Panic flared as mobility began to return, and Mena tugged against Mr. Burns’s unyielding grip. She struggled to wrench and yank away from him, but knew her movements were weak. “Don’t tie me up, I implore you!” When one of his arms released her to reach for the first buckled leather manacle, Mena’s arm flailed out, her elbow catching him in the chin.
He bared his filthy teeth as he whirled her around and smashed the back of his ham-sized knuckles into her face. He released her as his blow connected, sending her crashing to the hard floor in a pile of weak limbs. Pain exploded into Mena’s cheek and radiated to her eyes, ears, and down her neck, but she caught herself with trembling hands before her head cracked against the floor. The taste of brine and copper trickled into her mouth from where her teeth had cut into her cheek.
Mr. Burns crouched down, the pleasant, unassuming look fixed back on his unfortunate features. “Let me remind ya of something out of the kindness of me ’eart, Countess Fire Quim.” The foul stench of his breath assailed her, causing her already watering eyes to overflow. “Out there, you’re a noble lady expecting everyone to lick your boots and kiss your arse. But in ’ere, you’re nothing but another loony cunt, locked away because no one can stand ya. I’ll tell ya what I tell the others here. If ya make me ’appy, I can make your life easier. If you’re difficult, then life will be difficult, and no one will believe that the bruises I leave on ya weren’t inflicted by your own self.”
All of the large muscles in Mena’s body quivered and twitched with returning blood. Her skin burned, yet she was freezing. Despite all that, she was only aware of the raw black emotion swirling in her soul. Something dark and self-destructive, as though one of the many demons she’d fought in her lifetime had finally been set free.
“It’s Viscountess Fire Quim, you hateful brute,” she snapped, surprising herself as much or more than Mr. Burns. “If you all insist on calling me that ridiculous moniker, the very least you can do is affix the correct title.” To seal her fate, she spat blood in his repulsive face.
He acted just like she’d expected him to, and his next vicious blow granted her the oblivion she craved.
* * *
To Mena, heaven was a difficult notion to comprehend. And, somehow, whenever she pictured it in her mind, she merely conjured an image of home. Her real home. Not Benchley Court, the stately, opulent mansion where she’d resided with her husband these five soul-crushing years. Nor Belle Glen Asylum, where she lay now on the stone floor in a puddle of her blood and grief.
But home. Birch Haven Place, an idyllic country baronetcy in Hampshire. A place as much a paradise as this asylum had become her purgatory.
Floating in the dark folds of her unconscious, Mena could feel the sunshine of southern England on her face. Could close her eyes and still see the light and shadow playing to her in the shade of her favorite copse of birch trees where she used to picnic and read of a summer’s day. She’d gaze over the fields to where the manor house settled, a cozy Georgian structure, too big to be called a cottage and too small for a mansion, with red stone, white windows, and entirely too many chimneys. Her father had once told her he thought the roof rather cluttered. But Mena had loved each seemingly random gable and smokestack right where it was.
When she was growing up, the gardens had been her fairyland, a place to let her imagination roam. The stables, her adolescent refuge, as she was allowed to explore the countryside on horseback until the fields ran into the sea. The grand fireplace in the meager great hall was a warm corner of comfort, where she and her beloved father had huddled their heads together every winter over countless books and shut out the world.
Her father, lovely as he was, had been too low for high society, too gentle for the merchant class, too eccentric to fit in much of anywhere, but too wealthy to ignore. Her mother had died of scarlet fever before Mena could even walk, and Baron Phillip Houghton had protected and pampered his only daughter. Educated her like a man. Treated her like a treasure. And instilled a love of all things intellectual and agricultural.
When the St. Vincents purchased the stately manor of Grandfield bordering Birch Haven, the baron had seen a chance to save his only child from encroaching spinsterhood.
A disease had been eating at his bones, one he’d kept hidden from Philomena until he succumbed to it mere months after her marriage, leaving her alone in this world but for a cruel husband and his hateful family.
Now Birch Haven was gone. Her father, years dead. And there was no sunshine or warmth in this world.
The cold pierced Mena before consciousness fully returned, and she knew for a fact she was not in heaven. Even before she blinked open her eyes and saw the face of the devil calling her name, an eye patch affixed over a grim, scowling, but satirically handsome face.
“Don’t move, Lady Benchley,” the black-haired, black-eyed devil was saying as he tucked something around her shivering body, something with warmth in its heavy folds. His cloak, perhaps? “Don’t look,” he softly ordered.
There was a man yelling, not far from her. Mr. Burns? The voice made her skin crawl. Her face throbbed with pain. Screams of madness and cries of joy echoed from women among the chaos of authoritative male voices out in the hall.
A sickening crunch sounded, and despite the devil’s orders—despite her own dismay—Mena looked.
Mr. Burns dropped from the grip of a familiar auburn-haired mercenary. The orderly’s neck crooked at an impossible angle and his eyes stared sightlessly at the cold, white walls.