Dancing With Danger (Goode Girls #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,42
to you. It is everything. Your entire bold, adventurous, domineering, warrior’s spirit. It is the life that spills from you, that radiates like a star in the middle of your own solar system. You don’t just tempt me, you fascinate me—obsess me—and no one has managed to do that in a very long time.”
“Then...” She cast her gaze down and schooled the longing from her voice. “Why not continue this while we are inclined to do so?”
“Because the moment I care for something...someone...it gives them power over me.”
“Your enemies?”
“Yes, but I was referring to...my men.”
At that, she sat up straighter, folding her legs beneath the sheets to face him fully. “I don’t understand.”
His face softened and his gaze touched every part of her face, as if committing it to memory. “That is because you are not part of this brutal world in which I exist, and I would not have it touch you. I will—die first.”
Mercy’s brows crimped as she did her utmost to puzzle him out. One thing missing from the mysteries of Eddard Sharpe was this vagary of fate. The villains were dastardly characters motivated by hatred, greed, or any number of ugly impulses belonging to man.
Rarely—never—were they noble or tender with predispositions toward generosity and kindness.
This man, this wicked, rakish criminal was possessed of a conscience. A code.
And yet...
“Why did you become a Fauve?” she asked, knowing she tread on dangerous ground. “Furthermore, why lead them if they would so easily turn on you? What sort of life is that?”
“It’s the life Gabriel and I inherited,” he answered simply, as if he’d resigned himself to such a disappointment long ago.
“Inherited?” she echoed.
“From le Bourreau.” He muttered the name as if it tasted of ashes in his mouth. “The Executioner.”
He slumped against her headboard, the covers sliding around his lean waist. Broad shoulders rolled forward a little as if Atlas himself could not have contained such a burden. His eyes unfocused slightly, as he looked into the past.
“He was an Englishman who married a Monégasque girl—my mother—leveraged by the debts her father owed him,” he explained in a voice devoid of emotion. “He kept her—us—in a villa in Monaco where he ruled the underworld there. Gaming establishments, brothels, and smuggling ships...” His fists curled in her bedclothes as his eyes glittered with a hatred so cold and absolute, she shivered with it.
“Fighting rings.”
Mercy covered his taut fist with her hand, and it unclenched beneath the pressure until he turned it to thread his fingers with hers.
“Your father, he...died?” she asked gently.
His jaw worked to the side in a show of gall. “My mother went first, suffered terribly from the syphilis he gave her, and he lingered—too long—disintegrating until parts of his body rotted away, to match the soul beneath.”
Mercy hadn’t been faced with such animosity before, not really. Her relationship with her father was either cold or contentious, but all they felt for each other was a rather mild form of duty and disappointment.
Raphael hated his father with a rage-induced loathing she’d not known him capable of.
It frightened her.
“Did he...was he...awful to you?” she queried.
His expression was carefully impassive. “He was horrible to everyone. I was no exception.”
“You should have been.” Mercy ventured closer to him, wanting to provide him comfort but feeling ill-equipped to do so. “You were his son.”
“His second son.”
“Did you resent that?”
“Never,” he answered darkly. “I was glad to be a small, rather undeveloped boy even after fourteen or so. I was lucky that he ignored me. That he thought me too pathetic to much notice.”
“Why would you be glad of that?” she asked, thinking she already knew she didn’t want the answer.
“Gabriel was always so extraordinarily big and strong and as savage as my father had crafted him to be. He was heir apparent to the Lord of Louts. And the prince to those who called themselves the Fauves. And still, when my father needed money, he threw Gabriel to the pits.”
“Is...that why he wears a mask?”
Raphael nodded, swallowing once. Twice.
“My brother always protected me from my father and now, you understand, it is my job to protect him.”
“I understand,” she murmured. And she did. It never mattered what kind of man he’d wanted to be. Because he was who his father made him. “So, like the monarchy, when the king of the Fauves dies, his sons inherit?”
“Only if they are worthy. If they can command the respect of the men.”
“What if you didn’t want to be a part of it anymore? What