I met steady blue eyes across the small expanse. Gratitude, anger, accusation all congealed into a wordless knot of emotion I could not process quick enough. The door closed again, leaving me in the room with black bathwater, my own dread, and the attire I would not put on.
They had taken my opium.
Terror demanded my capitulation.
I could not acquiesce.
Chapter Nine
The door handle rattled. I marked it, as I’d marked all the others in the past untold hours, with a deliberate counting. “Twenty-three.” Or was it twenty-four? I could not be sure; counting had not done my peace of mind any favors.
I sat in the farthest corner of the room, huddled over my knees. I clasped them to my chest, rocked because I had no choice.
How angry Osoba had been when he’d returned to find the door blocked. I’d fitted the chair beneath the knob, then obstructed that with the heavy trunk I found behind the folding screen. With some effort, I’d laid the screen between the trunk and the wall, finding just enough room to angle it in a secure brace.
It wasn’t sophisticated in any way, but it had provided its service without fuss. There were no windows in this room, no other entry but that door that would not open, no matter how many times it was rammed from the other side.
On the other hand, there was no other exit.
I was sweating profusely. It had set in an hour after my self-induced incarceration. With it, nausea swirled and my head ached like a pounding drum. The ague I’d worried about earlier this morning had returned three-fold, and I felt as if I’d been beaten solidly with sticks and left to rot.
I chewed on my thumbnail as I rocked. Blood had long since welled from the ragged edge I was creating, but I did not stop.
Back and forth, I rocked. Back and forth.
I wanted to pace, but it seemed a nightmare to even sit up straight, much less walk.
How long could I last in this cell? How long until the pain sitting like a rock in my gut turned to blistering agony?
I blew out a breath that shuddered free of lungs too full of phlegm.
The doorknob went still. So did I.
Did anyone wait outside? I had listened for some time through the panel, heard a bitingly angry Ikenna Osoba order men to stand guard for my inevitable defeat.
It did not escape me that he would be punished for my actions. Although the girls had done their bit, I wagered the Veil would not let them escape unscathed, either.
I could not summon the will to help them. Guilt paled beside the depths of my illness now. My efforts to help would only demand my surrender, and that I would not allow. Not for all the coin in the world.
Fresh blood filled my mouth as my teeth found a torn edge and sank deep.
The pain did not distract me for long.
I breathed as if I had run for hours, gasping for air as I rocked once more. My backside ached from the wear, but everything I was had become a terrible knot of panic and fear and pain and illness.
I wanted to laugh, but could not understand why.
“One miller, two millers,” I whispered. “Three millers, four.” The term was Ishmael’s, interchangeable with hang-in-chains for the name of a murderer. “How many millers to open a door?”
Two that I knew of, each demanding justice. Revenge. Rivals with each other, rivals with me.
The dead haunted my every waking breath. Feminine laughter, a woman’s screams. The wide, shocked eyes of an earl’s dying stare—foggy green, and never again to fill with warmth when he looked at me, or delight when I surprised him.
I saw in red and breathed the metallic reek of fresh spilled blood. Mine, perhaps, from the wound I would not leave alone between my teeth.
The earl’s, perhaps, from the wound I would not leave alone in my heart.
I do not know how much more time passed before a sound at the door earned my manic attention once more. It was a tap. A polite sort of sound.
I smothered an inane snort before it blasted through the vicious ache behind my forehead. “Go away,” I croaked.
A masculine voice trickled through the panel. I could not make it out, but it was not Osoba’s. Nor was it the nasal evenness of the Veil’s—not that I expected that one to tend to the likes of me himself.
“I am not leaving this room,” I said tightly. “Leave me.”
Was that my name I heard? A two-syllable decree?
Much to my surprise, I found my legs unfolding. I rose, clinging to the wall as my knees threatened to spill me headlong into the angled screen.
“Open this door, Miss Black.”
Hawke. The nascent threat inherent in every word was unmistakable, as was the all-too-familiar tones of command. Yet there was something else. Something that tugged at my inflamed mind and plucked from within a memory I had struggled so hard to bury.
Are you with me, Miss Black?
No. No, I wasn’t. Not this time. Did I want to be?
Would it matter so much when I had so little else to bargain with?
Oh, heavens. What was I saying? What was I thinking?
“No,” I replied sharply. Too much fear colored the denial. Too much uncertainty.
Hawke must have heard it. I could never accuse him of being dull-witted, not in my wildest of fancies. His voice came again, neither sharp nor loud. “You have been too long locked away,” he said, and would I in my right mind, I would never have called it gentle. Yet that was the very word I thought of.
Gentle. What madness was I mired in?
I climbed over the trunk, hiking the bulky folds of my borrowed robe over my knees as I did so. My palms slid over the wood, as if by doing so, I could see through it to where Hawke waited beyond.
Would he be clad in his working togs? Would he cover his scars once more?
Or would he stand outside this door, cloaked in the steely authority of his mantle? Glaring at this door as if it dared have the temerity to obstruct his aim.
I would be that aim. Reckless, obstinate, foolish Cherry St. Croix, the collector who could not collect.
“Cage,” I whispered. Some part of myself had the wherewithal to be shocked, but I could not summon the mask of cool derision I needed to maintain distance. If I saw him—if I saw his face, would I have the strength to turn away again? Now? Here?
I could not. More than half out of my senses and too hungry for something to fill this terrible ache inside me, I did not dare risk it.
The door creaked faintly, the lightest touch. My fingers shook against the smooth surface. Had he laid a hand atop it? Were our palms separated only by a bit of carved wood?
I wanted to weep for the pain of my body, the ache of my heart, and could not.
“Open the door, Miss Black,” came his voice, so low that I could imagine him murmuring against the panel I leaned against. So close. “Your lot is already difficult enough. Do not force me to make it the worse.”
A threat. Or a warning? Were they all that different?
“Cherry.”
My name in a rich, masculine command—on Hawke’s own lips—was my undoing. I am not certain when I made the decision, but I scrambled over the trunk before I became fully aware of my own intent, kicked aside the screen, and shoved away the heavy chest with a strength I did not know I had. The chair came next.
The door did not open.
I waited, fists clenched together under my chin, but it remained still. Quiet.
I would be forced to open it myself.
Trembling so hard as to clench my teeth against the chattering, I reached for the door knob. I turned it slowly, opened the panel with such effort, I could not imagine where the strength came from.
There were no curious eyes to stare as cool air wafted into the room. No servants to gawk, no angry lion-prince to threaten and snarl. Only Hawke, clad in the exquisite perfection of his ringmaster attire—black and brilliant blue, the same color as the bit of devilry in his left eye. He wore no gloves this time.