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.”
Liam paused. The veracity of Dorian’s reasoning washed over him with chilling precision.
“I knew this was where you’d find the truth.” Dorian pointed to Gordon, whose red, bleary eyes blinked up at them from an opium- and terror-induced stupor. “This human heap of rubbish told you everything you needed to know. And now, you can do what needs to be done in order to claim the woman you love.”
Liam blinked up at his brother, and found the same demon he saw in the mirror every day staring back at him. Suddenly there were things he wanted to say. Apologies he wanted to make for sins that were not even his own.
But first.
He drew his dagger from his boot.
“D-don’t do anything you’ll regret,” Gordon begged, putting a weak and ineffectual hand out. The man would have been mindless from the pain of his mangled face if not for the heavy amount of narcotics coursing through him.
“I’m a lord of the realm,” St. Vincent slurred from behind teeth stained crimson with his own blood. “There will be inquiries. When they find my body, they’ll know it was you. There were too many witnesses on the train platform. They saw how you wanted her.”
Dorian Blackwell made a dark sound. “What makes you think there will be anything left of you to find?”
“Only the blood you’re dripping onto this couch,” Argent added blithely.
Liam nodded to them both before pointing the dagger at the viscount’s face. “My name is William Grant Ruaridh Mackenzie, I am the Demon Highlander, Laird of the Mackenzie clan of Wester Ross, and ninth Marquess of Ravencroft. When we meet in hell, ye’ll know what to call me. I made a vow to my woman that if I ever got my hands on ye, I’d put my dirk through yer eye.”
And so he did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I have to go to him.” Anxious agitation drove Mena to her feet and her companions, Millie LeCour and Farah Blackwell, both rose in tandem as she began to pace across the lush cobalt carpets of the Blackwells’ Mayfair mansion. “What if he’s … the poor children … I must—”
“Mena, darling.” Farah’s robin-blue skirts rustled in the heavy, expectant quiet of the house as she put her arm around Mena’s shoulders and tried to steer her back to the settee. “Dorian and Christopher left to look after your Lord Ravencroft before Murdoch and I brought your emancipation papers to the authorities. They promised to send a messenger if there was any news to report.”
Mena’s anguish was a tight fist in her chest, squeezing her heart until every beat seemed as though it might be her last. She hadn’t felt this kind of helpless desperation since Belle Glen. For once, her pain had nothing to do with her own hopeless situation.
Even when she’d thought she was going back to the asylum, when she’d assumed Gordon had delivered her to another indefinite hellish incarceration, the only care she had was for Liam. She relived the horror of seeing his blood bloom against the gray of his vest. Of watching such a mountain of a man crumble to the earth.
“It’s been hours.” Mena had never been the hand-wringing sort, but she was certainly doing plenty of that today. “I can’t sit here and do nothing. I will truly go mad.” They’d have to deliver her to the very sort of place she’d been saved from if the man she loved was …
God, she couldn’t even think it.
What if they hadn’t sent word because the news was of the sort that one had to deliver in person.
Tragic news?
The only thing that had kept her away from the hospital this long was an alternate fear. What if Liam refused to see her? Could she face his antipathy? His rejection?
Could she bear the look of betrayal in his eyes?
The answer had been unclear until this moment. And the answer was a resounding yes. If he was alive, she could deal with whatever came after. So long as she could see his thick chest expand with breath, and his lithe, muscular body suffused with the almost inhuman strength she attributed to him, alone.
Nothing else mattered. Not until she knew he was all right. Until she saw, with her own eyes, that the Demon Highlander stood once again.
Gathering her pelisse, she hurried toward the door.
“Well, if you’re going, we’re certainly coming with you.” Millie LeCour, garbed in violet silk, also retrieved her fur wrapper, her sable eyes snapping. “I know that if Christopher were in a similar situation, the entire Roman Legion couldn’t keep me away.”
Farah moved to stop them. “I’ve learned to trust Dorian,” she said evenly. “I know what kind of hell you’re in, Mena, but if your marquess were in even a hint of danger, my husband would have called you to his side. He asked that we wait here, and I feel there’s a reason for that.”
Mena paused, seized by indecision, looking to the secure door beyond Farah’s slim shoulders, and then to the gentle gray eyes of the Countess Northwalk.
“Your marquess and my husband are brothers, Mena.” Farah’s firm tone belied her subtle push back toward the parlor. “Brothers with a long and painful past of their own to sort out. Perhaps they are doing so now, and need the time to clear what is past between them.”
She hadn’t considered that. Hers was not the only pain Liam had to deal with. There was Jani, their father, Hamish, Dorian, Thorne, and so much more. Mena probably rated rather low on the list of disasters he needed to contain.