Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

He had gone to Matthew’s room first: Matthew had not even tried to hide the brandy and absinthe bottles—most empty, a few full. They were lined up along the windowsill like green glass sentries. His clothes were everywhere: over the backs of chairs, on the floor, waistcoats and spats abandoned carelessly.

He had spent only a moment in Cordelia’s room. It held the scent of her perfume, or her soap: spice and jasmine. It brought the memory of her back too painfully. He escaped to the living room with one of Matthew’s absinthe bottles, though he could take no more than a single swallow. Bitter fire, it scorched his throat.

He recalled being relieved that Matthew and Cordelia had two separate rooms. He told himself he should not be surprised. Matthew was a gentleman, however strongly he felt for Cordelia. He could talk through this with them, explain his feelings. Things could be all right.

Then he had heard the door open. He had heard them before he saw them—soft laughter, the sound of falling fabric. The moonlight had turned them into moving shadows as they came into the room, neither of them realizing he was there. Matthew setting Cordelia down, his hands on her, roaming over the curves of her body, and she had been kissing him back, her head tilted, hands in his hair, and James could remember, painfully, what kissing Cordelia was like, hotter and better than any fire. He had felt sick and ashamed and desperate and did not even remember reaching for the cord of the lamp.

But he had, and here they were. Matthew had gone, and James knew he needed to talk with Cordelia. Needed to tell her the truth, no matter how awkward the circumstances. They would not become less awkward if he withheld the reason he was here.

He knocked, twice, and opened the door. The room was decorated in pale pastels that reminded James of the sort of dresses Cordelia had worn when she’d first come to London. The wallpaper and bed hangings were celadon green, the rug striped sage and gold. The wallpaper was a repeating pattern of fleur-de-lis and ivory ribbons. The furniture was gilded; a small writing desk stood by the large, arched window through which he could see the lights of the Place Vend?me.

In the center of the room was Daisy, in the process of carrying a striped dress from the wardrobe to the bed, where the rest of her clothes were laid out. She stopped when she saw him, arrested in mid-motion.

She arched her eyebrows at him but said nothing. Her hair had been done up in some sort of complicated knot, which had come very loose. Long strands of flame red spilled down around her face. She wore a dress of almost the same flame red; James had never seen it before, and he’d thought he knew most of her clothes. This one was velvet, clinging to her breasts and waist, flaring out from her hips and thighs like an upside-down trumpet.

A thread of desire unfurled in his stomach, curling around the knot of anxiety there. He had not been this close to her since he had realized the truth about how he felt. He wanted to close his eyes against the pain-pleasure of it—his body, it seemed, was too foolish to know when he wasn’t precisely welcome. It was reacting as if he’d been starving and had just had a plate of the most delicious food placed in front of him. Go on, you idiot, it seemed to be saying. Take her in your arms. Kiss her. Touch her.

Like Matthew did.

He took a ragged, deep breath. “Daisy,” he said. “I wanted to say—I never apologized.”

She turned, laid the striped dress on the bed. Stayed there, fiddling with its buttons. “For what?”

“For all of it,” he said. “For my stupidity, for hurting you, for letting you think I loved her, when it was never love. It was not my intention.”

She did look up, at that. Her eyes were very dark, her cheeks flushed. “I know it was not your intention. You never thought about me at all.”

Her voice was low, husky; the voice that had read Layla and Majnun to him, so long ago. He had fallen in love with her then. He had loved her ever since, but had not known it; even in his blindness, though, her voice had sent disconcerting shivers up his spine.

“I thought of you all the time,” he said. It was true; he had thought of her, dreamed of her. The bracelet had whispered to him that none of it meant anything. “I wanted you with me. All the time.”

She turned to face him. Her dress had slipped partway off one shoulder, baring the skin, a soft gold-brown against the crimson of her dress. It had a sheen like satin, and a softness he recalled with an almost painful sensation of wanting. How had he lived with her, in the same house, for weeks, and not kissed her, touched her, every day? He would die for that chance again.

“James,” she said. “You had me. We were married. You could have said any of this at any time, but you did not. You said you loved Grace; now you say you want me. What am I to make of that, other than that you want only what you cannot have? Grace came to you, I saw her, and—” Her voice shook slightly. “And now you have decided you feel nothing for her, but you do want me. How am I to imagine that you mean what you say? Tell me. Tell me something that would make me feel this is real.”

This is the moment, James thought. This was when he should say, No, you see, I was ensorcelled; I thought I loved Grace but it was just dark magic; I couldn’t tell you earlier because I didn’t know; but now all of that is behind me and—

He could hear how it sounded. Unbelievable, for one thing, though he knew he could convince her eventually, especially once they had returned to London. It wasn’t that he couldn’t make her believe him. It was more than that.

The image of Cordelia and Matthew in their embrace came back to him. It had wrenched at him with an awful sort of shock to see them like that. He did not know what he had been expecting, and some part of him had felt a blind sort of happiness in seeing them—he had missed them both badly—quickly swamped by a deep and terrible jealousy. It had frightened him with its intensity. He had wanted to break something.

He thought of Matthew slamming his way out the door. Maybe he had broken something.

But there was more to the memory. It hurt to call it back up, like slicing one’s own skin with a razor. But he did it, and in the memory he saw past his anger, his misery, and he saw how they had looked—happier than he had seen either of them in a long time. Even when he and Cordelia had been happy together, in the memories he had clung to this past week, there had been a melancholy in her dark eyes.