Page 36 of The Forsaken

“The lady got it into her otherwise empty brain to visit a fortune-teller. A bloody fortune-teller.”

“Have a care, Kerr. The lady is my sister-in-law.”

“I thought your focus would be on how close the lady came to dying tonight. Forgive me. I will remember that I am only allowed to insult the countess’s male relatives.”

“How did she come to be—”

“Finally, the only question that matters.” By the time Kerr finished his recounting, his fury had peaked. He wanted to storm the townhouse and thrash her—which God help him, with her impeccable French, she’d heard and understood.

French. Kerr gritted his teeth. She spoke it like she’d been a damned descendant of the Sun King’s line.

And more infuriated by that, he didn’t even realize he’d marched to the exit.

“Kerr, you have no mount or carriage.”

“I’ll bloody walk,” he shouted, lifting a fist in the air and giving it a hard shake.

Good riddance. His hands were forever free of the maddening chit.

Chapter 6

The following afternoon, Andromena died…and it was all Edgar’s fault.

That kiss—his kiss—in a slow, cumbersome carriage was nothing like the sweet, snowy one from that winter’s morn. This was a fierce, desperate hunger, as if his very breathing depended on that kiss. And she understood, because if he’d stopped, she was certain she would have died right there in his arms. A day later, she still didn’t know how she’d played it so collected in the immediacy of his embrace.

The things she had secretly thought abhorrent—like a man sticking his tongue in her mouth—turned out to be pure magic. It left her wondering if she might also be wrong about what came next, whether a man’s body pressing into hers could be another kind of magic. She had doubted that until she felt his solid weight against her, making her reconsider everything. But the simple feel of his tongue touching hers, caressing her mouth, at least showed her why women put up with all the rest.

He left her breathless and dizzy, his touch chasing away the memory of her blackmailer. Safe in her sister’s guest room under a warm coverlet, sleep eluded her. It was not fear that kept her staring at the lace canopy, but thoughts of Edgar, until dawn broke and she finally drifted into dreams of him.

Sleep offered no escape from the viscount. She’d awakened to his ghost, whispering around every corner of her clouded mind.

Altogether, a lack of proper rest combined with Edgar’s outrageously thorough embrace, and also her wide-brimmed Gainsborough hat, accounted for Andromena stepping into the path of a hooded Tilbury on New Bond Street.

Upon dressing that morn, the leghorn straw hat with sparkling gauze and a dark netted veil seemed like the perfect adornment for a blackmail meeting. It also happened to be much less useful for seeing.

Shouts from the banshee heralded Andromena’s end.

As she stood, her pearl-encrusted slippers mired in both literal and figurative mud, the looming, spindled conveyance barreling toward her cast a sudden breeze that parted her netting like a curtain. The banshees ensured Andromena would see the spindle-barreled curricle bearing down on her, and the giant, chestnut-maned mount about to trample her.

And then she was dying, and it was simultaneously terrific and terrible at the same time. Unlike her father, who’d strangled, choked, and gagged until death overtook him, the weight of the carriage knocked the air from her lungs. Before she could be trampled, she took flight, sailing effortlessly through the sky like one of Diana’s airborne magical women before floating gently onto her back.

That thrilling sensation lasted as long as her last heartbeat.

The force of Andromena’s collision with the earth crushed her lungs. Her teeth clanked hard enough to break. And her vision went black. Then stars danced behind her eyes, and she wanted to say: The stars and the moon are heaven! I knew it. Granted, there was no moon, just glittering, floating sparks.

But an I-told-you-so to only herself was no consolation. Not when the price of death was throbbing muscles and crushed lungs.

Here, Andromena believed one didn’t feel pain in death. Hoped, perhaps, to make herself feel better after her father’s death, and then worrying and wondering about her own.

Maybe that was the price one paid for entry into the pearly gates and a chance to play among the stars and clouds.

“Are you bloody insane?”

When it came to The Almighty, she’d proven wrong. As it turned out, he was neither benevolent nor kind and loving but surly and snappish with a temper and tones to rival Lucifer.

Andromena could trace her descent to one particular act in her living years—age nine, when Campbell returned from a sea voyage with three gifts for three sisters: an opal brooch for Linnie. A garnet necklace for Meghan. And a hay-stuffed doll for Andromena. This is what she got for stealing the brooch.

I’m in hell, she silently wept.