Dorian took a coin from his jacket and pressed it into the hooker’s hands. “Fly away, little bird,” he commanded gently. “But if I hear of any chirping…”
“Everyone knows better than to sing a word about the Black’eart of Ben More.” Her fist closed over the coin, and she didn’t even pause to collect her shoes as she shuffled away as fast as her muddled limbs would allow, another wraith lost to the night.
Liam seized the sniveling viscount by the lapels of his robe, and hauled him to his feet using only his one good hand. “Why did ye take her only to dump her at an asylum?”
“Because she’s mine. She’s my wife, and as long as I’m alive, she’ll belong to me. I must make her pay for what she’s done, I’ll take it out of her flesh if I have to, but she’ll not bring more shame and humiliation on my family.”
“Your family doesn’t need any help in that regard,” Argent remarked wryly.
Liam clenched him harder, unable to fathom the depth of this small man’s cruelty. “If ye felt no affection for her, why marry her in the first place?”
Gordon obviously mistook Liam’s meaning, as he seemed to find hope in the question. “I liked her well enough, at first,” he admitted. “She was from country gentry. Good breeding stock, my father said. Women with hips like that are supposed to be built for birthing sons, but Philomena never even conceived.”
An ugly jealousy reared in Liam’s chest, and he had to drop the man back to the couch to keep from crushing him with his bare hands. Gordon again misread the action as mercy, and his tongue loosened.
“She was so soft, so unspoiled, so agreeable and malleable, unlike the grasping debutantes in London. Philomena was good. Endlessly, eternally, optimistically kind. I found it charming at first, but in the end, I fucking hated her for it.”
Every muscle twitched, every drop of blood sang with violence as Liam contemplated breaking every bone in the man’s body.
Slowly.
“Steady on,” Argent said in a low drone.
Turning away, Liam began to tremble with the force of his emotion.
“You fell in love with her, didn’t you, Ravencroft?” Lord Benchley correctly assessed.
Liam remained silent, unable to give voice to the force of his emotion. “The Demon Highlander. She made you want to be a better man, didn’t she?” he commiserated with pathetic disgust. “Did she look at you with those bloody big eyes and force you to see your every weakness and every flaw reflected in their depths? I hated myself when she looked at me like that, like I’d disappointed her. Like she still believed I would improve, hoped I would be a better man. I began to crush that hope, and revel in doing so.”
“But she was never mad,” Liam stated, still unable to look at the man without killing him. The void was growing, his humanity was slipping, and he needed to finish this. He knew exactly what the viscount was referring to. He’d seen his own demon reflected in Mena’s eyes, and he’d wanted to exorcise it. For her.
She’d made him want to be a better man … and he loved her for it.
“She was sweet, but she was willful. Her father, the poor sod, educated her for some unfathomable reason, and what she needs is amelioration. It’s why I sent her to the asylum. She’d become too erratic to manage, and Lord knows I tried.”
“Ye were violent with her.” Liam fought to keep the violence from his own voice.
“I only struck her when she needed correction, at first.” Gordon leered, as though in a room of like-minded comrades. “Sometimes you have to whip your spaniels to teach them things, a wife is no different. But after this latest stunt, I think a heavier hand is needed. I’m going to teach her a lesson she’ll never forget.”
Liam had heard enough of the truth. Every word was like acid dripping on his heart. The images too terrible to abide, too horrific to ignore.
He had thought he knew what rage was. An inferno of uncontrollable lust for violence and blood. In the past, it had painted the world with a pall of crimson, and flashed fire through his body until his skin burned as though covered in molten steel.
What he felt for Gordon St. Vincent was the antithesis of that. It was a void of ice and darkness. A calculating, glittering shard of dense, hellish hatred lodged in his soul.
A welcome sin.
He snapped, and suddenly he had his knee against the viscount’s chest, driving him into the couch as he planted a fist into the man’s nose, shattering it beyond repair.
His demon reveled in the feel of the bone and cartilage giving way beneath his fist, and in the choked and pained sounds exuding from the man, as blood exploded down his robe in a great gush.
“She’s not at Belle Glen, Liam,” Dorian murmured from where he stood behind the couch facing him. “I liberated that hellhole the day I helped her to escape. I worked very hard to have your governess emancipated as a ward of the crown, and she is safely with Farah and Millie at my home.”
Liam turned his wrath on his brother. “Why did ye let me believe she was in danger? What sort of bastard are ye?”
“The sort who built his fortune, his entire life, on secrets. The sort who built his name on a lie so our father wouldn’t try to have me murdered again,” Dorian murmured, his good eye burning with its own dark fire. “We may be bound by Mackenzie blood, Liam, but not trust. Not yet. I needed to be certain you wouldn’t take your famous temper out on Mena. She’s suffered enough. And you needed to hear the truth of your woman’s desperate circumstances from the man who caused them. You don’t know me well enough to trust my word, and I knew trusting her would be difficult for you.”