In the Dark with the Duke by Christi Caldwell Page 0,59

silence. “Isn’t it the same thing?”

“No.” But how to explain it? Particularly to a man who’d built a reputation off fighting in the name of coin and profit. She wandered off, her gaze on the faint slash of light that had managed to creep through Hugh’s shutters. “I’m willing to fight . . . if I need to.”

If her sister or nephew or mother or sister-in-law . . . or brother found themselves at risk.

If someone stronger, bigger, or more panicked had Lila in a hold she needed to escape from.

My God, please let me go . . . I can’t breathe . . . Pleeeeease . . .

She sucked in a deep breath, trying to fill her lungs with air, as if in doing so, she might give that gift over to the girl she’d been, crushed by a delirious mother who’d scrabbled and clawed at everyone around them, all in the name of freedom and survival.

Could she hurt someone? The metal clang of sabres sluicing through the air rang in her mind.

Where do you think you’re going . . . ?

Lila pressed her three middle fingers against the scar down the middle of her forehead.

Men, women . . . children. Babes. They’d all fled. They’d not fought. Surviving had been their only goal, and on that day on St. Peter’s Field, it had been a shared one amongst the masses. And yet, even fleeing as they had, there’d been men who’d gleefully cut them down, men who’d sliced the breast off a woman and left her rib cage hanging open. And that violence, that ugliness, was the world she’d retreated from, and the one she wished to protect herself from. And until Hugh’s words here, she’d failed to truly consider that sometimes a person couldn’t free themselves . . . without fighting. Without risking harm to others. Feeling Hugh’s eyes on her, she made herself turn back, facing him, and owned her decision. “I want to learn to fight. And if that means learning to fight aggressively so that I can keep myself and the ones I love safe? Then that is what I want”—need—“to do.”

Lila March had suffered broken fingers.

Three of them.

Which, in the scheme of what Hugh had inflicted, suffered, or witnessed, may as well have been as insignificant as a sprain. He’d become immune to other people’s suffering, emotionally deadened to the sight of violence.

Only to find from the slight angling of her once wounded digits, he wasn’t as impervious as he’d believed.

The woman was a conundrum wrapped in a mystery and, because of it, the last thing he could afford. His entire existence centered around secrets and sins and crimes. Whatever ghosts belonged to her, whatever it was that had made her seek him out, belonged to her.

“Close your eyes.” She hesitated a moment, and then she swept impossibly long lashes down until they lay as a blanket upon her pale cheeks. It was a detail he shouldn’t notice, and yet as he instructed her, he remained riveted by that beautifully lush fringe. “Find your target,” he murmured. “See one. In your mind. Who is the person?”

Color slipped from her already pale cheeks, and her perfectly even, pearl-white teeth caught her lower lip, but not before he caught the way that flesh trembled.

She gave a juddering nod. “I have one,” she said, her voice cryptic.

And he’d wager his lifelong vow of revenge against his oppressors that her mind’s eye had drawn forth the one responsible for her fingers.

Rage licked at his senses, an all-too-familiar, vicious hungering to take apart the coward who’d put his hands upon her. It was an unexpectedly volatile response to this woman. A weakness he’d not permitted since Bragger’s sister, Valerie, the youngest of their group, whom they’d protected . . . whom he’d vowed to protect . . . and failed.

Perhaps that was why he found himself, if not liking Lila March, liking her presence. That being with her wasn’t about the arena that had become the center of his existence. It wasn’t about the need for revenge. Or the young woman Hugh had failed. It was why he’d not sent Lila away again after that first night, and why he’d fought his partners on her being here. In being with her and assisting her, for the first time in his life, he wasn’t connected with a person through the Fight Society.

And what he’d never counted on . . . what he’d never expected was just how welcome that