criminals. One in his uniform wielding a nightstick.
There would be pain. And he needed the pain. To inflict it. To endure it. To escape.
Yes. He’d put an end to Cutter very soon. But first…he’d use every weapon in his arsenal. He’d cut out the truth if he had to. The sooner the better.
Because as much as he trusted no one, he trusted himself least of all…
To keep his hands off his wife.
Chapter 10
If it was the last thing she ever did, Pru was going to get behind the two locked doors in her house.
She’d been staring at them for a week. Or, rather, they had been staring at her.
They’d a somewhat strange relationship now, she and the doors. They greeted her every day on the way down to breakfast, beckoning to her with their iron latches and symmetrical arches. A cream-colored obsession, they were, and if she didn’t get behind them today, she’d give in to the madness waiting in the periphery of her thoughts. Threatening to engulf her and drag her to perdition.
She couldn’t exactly say why it bothered her so much. Why she spent so long in front of them when there were so many diverting rooms to occupy her. The first floor alone contained the large drawing room, the dining room, and a morning room attached to the well-tended back gardens through which the modest stable and carriage house hunkered in a cozy stone corner. She’d found a small library, in which she rejoiced, connected to her spacious parlor on the second floor, along with a couple handsome unused guest rooms, and her husband’s study.
The third story was where she slept, and only four doors graced the long hall. One was her bedroom and dressing room, obviously, and the other a washroom.
She needn’t the deductive powers of a Scotland Yard detective to suss out that her husband slept behind one of the locked doors.
In theory, at least.
Nighttime was when her body reminded her she carried his child with bouts of vicious nausea. So, when she lay awake staring at the canopy, doing her best to contain the retching, she’d often hear the clip of his shoes on the floorboards as he returned home from occasional nocturnal adventures as the Knight of Shadows.
Pru would lie awake and listen to him putter about behind the locked doors. Sometimes it sounded as though he’d brought his enemies home to grapple with them in the middle of the night and she’d burn to know what he was about.
He’d be gone before she awoke.
She never saw him. They never spoke. But she knew her husband kept apprised of her. That the staff, meager as it was, updated him on her well-being.
After a particularly restless night where she’d vomited until the wee hours, she’d been presented an effervescent drink by the thin, birdlike cook at the lonely breakfast table.
“From the master,” the woman had told her. “To settle your ills.”
She’d not even been able to stomach her usual breakfast of toast that morning, but the moment the ginger ale had fizzed its way down her throat and spread relief in her belly, she’d thanked the stars for him.
The gesture, tiny as it was, had touched her.
He cared.
More likely about the baby rather than her, but even so. She wasn’t surprised, per se. She remembered his deference the night they’d been lovers. The tempering of his strength. The tenderness of his touch. The attentiveness to her pleasure.
To dwell on it now would drive her deeper toward madness.
A tray had appeared in her parlor, and upon it she found little treasures almost every morning. A furniture catalogue. A card of information for a staff employment company. Clothing patterns and collections for infants from which she could order.
She’d never had to send for her things from her father’s house, workmen had simply arrived and collected her. She’d gone to her parents’ house in her husband’s fine carriage, finding them conspicuously absent, and had gathered what belonged to her.
And a few things that didn’t.
They’d moved and unpacked her entire life without her having to so much as lift a finger.
Chief Inspector Sir Carlton Morley did just about everything around the house…
Except sleep. Or eat. Or live.
She might as well reside in a crypt for all the interaction she had. Ester, Lucy, and the footman, Bart, were polite but disinclined to break the barrier between mistress of the house and staff, regardless of her clumsy attempts. They treated her with careful suspicion, and in the moments they weren’t