“I won’t,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He pressed a kiss to her temple, then her cheek, then her lips again, soft this time. Reverent. Full of everything he couldn’t say aloud.
Finally, he stepped back, brushing his hand down her arm. “Get what you need. We leave in ten minutes.”
And this time, she would not leave without him.
Chapter Six
The cemetery hadnever felt so alive.
It breathed around her, low and restless as fog rolled over graves like a mourning shroud, tree branches creaking in the breeze like fingers dragging along stone. A full moon floated above the mausoleums like a pale, judging eye, casting silver streaks through the mist. Every tomb, every statue, seemed to lean toward the path, watching.
Isobel stood in the shadows just beyond the perimeter of the northern gate, her black mourning veil pulled low over her face, her gloved hands folded before her like a specter carved from grief. The fabric of her dress whispered whenever she moved, a soft, unsettling rustle like silk over bone.
She had worn these garments before at her parents’ funeral. Also at the graveside of the maid who died in her place. Now she wore them again, not in mourning, but in vengeance.
Elias crouched behind a weathered headstone nearby, hidden beneath the sweep of ivy and gloom, his eyes sharp, lips curled in a half-smile that was equal parts admiration and mischief.
“Are you certain about this?” he’d asked earlier that evening, when they’d first walked the cemetery perimeter under cover of night.
She had nodded. “It’s time he learned to fear the thing he tried to kill.”
Now she waited. And at last, he came.
Lord Alistair Norton stepped through the north gate like a man entering a lion’s den. His greatcoat was buttoned high, his cane gripped tightly in one gloved hand. His eyes darted from tomb to tomb as if he were expecting the stones themselves to whisper his name.
He paused a few steps in, his breath visible in the chilled air. The fog thickened as if summoned. He turned in a slow circle.
“I received your message,” he called, trying for confidence but failing miserably. “I assume this is some pathetic attempt to rattle me.”
A silence stretched.
Then she called his name in a low, haunting voice. “Alistair…”
Norton jerked toward the sound, cane raised. “Who’s there?”
She stepped into view like a memory pulled from a grave.
The black silk trailed behind her like smoke. “I’ve come,” she said, “from the place you left me.”
Norton’s face turned white. “No,” he said immediately, his voice cracking. “You’re dead. I–I saw the reports. You cannot be a ghost!”
“Indeed?” she murmured, gliding forward, the gravel path crunching faintly beneath her boots. She tilted her head slightly, the veil rippling with each step like a wraith. “You had my death declared. Signed the papers. Told the world I was ash. So perhaps I am.”
“You’re not real,” he snapped. “This is some trickery. It’s Blackwood’s idea of a joke.”
Isobel let out a low laugh, and even she was surprised by how cold it sounded. “You always were fond of lies, Alistair. But lies have a way of coming home, don’t they?”
Norton began to retreat, slowly, stumbling slightly as his heel caught the edge of a sunken grave. “What do you want?”
“I want you to listen,” she said, her voice suddenly firmer.
He froze.
