AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Stop! Stop it now!” Sabrina stepped between them as if she could fend off the inevitable. “Do you hear yourself, Aidan? Is this even about me?”
“What do you think, Sabrina? Or did you think at all when you took up with this thrice damned savage fiend? He’s a
freak of nature. A cursed, hellish experiment.”
“Careful, my lord. I’ve killed men for less.”
“I’m well aware of the men you’ve killed.”
Like two curs circling, teeth bared. Did they even hear her over their chest-thumping brinksmanship?
She grabbed Daigh’s arm. Dragged him around long enough to focus on her. “What’s this about?” A question she seemed to ask with maddening regularity. But confusion had become her permanent state of mind. And she tired of it. “Why are you ready to tear each other apart?”
Daigh offered her a mad dog stare, a feverish, implacable rage burning in his jet-black eyes. Emotion flooded her senses, but instead of the unstoppable rush of memory, she came up against a wall, stark and impassable. She read nothing of his thoughts. Saw nothing of his past. Only a black, dizzying emptiness like a razored maw. An unblinking serpent’s eye. She shuddered under that malevolent, unyielding gaze. Fell back with a startled cry.
“You once said I was given a second chance, Sabrina. But that chance came with strings. The diary I dreamt about? The visions of death and destruction?”
“What about them?”
“Your brother. His wife. Your cousin. Your house. I destroyed them all. Or tried to at my master’s bidding. I am a creature in thrall to a madman.”
Aidan’s injuries in the spring. They’d told her he’d had an accident climbing the cliffs below Belfoyle. Jack dead at the hands of highwaymen. Kilronan House burnt to the ground from a dropped candle on a carpet. All of these had been caused by Daigh? No. It couldn’t be. She would have known. Would have seen. Would have sensed it.
But she had. She did. And she’d refused to give any of her concerns credence. Too caught up in her girlish fantasy of Daigh riding to her rescue. Her black-eyed paladin swooping in to save her. It had been just that—fantasy.
Her body went cold then hot. She hugged herself against the shudders wracking her body.
Aidan grabbed her arm. “Come, Sabrina.”
“I don’t believe you,” she whispered, praying for a denial.
“Believe me. It is so,” Daigh answered.
Aidan’s grip tightened as he pulled her away.
“You wouldn’t hurt me. You couldn’t.” She reached for Daigh, but he shrugged her off with a quick, angry gesture.
“You’re a silly child,” he snarled, averting his gaze. Refusing to look her in the eye. “A fool.”
His insults struck her with the force of blows, but she was already numb and barely staggered beneath them. “And what I saw of us? The images of you and me?”
He lifted his head, raking her with a greasy, ugly stare. “A virgin’s infatuation.” His lips curled in a scoundrel’s smile. “But we took care of that, didn’t we, pet?”
Aidan went rigid, his expression thunderous. “Lazarus, you son of a whore’s rotten—” Jerked his hand up, squeezing off a shot.
“No!” Sabrina screamed.
The windows rattled, smoke stinging her nose, making her eyes water.
Squinting through the blur of tears, she dropped to her knees and the man crumpled on the floor, bloody hands clutching his stomach.
“Daigh! By the gods, Aidan. Why?”
He loomed over them, white-faced and shaking. “It may not kill him as he deserves, but it sure as hell makes me feel better.”
Daigh’s chest rose and fell with shallow, painful breaths. Each inhalation pushing fresh blood between his fingers. His lips curved in a faint grimace. “Glad to be of service, my lord.”
“Come, Sabrina.” Aidan dragged her to her feet. “If I so much as catch a whiff of your stench again, Lazarus, I’ll risk any damnation to see you suffer.”
