Lord Benchley’s voice was unmistakable, as was the sickeningly sweet aroma of the cloying smoke filtering from the room.
Opium.
Blackwell and Argent advised serpentine stealth to achieve their objective, but try as he might, Liam had never warmed to that particular method. Fingers curling into fists, as though he already held the viscount’s neck in his hands, Liam kicked the door to the study open with such force, it shattered.
He’d have thought the sound Gordon made had come from the woman if he hadn’t seen evidence to the contrary.
Both occupants of the room were slow and unsteady, even in their panicked state. The effects of the opium exacerbated now, as fear pumped the substance more hastily through their veins. They were locked in a passionate embrace, halfway toward congress on a dingy couch of indeterminate color. On the table in front of them, various mysterious forms of paraphernalia sprawled between half-empty bottles of liquor and uneaten food.
The woman, an exotic beauty, rolled off Gordon St. Vincent’s lap and sagged onto the couch, her breasts exposed by her drooping bodice. She was in such a stupor, she didn’t even move to cover herself.
“What is the meaning of this, Ravencroft?” Lord Benchley slurred more than demanded. “I saw you shot.” He wore the same fine suit he’d sported at the rail station, but now it was disheveled and soiled with God only knew what substances. His hair, fashionably curly with long sideburns, was rumpled in the extreme and slick with some sort of pomade, or maybe with his own oily filth. It was too dark to tell.
That this reprobate, this disgusting, pathetic fuck, had ever put his hands on Mena evaporated the last of Liam’s scruples, and left the acid taste of dread and hatred in his mouth.
“Where is she?” Liam snarled, fortifying himself against the stench of opium smoke, unwashed bodies, and sex hanging in a pall over the dim room like a toxic cloud.
“You mean, my wife?” the viscount sneered.
“I mean, yer widow.” Liam stalked toward the shabby couch upon which the two were draped like limp and dirty linens.
The sight of the wan lamplight gleaming golden off the sharp blade seemed to clear some of the murky smoke from their eyes.
Gordon rose unsteadily, and instead of retreating around the sparse furniture, he scrambled over the back of it, placing the couch and the woman between him and the murder etched on Liam’s features. He fled toward the door on the far wall and flung it open, uncovering the still, cruel form of Dorian Blackwell.
His cowardice allowed him to recover quickly, and attempt a hasty escape to the French doors that opened onto a veranda. Wrestling them open with fingers made clumsy with drink, vice, and fear, he screamed again as Argent slithered from the darkness beyond and crowded him back inside.
“All this over Philomena?” Gordon said as though he couldn’t keep his thoughts and his speech separated. “That sallow, barren, miserable bitch?”
“I’ll use this blade to dig the answer from your throat before I end your life,” Liam threatened darkly. “Where. Is. She?”
A faded dressing robe hung limply from Benchley’s shoulders, and his trousers were unbuttoned, but remained aloft around the beginnings of a swollen belly brought on by too much ale and other excess.
“S-she’s not here.” Gordon stumbled back to the couch and gripped it as though it were the only thing holding him aloft as the three lethal men converged on him and the sloe-eyed, trembling woman. “I had the men Father hired take her back to the asylum.”
Liam advanced, ready to strike him dead and race for the asylum when the hooker cried out. Apparently, she’d finally gathered her wits enough to pull her gaping bodice over her breasts. “Don’t ’urt me,” she begged. “Let me go, and I dinn’t see no’fing.”
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.”