them had transformed, replaced with the revelation that weighed them both down, waiting to be voiced.
“Then forgive me for my breach in good manners on several occasions today.” She gave him a deep curtsey and, when she rose, she met his shadowed glance. “Most notably that I did not sooner make my bows to the master who has come home.” Still she did not evoke a response. “My Lord Avon.”
Silence—so searing she felt the stab of old wounds.
“You found Percival Avon’s ghost?” he asked sharply, the sudden flash of lightning once more revealing his angular features and rapt eyes.
“No, I have not found him.” But she understood better why he had been so eager for this quest, for this particular ghost.
His father.
With that confirmation, St. Silas schooled his face once more, wearing the same expression he used when taking his confessions—a studied casualness, as if he was an indifferent observer to someone else’s misery.
Then he did something that Leena didn’t expect.
He smiled, dark eyes suddenly dancing as if they were once again sharing a jest. He narrowed the space between them in two long steps.
“Miss Al-Sayer, you are still shaking.” His voice was laced with silky concern.
He reached for her frozen hands and cupped them in his own, bringing them close to his mouth to breathe on them.
“Never mind all of this. Come here—I shall warm you.”
A charge went through her the moment he touched her, and she forced herself to jerk away from him.
What St. Silas did not realize was that she, too, had begun to know him, to unravel the workings of his mind as perceptively as he saw hers.
He was trying to make her doubt her own convictions by distracting her.
This was the Saint of Silence as he was, layers of subtle manipulation to conceal the truth.
“I am warm enough without more lies,” she said, her anger once more building in her refusal to be diverted by him. “You are Percival Avon’s son.”
The smooth smile dropped. His eyes were alert again, their dark flecks enhanced in the storm’s gloom.
“That changes nothing.”
“It changes everything,” Leena whispered fiercely, head tilted upward to meet his, to ensure that he didn’t mistake the earnestness on her face.
“You are master of the last fortress in the north; all the land until the sea is yours by birthright. Your father was Percival Avon. You come from a lineage as old as the First Marquess of Avon, traced back nine hundred years.”
Another sudden blaze of light, then the distant roll of thunder. The electricity in the air coursed over her skin again, raising tiny hairs at the back of her neck.
She felt exposed under St. Silas’s eyes, every pore on her skin vibrating under his focused attention, until she felt as charged as the lightning.
“What do you want from me, Leena?” The sudden change from his indifference—the fervency with which he asked the question—roared in Leena’s ears.
She remembered when she had asked him that exact question not long ago, how it had torn through her own throat and left blood marks from how badly she’d wanted to know.
“The truth,” she responded, just as low. “Nothing else.”
He returned her curtsey with a low bow of his own. Even as he did so, his eyes lingered on her neck, sliding momentarily lower, his pupils dilating.
“The Seventeenth Marquess of Avon, at your service.” He even spoke like an aristo.
She’d always wondered about his cultured accent—his voice a drawl, like wine spilling into a glass, while Leena’s tongue gnashed at her Rs and tasted her Ts like grit.
“Does it displease you to find out I am an Avon?”
“No…”
“Are you angry?”
“Anger is a very useless emotion,” she gritted back—the same words he had used on her long ago.
“No, I am not angry. I am not even angry that you withheld this information. I would be a hypocrite if I were to deny that we all have painful secrets we wish to hide.” Leena could see that he had not been expecting that answer, but she pressed on before he could interrupt.
“Do you know about the Avon curse? Do you know what the First Marquess of Avon promised to the demon living under Weavingshaw?”
There was no change to his expression; it was as if they were merely speaking of polite nothings over dinner. “This is the history of my lineage. I have known it since I was old enough to speak.”
She could not keep the astonishment from her voice. “So if you knew, why are you looking for a way to reclaim Weavingshaw? No, do not deny it; this entire hunt for your father was always about taking back Weavingshaw.”
“Because it is mine.” The words were not a statement but a proclamation of war.
The rain outside had sharpened its onslaught, breaching the defenses of the cave, a few droplets reaching them. It had turned into sleet. Soon, it would start to snow.
Even as they argued, Leena was aware that St. Silas’s gaze struggled to remain on her face, continuously dropping below her collarbones before jerking up again, and her face flamed. But still she persisted.
“It was also Percival Avon’s,” Leena returned, and the hollow cavern twisted her words into a dark echo. “And I saw a memory of him standing over the lake in the crypt, pleading with the demon to stop feasting on him.”
St. Silas shrugged, not at all disturbed by that knowledge. “My father was a weak man. He could not control the demon, so it controlled him—to his demise. I will be different. I will curtail the beast underneath, eradicate it in time.”
She stared at him uncomprehendingly. She could not understand this ferocious tether to a land, being perpetually unmoored herself.
A refugee was just another type of ghost.
Leena shifted her bare feet against the hard rocks in frustration, her entire body tense with thought.
St. Silas had been watching her movements in silence, his eyes slightly out of focus as he once more traced her soft outline in the dimming light.