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Chapter Ten
Darcy
“You there! Who are you? Wake up and state your business!”
The loud, rumbling voice startled me out of an uneasy sleep the next morning, and I threw off the quilt I had wrapped around me and tried to jump to my feet. Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I looked up into perhaps the fiercest face I’d ever seen. The man it belonged to loomed over me, with a bushy blue-black beard that covered half his face.
Not only was he at least six and a half feet tall, but he was massively built too. That was alarming, but it wasn’t what made my mouth go dry and my hands tremble. It was the magnificent horse he was sitting on.
The beautiful animal was about sixteen hands high, measured from the highest point of the withers, where the neck meets the back down to the ground. Black with a long white stripe down his nose—Wyatt had called it a blaze. I knew that horse—it was Midnight, Wyatt’s horse and I was sure of it. That could only mean something terrible must have happened to Wyatt.
It took my breath away for just a second, because my first thought was that Wyatt would never allow this man to touch his beloved horseif he were aliveto stop it.
That idea came to jeer at me for a few moments, and I staggered slightly and put out my hand to steady myself against the wall. Waves of nausea hit me, and I feared I was going to throw up at the man’s feet.
The man on the horse sneered at me. “What’s wrong with you? If you’ve brought some sickness to my gates, I’ll make you regret it!” he shouted at me, his eyes wild and mean. His hand dropped to a dagger at his waist.
“N-no, nothing like that, Your Lordship,” I managed, before he carried out his threat. “I must have gotten up too fast, and it made me dizzy. That’s all.”It wasn’t all, of course. Not by a long shot. It was the fact that there was no way Wyatt would have given up his horse willingly—the same thing Wyatt said about Asher’s horse, Whiskey, the one whose sudden appearance in the yard at the lodge had started Wyatt on this mission to find Asher and Brandon in the first place. I was worried sick, and my soul trembled at the thought that Wyatt could already be dead, and I had come for nothing.
But the man continued to glare down at me, as if considering whether or not to kill me and be done with it. It gave me a chance to collect my wits. I looked him over carefully as he gazed down at me. He was not an Alpha, though he was as large as one. He was beta and not yet middle aged. His skin was a swarthy color, and his eyes were black. His gloved hands, clenched around the reinswere approximately the size of small hams, and his beard was the thickest and bushiest I’d ever seen. And so black it looked almost blue in the soft morning sunlight.
This must be the baron, and he was unnatural looking in almost every way, from his huge size to his crazy blue beard and his strangely piercing, sapphire-colored eyes. His mouth was soft and sensual, though, and the wild beard was trimmed neatly around it, framing his full lips, though it was maintained nowhere else. My aunt once remarked that blue was a color that rarely occurred in nature, except in translucent ponds or lakes. Because of that, some people considered it to be a color not of this world. It was almost...inhuman.
“Well?” he thundered, leaning down over the pommel of the saddle to sneer down at me. “What are you doing here? Give me a reason I shouldn’t set the dogs on you or string you up by your scrawny neck for trespassing on my property!”
“I-I…” Because I was upset about the horse, I wanted to yell back at him that this wasn’t actually his property, and that I was outside the gates, andwhere the fuckdid he get Wyatt’s horse anyway? But something told me that was the wrong way to speak to this mountainous man who could no doubt crush me with one of those massive fists without breaking a sweat. My true nature was what Barbarosa had told me he’d respond to. So instead of yelling at him, I instinctively fell to one knee and lowered my head in supplication.
“Your lordship,” I said, in a tone as meek and obsequious as I could make it, “Please forgive me, but I arrived very late during the evening, so I had no choice but to wait here until morning to see you.”
“Seeme? For what?” he roared.
“I’m seeking employment, Your Lordship. I can provide references, and I hoped that such a magnificent house such as this one might have a vacancy in service.”
The prolonged silence made me peek up to see him still glowering down at me, but I couldn’t read the expression on his fierce face. That frown might have meant “I’m thinking about eating you for breakfast,” or perhaps just, “get the hell out.” I had no way of knowing, and I prayed that Barbarosa had been right about his attraction to omega qualities.
He continued to stare at me until it got to be beyond uncomfortable, but I stayed silent, waiting.
“Whoareyou?” he suddenly asked.
“My name is Benjamin,” I replied, using the fake name I’d decided on at my aunt’s house, when she wrote me the reference. “Benjamin Tate.”
It was highly unlikely he knew the name of Wyatt’s omega—even improbable—but better to be safe than sorry, so I had decided to use a fake name. Now that the initial shock was receding a little, I was hoping as hard as I could that the fact he was riding Midnight simply meant that Wyatt was being held here or somewhere close by. Anything else was unthinkable, so I decided I just wouldn’t think about it.
It wasn’t that I was cavalier about the possibility of his death…I simply couldn’t hold the idea in my mind and still keep functioning. I’d think about it later. And I would find Wyatt, if it was the last thing I ever did.
Without another word, the man pulled on his horse’s reins and turned Midnight’s head away. He rode slowly toward the gates, and my heart sank. I thought I’d failed to convince him, and he was just leaving me here. It was only as he reached the gates that he stopped and turned back to look at me.
“Well? Are you coming or not?” he asked, and I jumped to my feet, scrambling to pick up my things and follow him inside to the courtyard. Once inside the gate, we were swarmed with his soldiers, who didn’t touch me or talk to me, but gave me deeply suspicious looks. He ignored them completely and I watched him ride to the broad steps of the castle and dismount. He never even looked back as he mounted the steps and went inside. I stood inside the gates, feeling foolish and not knowing what to do until one of the men—an officer by the looks of his uniform, came over to growl at me.
“Who are you, boy?”
“M-my name is Tate. I’m here about a job as a servant. The baron told me to follow him in the gates.”
That was a bit of a stretch, but he’d asked if I was coming inside. Close enough, I figured.
“Go around back to the scullery and talk to Mr. Nolan,” he said. “He’s in charge of the servants, and he’s usually eating his breakfast there at about this time.” He looked me up and down and sneered. “You don’t look strong enough to do a man’s job. Maybe you can work as one of the maids.”
The men standing around him laughed, and I knew better than to react in any way. I simply said, “Thank you,” and then hesitated. The man was unfriendly, but I still had to ask. “That was the baron, right?”
