She searched for a sense of guilt or self-recrimination. “He couldn’t live. Not after what he did to Ezra and Ezra’s pack, and what he intended to do to all of you.”
“He wanted you dead, too,” Rhys noted.
“If there’s a choice between him and us,” she said, turning her back on the baronet’s body, “I will pick us. Every time.”
She was hauled against hot, bare skin as Ezra pulled her close. Tej and Rhys surrounded her, too, their arms going around her, holding her steady. A hum of power and energy coursed through them, a circuit between herself and the three men.
“I don’t understand how it was possible,” Rhys confessed. “That we could transform without the full moon.”
“It’s because of you, jewel,” Ezra said to Jessica. “I’d heard that such a thing was possible with certain people. They become the full moon to the wolves, allowing their transformation.”
“I have long felt a connection with the moon.”
“Then there is something in you that makes it thus for us.”
“What makes it so?” She pulled back to look up at him.
“A bond. It has no name, no title. How it’s made, or why it happens between certain wolves and people…the lore is sparse. No one truly knows why it happens.”
“I think I have an idea as to why—with us, at least.” She pressed her face against his chest once more to hide the flush in her cheeks.
She felt their rumbles of approval in her body, and resounding in her chest. The world kept unrolling like a tapestry, revealing new landscapes and designs worked by uncanny hands.
But she and Ezra, Tej, and Rhys couldn’t stay as they were all night. There was more to be done.
14
The kitchens were empty, as were the servants’ rooms. Other than Jessica and the highwaymen, there was no one left alive in Mowbray’s house.
The three left to dispose of the bodies. All of the corpses were taken out into the forest. Jessica didn’t know precisely what they planned to do with the remains of the baronet and the Guardians, and it was probably best she wasn’t told what would become of them. When Tej, Rhys, and Ezra left the house, bearing the dead, Jessica was on her own.
She walked through the empty manor, picking her way around the debris Sir Harold had thrown in her path and investigating the many rooms. It seemed ridiculous that only one man lived here, in these dozens of chambers, when she’d seen the hardscrabble homes of the people who lived nearby.
In what she assumed was the baronet’s study, a room paneled in wood with a globe and seldom-used books on the shelves, she found a bound folio on his desk. It detailed the many werewolves the Guardians had killed with the Mowbray family’s patronage. Her stomach turned as she read it. There was an entry marked ten years past, where five werewolves were slaughtered, though one barely escaped.
The murder of Ezra’s pack was one of many, dating back generations. Nausea climbed up her throat, but she swallowed it down to perform her next task.
She walked the folio to the study fireplace and dropped it into the flames. With satisfaction, she watched the fire consume the record of massacres, the centuries of hatred turning to blackened paper and then finally ash.
With this grim document destroyed, she found the ballroom. She paced the length of the elegant chamber, which sported two crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, and stiff-backed chairs positioned in front of huge, costly mirrors that hung on the paneled walls. There was no fire burning in the large tiled fireplace, so she kicked apart one of the chairs and used the pieces to start her own fire.
There was a large, plush French carpet spread before the fire, likely dating to when the house was built, and she sat down on it to contemplate the flames.
Ezra, Tej, and Rhys found her there. They’d washed the blood off, and retrieved their clothing, though they were only partially dressed in shirtsleeves and breeches. Ezra sat behind her, setting her between his legs so that they bracketed hers. His arms went around her, while Tej crouched nearby, feeding more pieces of furniture into the fire to keep it going.
Rhys disappeared, then returned again a short while later. He carried a large silver tray, and heaped atop the tray were loaves of bread, pieces of roasted meat, hunks of cheese, hothouse fruit, and even a few cunningly iced cakes.
After Rhys set down the tray, Tej slipped out, before coming back bearing two bottles of wine.
“From the good baronet’s excellent cellar,” he said, handing the bottles around.
“Is this what wine’s supposed to taste like?” Jessica took a long draw from one of the bottles. The ruby liquid warmed her and had the flavor of things she couldn’t even name but certainly enjoyed. “Everything I had before this has been pure vinegar.”
“Plenty more where this came from.” Tej sat, then took the bottle she handed him and drank deeply, the length of his neck moving as he swallowed.
“We cannot stay in this house forever.” She glanced around the ballroom, with its vaulted ceilings, its glittering surfaces, and its expectation to be filled with the English elite—not three werewolf highwaymen and a disgraced woman of common birth who’d once provided private security. None of them would have been welcome in here, not while Mowbray had been alive.
But he was dead. At her hand.
