“He knows how to put a man’s pride against the wall.” Surratt leaned against the planking behind him. “And he’s as proficient with a blade as a gun. At this point, everyone knows it and does their best to remain on his good side. Which means, to circle back to the point, avoid anything more than polite flirtation with the widowed-and-soon-to-be-anew Mrs. Hughes.”
Advice Slade certainly didn’t require. Marietta Hughes may be beautiful and charming—and perhaps mysterious—but Hughes had no more than to crook a finger to bring her flying to him.
Did she know what he was? Part of him wanted to think not, given the Unionist family from which she hailed, the brother she had lost at Gettysburg. But how could she not, if she were as close to him as she seemed?
And how dangerous did that make her, if she did? The daughter of a commodore in league with the captain of a KGC castle. One alluring enough that she could no doubt smile at many a man and get whatever information from him Hughes wanted.
A cunning enemy indeed. He took another drink of his coffee and held his tongue. But the rust-red gash across the printed face of Lincoln said plenty.
These were men out for blood. And very little stood between them and it.
Marietta eased the door closed, silent but for the faintest of clicks. Behind her, the soft glow of the banked fire lit her chamber, its warmth scarcely making a dent in the January chill.
But that was nothing. Nothing compared to the chill in her core.
Her hand still touching the place where door and jamb met, she rested her forehead against the solid wood. Tears burned.
She shouldn’t have gone. Shouldn’t have crept from her room after she dismissed Cora for the night, shouldn’t have snuck out the back door and over to the carriage house. She shouldn’t have returned to that tunnel of nightmares and shattered dreams.
Shouldn’t have pressed her ear to the wall nor followed the sounds farther down than they had gone earlier.
She shouldn’t have listened. Because now the words would never leave her. They would forever echo in her mind, another memory to chain her down. To rattle around and rise to the fore when she least wanted it.
…preeminent before all…before the affection of wife, mother, or child.
Her tears felt scalding upon her cheek. Before all. Her hand slid down, and she let it dangle there between her and the door, with nothing but frigid air to hold it. No warm fingers around it, no lips upon its knuckles. No love.
If Dev could issue that oath, he had sworn it himself. As had Lucien. The two men who had claimed to cherish her above all. Both had turned around and sworn to put these brothers above her. Was she anything to them? Was it love they felt or, as Stephen had insisted when she announced her engagement, something baser?
Maybe it was. Maybe that was all any man could ever feel for her. Maybe she was nothing but a fool to ever think she could find something real, some genuine affection to carry her through life.
A fool. A wicked, selfish fool who had done nothing but chase her own desires, and who had nothing to show for it but a stone heart crushed to pieces.
She ought to have learned her lesson the first time, when she stood in the summer-warm stable and saw her dreams stomped to dust. She ought to have turned around right then and sworn off men.
Or the second time, when that bolt of attraction to Dev proved false her feelings for Lucien. She should have canceled the wedding and…and joined a nunnery. Or at the very least, taken the train to Connecticut and let Grandpapa Alain hold her tight to his chest and whisper French assurances into her ear.
And now here she was again. Her memory etched with the proof that nothing was what she thought it.
She turned, put her back to the door, and slid down. Maybe if she were lucky, her bones would turn into nothing but a mound of dust on the floor, to be swept away.
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones…
The floor was like ice against her legs. Perhaps that was what Hades really was, ice rather than fire. For she had tasted fire, had let it consume her—and this was worse. This was the punishment. Not an inferno of feeling, but a total lack of it.
And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.
The time had come to learn. That was what Stephen had said to her when he confessed he had enlisted. “You can list every mistake you ever made, Mari, but at some point you have to learn from them. You have to recognize them for what they are. You have to take consequences into account.”
Her own voice echoed back through her head, tinged with anger—anger at him for saying the words, and more, for leaving her alone to hear them again and again. “You can’t understand, Stephen. You speak of consequences as if the future matters, but if you had these bells of memory forever clanging in your head, you would understand why I only want now.”