Page 15

Alocked door is a suggestion. Nothing more.

— The Wicked Widow’s Rules

Audrey

He was watching her again.

Since they made bread five days ago, she’d noticed the way his eyes tracked her when he thought she wasn’t looking, then didn’t look away fast enough when she was. This morning he made no pretence of it at all. She stood at the range stirring porridge that wasn’t burning for once, and she could feel him behind her at the table, his attention a physical weight between her shoulder blades.

She turned. He didn’t pretend to be doing anything else. His eyes moved down her, slow, and stopped somewhere they had no business stopping.

She noticed his body’s response too, and felt her face go hot, and told herself she’d imagined it.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“Yes.”

“It’s inappropriate.”

His expression shifted, gone before she could read it, then cool again. He rose from the table. Crossed the kitchen towards her, unhurried. She held her ground because retreating was losing to this ox.

“You’re welcome to go,” he said.

“Go where? This is my house.”

“To another room.” He was close now. Closer than he needed to be. She saw his chest expand as he breathed in slowly. His eyes dropped to the line of her bodice and stayed there a beat too long. He lifted his chin, his eyes half-lidded as he looked down at her.

“You’ve been starved,” he said, his voice quiet and rough at the edges. “Haven’t you. And you don’t even know it.”

She went still.

“How dare you.”

“You’re still here,” he said. “You could’ve left.”

She shoved him with both hands, as hard as she could, and he barely moved. That made it worse.

“You are vile,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “You are the most contemptible man I have ever had the misfortune of meeting, and I include my late husband in that reckoning.”

He said nothing. She thought she saw a grimace on his face, but she was too angry to care. She walked out.

* * *

This seemed the perfect time to defy his orders.

She took the lantern from the passage and went to the cellar stairs. Let him stare at an empty kitchen. Let him contemplate the wall he so enjoyed pressing women towards. She was going where he’d told her not to go, because she was Lady Audrey Kendal, mistress of Silverton Abbey, and if there was a room in her house she had not entered, that was a failing she intended to correct immediately.

The stairs were narrow, slick with damp, each step darker than the last. The lantern light clung to the walls and did not reach the bottom. She held it low and picked her way down, cane in her other hand, the stone under her feet cold enough to feel through her shoes. Her breath was shortening with every step, though she could not have said whether that was the hip or the dark or the smell. The clean cold of the passage above had given way to something thicker. Earthen. Wet stone and turned soil and, beneath that, the same faintly sweet, faintly wrong scent she’d noticed her first night, rising from the hole in the hallway floor. Stronger here. Closer to its source.

The cellar floor was intact. No collapse, no crumbling flagstone. Unlike the hallway above, nothing here had given way on its own. But against the far wall, three rough planks had been laid flat across an opening in the ground and weighted at the corners with loose stone. The wood was the same pale timber she’d seen propping beams in the passage above, cut to length, placed with care. Not old. Not part of the house. Someone had put them there.

She stood over them for a long moment. The smell rose through the gaps between the boards, thicker now, unmistakable. She set down her cane. Knelt. Gripped the edge of the nearest plank and dragged it aside. It scraped against the flagstones, and the sound rang off the cellar walls and died. She moved the second. The third.

Below, the earth had been disturbed. Turned. Deliberately, recently. The soil had been worked and pressed level. A shard of broken pottery sat near the lip, white against the dark earth. Something metal glinted further down, half-buried, catching the lantern light.

The silence here was different from the silence upstairs. It had weight.

“Get away from there.”