With one hand, he lifted a tress of her hair. He whacked it off with his knife. “You wore them in ringlets when you were a child, did you not?” Another cut through her hair. He brushed the jagged strands from her shoulder, then eased his fingers into her scalp. “Very soft, Miss Gillingham. I am not entirely a rogue, you know. I appreciate—indeed, nearly dote on—things that are beautiful.”
Her pulse sprung into madness, as his lips pressed to her neck, crawled along her skin.
Then pain. She gasped and stumbled backward, the cut on her left arm leaking crimson—just as he waved the knife again and sliced her right. He was mad. She’d known that before, only this Bowles was different. He wasn’t going to plunge the blade in her stomach or shoot a bullet into her head and dump her into the ocean as she’d imagined.
He was going to cut her.
Again and again.
Until she bled everywhere and died from the claws and—
“I wanted to kill you then.” The knife blade nicked her neck. Blood trickled down her throat. More pain. “But she would not let me. All my life, she and my father had dominance.”
Her eyes slid shut, but it didn’t stop the images. He was the tapestry. The beast. They were interwoven in the nightmare, the two of them, and her mother was screaming while the curtains fluttered.
“But they do not have dominance now, do they? No one does.” Nearer, but he didn’t cut again. “Do you like harps, Miss Gillingham?”
Everything numbed.
“Miss Gillingham?”
She forced her eyes back open. He had stubble on his jaw. His lips were dry. His eyes were flecked with green and blue, and hair fell over his forehead, dark and reddish and tousled.
He was flesh and bone.
A man.
Not a beast. Not a nightmare. Not a tapestry or any of the things that had haunted her. He was real, and he was wicked, but some of the torment subsided. Calm seeped into her, as quickly as the blood dripped from her arms. Strange, that she should think this now. That after all these years, she should see him like this—that it could feel so different.
That the fear would be gone.
“You look at me strangely, Miss Gillingham.” He grabbed her neck, then her jawline, smearing the blood. “Pray, what is it?”
“He was right.”
“Who?”
“Captain.”
“How so?”
She winced when his fingers dug deeper. “He said I had nothing to be afraid of…when he soothed me.” She raked in a breath. “After the nightmares.”
“You make very little sense, Miss Gillingham. Perhaps you would care to expound.” When she said nothing, he squeezed harder and screamed, “Expound!”
“All you can do is kill me.”
“You bore me, Miss Gillingham.”
“Go on.” Tears burned through. “Go on. Do it.”
“No one tells me when and how to do my killing. Martha has tried that quite enough.” He threw her to the ground, kicked her against wooden chests, and grabbed another fistful of her hair.
She detected movement the same time more of her hair floated to the ground. A face in the opening. One she never thought she’d see again.
One she didn’t want to see now.
Felton.A cry left her lips and the anguish cramped down on her.Felton, no.
