Chapter 10: Under His Hand

Elara could still see the portrait every time she blinked.

The girl in the frame had her face.

Not close. Not borrowed in the flattering way society ladies compared cousins and sisters. Not the vague, forgiving resemblance of strangers who shared a nose or a mouth. This was precision. The same wide-set eyes. The same line of the brow. The same slight hollow at the throat where a chain might settle. The same expression caught between defiance and something softer, more private, as if the painter had been allowed to look where no one else had.

Seraphine Ash.

The name had lodged under Elara’s ribs like a shard of glass.

Now the corridor outside the hidden room had swallowed them both back into the house’s dim, salt-damp breathing. Lucien walked ahead of her without speaking, one hand loose at his side, the other holding the little brass key he had used to open the portrait chamber. He might have been leading her to dinner. He might have been leading her to an execution. The expression on his face made either seem equally possible.

Elara followed with her fingers curled so tightly around her own palms that her nails left crescents in the skin.

The passage gave way to the west hall. Rain worried at the tall windows beyond, turning the glass into long, wavering streaks of silver. The chandeliers were lit low, each bulb hooded in its own tarnished shade, and the house looked less like a home than a sleeping creature with all its teeth hidden.

Lucien stopped at the front doors.

Elara nearly ran into his back.

He turned. His gaze cut to her face, then lower, to the white knuckles of her hands. “You’re shaking.”

“I know,” she said, because it was safer than admitting I saw myself in another woman’s death mask.

His jaw flexed once. “We’re leaving.”

“That’s it?” Her voice came sharper than she meant. “You take me into a locked room, show me a dead woman who looks like me, and then expect me to walk out quietly?”

“I expect you to walk,” he said. “Quietly is optional.”

Her laugh came out thin and humorless. “You are unbearable.”

“I’ve been told.”

He opened the door before she could decide whether to slap him or ask another question, and the storm hit them at once—salt air, wet stone, the smell of rain rolling in from the black water beyond the terraces. The drive waited with its engine already running, a long dark shape glistening beneath the portico lights.

Lucien’s hand settled at the small of her back to guide her down the steps.

Elara felt the touch like a brand.

She did not step away.

That, more than anything, frightened her.

They had barely pulled through the iron gates when she said, “Who was she?”

Lucien did not look at her. He kept both hands on the wheel, his sleeves rolled to the forearm, rain hissing against the windshield in needles of light. “You already know her name.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

“Lucien.”

That finally made him glance over, just for a second. His eyes were unreadable in the low light, dark and steady and far too composed for a man who had just shown her a hidden chamber full of secrets. “Not now.”

“When, then?”

“When I can answer without lying.”

The words landed with an ugly little weight.

Elara turned toward the window. The road unspooled in front of them in slick black curves, bordered on one side by cliff and on the other by iron fencing that vanished into the storm. The island looked stripped to bone in the rain; every tree was a shadow, every branch a claw.

When I can answer without lying.

Her stomach tightened.

“That sounds suspiciously like a promise,” she said.

“No,” Lucien replied. “A warning.”

Before she could ask what he meant, the headlights caught movement ahead.

Elara’s breath snagged.

A vehicle had pulled across the road at an angle, blocking the lane beneath a hanging curtain of wet branches. Its engine was off. Dark windows. No lights. For one absurd heartbeat, she thought it might be abandoned.

Then a second shape emerged from the trees.

Then a third.

Lucien’s hand tightened on the wheel.

“Down,” he said.

Elara barely had time to process the order before the first shot cracked through the rain.

The windshield exploded in a white spiderweb of glass.

Lucien swore viciously and yanked the car hard to the left. Tires screamed against wet asphalt. Elara hit the door as the vehicle slewed sideways, one shoulder slamming so violently she saw a flash of white behind her eyes. Another shot punched through the rear window with a sound like a hammer striking ice.

“Stay down,” Lucien said again, low and lethal.

She dropped.

Cold leather pressed to her cheek. The smell of expensive cologne and rain and something metallic—gun oil, maybe, or fear, though she would have sworn he did not know what fear felt like.

The car lurched to a stop.

Through the shattered glass she saw men. Three, maybe four. Dark jackets. Masks glinting slick with rain. One of them held a rifle. Another came around the passenger side with something long and black in his hand.

Elara’s pulse hammered so hard she thought she might be sick.

Lucien reached beneath the driver’s seat.

“Of course you have a gun,” she hissed, though the words came out strangled and useless.

“Try not to sound surprised.”

He was out of the car in one smooth motion before she could protest. Rain hit him at once, flattening his shirt to his shoulders. He moved like the storm belonged to him, all sharp angles and dangerous precision. A gun flashed in his hand—small, black, terrible.

One of the men shouted. Lucien fired first.

The sound was deafening inside the narrow road. One attacker folded with a grunt and went down hard into the wet gravel. Another fired wild; the shot ricocheted off the hood with a violent shriek of metal. Lucien ducked, spun, and the second man dropped his weapon to claw at his leg.

Elara stared, frozen, unable to reconcile the man in the driver’s seat with the one moving through the rain like a blade given human shape.

A shadow lunged at the passenger door.

Lucien saw it half a second before she did. He reached the car in a blur, yanked the door open, and shoved her down fully into the footwell with his forearm braced over her head.

Another shot rang out.

Something hot and wet splattered against her wrist.

Elara jerked with a strangled cry, thinking for one sick, stupid second that she had been shot. Then she saw the dark streak across her skin and realized it was not her blood.

It was his.

Lucien let out a low sound—more breath than pain—and shoved the door shut with his shoulder. He moved away from the car again, barking something she could not hear over the rain and the ringing in her ears. A man rushed him. Lucien met him head-on, grabbed the front of his jacket, and slammed him into the hood with a crack that made Elara flinch even from the floorboard.

Then he drove the barrel of the gun up beneath the man’s chin.

There was a brief, awful pause.

The shot that followed was swallowed by thunder.

The body collapsed in a heap across the hood, sliding slowly down the glass in a smear of dark red rainwater.

Elara went numb.

Her mouth opened. No sound came out.

The last attacker hesitated as if he had suddenly remembered he was mortal. He backed toward the trees, stumbling. Lucien did not pursue him. He lifted the gun, sighted once, and the man went down with a cry that turned into a wet gurgle.

Then the road was empty except for rain, shattered glass, and the small hiss of the car engine still running.

Elara could not breathe.

Lucien stood in the storm for one long second, chest rising and falling hard, rain plastering black strands of hair to his forehead. He looked almost inhuman in the blue-white glare from the headlights, all angles and blood and control stripped bare. Then he turned toward the car, and the expression that crossed his face when he saw her was not fury.

It was terror.

He was at her side in an instant, yanking the door wide and crouching low to block the wind and rain. “Elara.”

She stared at him.

One side of his throat was streaked with blood. There was a cut high on his cheekbone, bright against the pale slash of his skin. His right hand was red to the wrist.

“Are you hurt?” he demanded.

Her voice came out broken. “You killed them.”

“Are you hurt?”

She looked at the dead man slumped over the hood, then at the body by the treeline, then at the one still motionless in the road with his face half-hidden by rainwater. Her stomach pitched violently.

Lucien shifted closer. “Elara.”

She sucked in a shaking breath. “No.”

“No what?”

“No, I’m not hurt.” Her teeth chattered on the last word, fury and shock and something brighter tangling together in her chest. “What is wrong with you?”

His gaze swept over her, checking, relentless. “Quite a lot, but none of it is urgent.”

She made a sound that might once have been a laugh. It came out as a sobbing breath.

Lucien’s expression changed. Every hard line of him went still, almost wary, as if he had just realized the extent of the damage and did not know how to approach it without causing more. Rain slid from his lashes. Blood threaded from a cut along his knuckles and vanished into the cuff of his sleeve.

“Look at me,” he said quietly.

Elara did not mean to. She did anyway.

The storm roared around them. The world had narrowed to the car’s wrecked interior, his voice, the pulse hammering in her throat. Her hands were trembling so badly she curled them into her skirt and hated herself for how close she felt to collapse.

Lucien reached in slowly, as though approaching a frightened animal.

“I’m going to touch you,” he said. “If you want me to stop, say so.”

It was absurdly polite. It was more dangerous than anything else he had done.

Elara swallowed.

“I—”

His fingers hovered near her jaw.

She almost told him not to. Almost. The memory of his gun, his hand at the back of her head, the crack of the shot in the storm, all of it ought to have sent her recoiling from him forever.

Instead she heard herself whisper, “Don’t let go.”

Something in his face broke open and vanished before she could understand it.

His hand settled gently against her cheek.

The touch was so careful it hurt.

Warm despite the rain. Blood-slick along one knuckle, the pad of his thumb rough against her skin. Elara felt the entire world tilt on that single point of contact. The shaking in her body sharpened, became unbearable, and then, impossibly, lessened. As if his hand were the only thing keeping her in one piece.

Lucien’s eyes dropped to her mouth.

He looked at it as if he had no business looking there.

He’s going to kiss me.

The thought flashed through her so abruptly she nearly gasped. She had no idea whether she wanted him to or whether the certainty of wanting it would shame her more.

Instead, his thumb brushed once over the corner of her lip where rain had mixed with the salt of her own breath.

“You’re trembling,” he said.

“I noticed.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “I can send for the doctor.”

“No.”

“Elara—”

“No doctor,” she repeated, more fiercely this time. “No one. I don’t want to be examined while I’m still trying not to scream.”

His expression softened in a way that should have been impossible on that face. “Then don’t scream.”

“You make that sound easy.”

“It isn’t.”

His hand remained on her cheek. His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone with maddening steadiness, a motion so intimate it felt more indecent than any kiss. Elara became aware all at once of the shape of his body blocking the rain, the dark blood at his wrist, the heat of him despite the storm. The narrowness of the car. The fact that she was leaning into the cradle of his palm without meaning to.