Luc silenced Ingrid with a finger to his lips and then waved for her to follow him. He walked through the open doorway, entering a sparely furnished dining room. Did the Dispossessed eat or drink? She’d never seen Luc do either, but then, she didn’t see any of the servants eating or drinking.
They walked a short, lightless hallway located off the dining room before Luc found where Lennier wanted them to go.
It was a bedroom, with a four-poster bed and a single glass door to a terrace overlooking the courtyard. The hearth was cold and black, and there wasn’t so much as a splinter of wood in sight to build a fire. The chimney couldn’t support one anyway, Ingrid figured. If anything, they’d smoke out a nest of squirrels or mice. There were blankets on the bed, at least, though they were sun-faded and an unfashionable chintz.
Ingrid hovered near the door, watching Luc take a turn around the small guest room. “I don’t feel like resting,” she admitted.
He stopped to peer outside. “There isn’t much else you can do until Lennier says it’s time to leave.”
“And we must do what Lennier says?”
“He’s our elder,” Luc said, his brows vaulted. “And the elder is king of the Dispossessed. It’s how things are done.”
Ingrid stepped over a battered hooked rug, charred along the fringe from lying so close to the hearth. H?tel du Maurier gave off such a sad aura, as if it had been bottled up and sealed off while it waited for a family to return to it. From what she had seen, no family had lived here for many years. Perhaps it had been decades. Lennier was the master of the house, and she was certain he liked it abandoned.
“Who was that other man?” Ingrid asked.
Luc grumbled and came away from the window. “Vincent. A Notre Dame gargoyle. They’re all like that.” He leaned against one of the bed’s lusterless posters and crossed his arms. “Forget him. He’s nothing.”
Ingrid wasn’t as confident about that as Luc seemed to be. Vincent had made her nervous in ways Marco and Yann never had—and they hadn’t exactly been nice.
“Is this place dangerous?” she asked. It felt like it should be.
The whole estate seemed set apart from the rest of the world. Luc had led her to it through the Luxembourg Gardens, the entrance arcades tucked into a corner of the park. Ivy and vines camouflaged the arched entrance, and the town house itself, dilapidated as it was, could have easily been overlooked.
She didn’t belong here. This was a place where men could freely transform into beastly figures. A place where unfamiliar rules held sway.
“I wouldn’t have brought you here if I thought I wouldn’t be able to protect you,” Luc answered. She didn’t fail to notice that he hadn’t really answered her question. It was dangerous, then.
Ingrid walked around him, toward a small dresser topped with an aged mirror. A spotty silver brush and comb set had been left to tarnish on the dresser. She ran her fingers lightly over the engraved silver.
“If you don’t want me in here, I can leave,” Luc said. He looked at her in the mirror.
“Don’t,” she said quickly to his reflection. “Please don’t.”
They were alone in a bedroom, but considering they were on gargoyle common grounds and Vincent had acted as though he wanted to drain her blood himself, she would forget propriety for a little while.
Luc held her gaze in the mirror. “What I told you the other morning. About my sister and that priest … about what I did …”
The topic change was so abrupt that Ingrid could only blink.
“I told you I wasn’t sorry, and that’s not going to change. If you’re uncomfortable with that—”
“I’m not.”
Luc sharpened his focus on her. “You ran away. You couldn’t get out of that carriage fast enough.”
She remembered it with a pang of guilt. “I wasn’t running from you.”
Oh, good Lord. Luc had trusted her with a secret he’d kept under lock and key for who knew how long, and she’d dashed away as if her stockings were on fire. Why wouldn’t he have thought she was running from him?
“It was a mistake to say anything.” He turned away from the mirror.
Ingrid did as well, catching his arm. He was too solid, though, and she couldn’t swing him back around. “It wasn’t what you did. It’s what happened to you because of it.”
Luc held still. “What do you mean?”
“The way you died. When you were telling me what happened I saw it all—the gallows, the noose, the black hood. The crowds shouting for your death. It was awful and I hated it. I hated imagining you dead.”
He had turned back to her by then, his expression guarded.
“I didn’t stay dead for very long. They threw my body in a shallow grave.” Luc cocked his head. “At least there were only three feet of earth to claw through instead of six.”
“It’s not funny,” Ingrid said, not understanding how he could speak so casually about death and coming back to life.
“Of course it isn’t funny. For a second I thought I’d been buried alive.”
“Not that! Your death, Luc. It made me sick just thinking of it. That’s why I got out of the carriage so fast. I needed air. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want you to be dead.”