Brimstone Bride

“I have a message for you, D’Arcy. From Father Malachi. You met him in Louisiana. I bet you didn’t realize you were talking to the best and brightest of us all. Father Malachi has chosen me to deliver another warning. We are always. We are watching. Do not distract or delay. Free our brothers before Lucifer’s Army comes with the waxing of the moon. You have one month. Or your son will pay the price.” His spittle-fueled voice dampened her ear. She was crushed breathless by his powerful arms. His words and the physical abuse of his bruising hold made her recall the madness she’d seen in his eyes.

“Release her and die,” Turov ordered from the shadows.

Gone was any hint of sophistication.

This was his truth.

He stepped into the soft glow of garden lanterns and starlight. The seriousness of his face was revealed.

Hard.

Fierce.

His jaw was no longer marble, but iron.

Adam Turov reached behind his shoulder and with a metallic rasp he drew a small sword that glinted, sharp and deadly with purpose.

“Remember what I have said,” the monk growled. He flung her away and Victoria fell, but even the sharp sting of gravel against the side of her face didn’t distract from the monk’s surprised scream. It gurgled in his throat and was cut off as his stocky body fell heavily, dead and headless. She heard a light, sickening thump as his decapitated head hit the ground and rolled to rest several feet away. She’d lived a much more violent life than your usual run-of-the-mill opera singer. Would a normal woman have recognized the sounds in the dark?

“I said release her and die. Not or,” Turov clarified softly, as if the dead man might question his semantics.

Victoria shifted to look toward Turov without being obvious. He wiped the blade he’d used on the monk with a pristine white handkerchief, rolling the silky cloth to cover the blood before placing it back in his pocket. Then he sheathed the blade at his back beneath his jacket. When he had finished the practiced moves of cleanup, his sophisticated costume was in place again. He straightened his cuffs and rolled his shoulders before he reached to help her to her feet. The monk didn’t move at all.

“Is he...?” Victoria said, although she knew the answer. The monk was dead.

“He gave up the right to your consideration when he hurt you,” Turov said. “My people will take it from here.”

The Order of Samuel was violent and ugly and murderers, all. And the man she was supposed to best had just dispatched one without a blink of effort.

Turov took her hand and led her back toward the house. She didn’t resist. Suddenly, her bold humming seemed reckless. This was a man with Brimstone in his blood. She couldn’t afford to play games with the affinity that even now made her tremble near him. That awakening in her earlier hadn’t been about anticipating an adventure. It had been a warning.

Adam Turov had killed the monk to protect her. But what would happen to her when he discovered she was on the Order of Samuel’s side against him?

* * *

A little over an hour ago she had left the cottage for a party. Now she returned with blood on her shoes. She didn’t notice the blood until they were inside, and even then not until Turov knelt to take her shoes from numb feet.

“I’m sorry. I’ll replace them,” he said. “I didn’t mean to spoil your shoes.” He tilted one shapely pump this way and that, as if appreciating its curves in spite of the blood. “From several years ago, I think, but I’ll manage.”

She backed away as he left the room to throw the shoes away like some bizarrely opposite Prince Charming. And, yet, he did have charm. Out in the dark, under the stars, with blood dripping from the blade he’d used to save her, he’d been charming as hell.

“You followed me into the garden even though I told you to come back to the cottage. Why?” Turov asked when he returned. He didn’t stop inside the door. He continued with purposeful steps all the way to her. When she backed up at his continued advance, he followed until she bumped up against a bookcase. The scent of aged leather bindings filled the air to pair with Turov’s Brimstone heat.

She wasn’t afraid. Not of him. She was afraid because she refused to be a damsel in distress. No matter how distressing her life became.

“You may not be able to sing, but I heard you humming. I felt it,” he said. “I’ve never felt anything like it before.”

He didn’t touch her.

He didn’t have to.

The heat in his blood did.

The Brimstone that sealed his deal with daemons sang its own song to her music-starved ears. He’d made the choice to barter his soul. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor. Too bad for her that she seemed to prefer much darker heroes.

“It won’t happen again,” she promised.

He leaned down to catch her whispered words. She was sure the breath that propelled them from her lips bathed his. He was close enough to taste with only a tilt or a sigh. She held very still. Apart. Contained. While her former nature urged her to boldly tilt, sigh, move to join him.

She ignored the urge to sing. She refused the desire to touch her mouth to his.

He looked into her eyes. His were brilliant blue, so bright to have seen so much, so clear to have just killed in her name. Where was his damnation hidden? Where was his shame? He looked undaunted and strong and so damn noble it made her ache.

“I hope that’s a lie,” he said. His gaze dropped to her open lips, but he didn’t close the distance. The warmth between them flared until she tasted salty perspiration on her upper lip when she moistened it with her tongue.

His eyes moved to watch the pink flick of her tongue tip. For a second, he seemed almost as if he would dip to claim it. He seemed mesmerized. But he straightened up and backed away before she made the fatal mistake of wanting his kiss enough to make it happen herself.

He blinked. The move was gloriously slow, as if he really had been in a trance and had needed to force himself to lower his lids. When he opened them again, his jaw had hardened and the expression in his eyes had cooled. She could still feel his Brimstone heat, but he was no longer controlled by it.

“Good night, Victoria. I told you that you’d be safe here and I meant it. From every danger,” he said.

* * *

He was shaking with it—anger, desire, the willpower it took to not pick her up and carry her away from the life she’d been forced to lead. His men were already discreetly cleaning up the mess he’d left them in the garden. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to kill one of his “brothers.” The Order was twisted, obsessive, and they never stopped. There were times when it had been kill or be killed, although his primary mission was to capture them and turn them over to the justice of Lucifer’s court. One of the reasons his body quaked from adrenaline overload this time was that capture had ceased to be an option as soon as the evil monk had hurt Victoria.

He was supposed to be a sophisticated vintner with her. No more. No less. But she stoked the fire in his blood until his disguise went up in smoke.

He checked on his men. They had standing instructions. When he saw all was in hand, he turned away to seek sanctuary in his own rooms. What the guests would make of his and Victoria’s early disappearance from the party wasn’t his concern. He needed to wash away the blood and forget the look of fear in her eyes.

She’d pretended not to fully understand what had happened, but a darker knowledge had been in her hazel gaze when she’d trained it on his face.

A spiral iron staircase provided an outside entrance to his private retreat in the house. It was almost hidden by his mother’s roses. She’d loved the climbing vine varieties and he’d continued to have them tended after she was gone. They’d become a profusion of tangles near the staircase where he’d instructed the gardeners to allow them to grow unchecked. In this back corner of the house, he had a bed, bath and study that were completely separated from guest bedrooms. Guests were rarely invited to stay longer than a night. He didn’t run a bed-and-breakfast. He only allowed visitors at all in order to provide an alibi for his actual activities beyond wine making.

As he climbed the familiar treads of the staircase, it wasn’t the Brimstone in his blood that made him see red. His memory called up the image of the petite opera singer in the grip of a madman trained to be merciless. His anger came from the same sense he’d always had of a wrong that needed to be righted—magnified by fury at an innocent’s pain.

Victoria was caught up in a war that wasn’t her making. Just as he’d been as a child.

Adam shed his ruined clothes and left them for a housekeeper he could count on for stoic discretion. She’d seen worse. All his people had. The small sword he wore in a specially made sheath that fit close to his body between his shoulder blades he placed in a hidden compartment in the top of his mahogany dresser. He would clean it later after he’d cleaned himself.

He couldn’t afford empathy for Victoria, this sense of connection to her that shook him to his cursed core.

He told himself this even as he recalled the tense moment when he’d almost given in to the temptation to taste her lips.

Steam filled the bathroom when the cool water hit his Brimstone-warmed skin. Clouds of it rolled and swirled, disturbed by his movements as he scrubbed his hair and his hands. Beneath the soap, he felt his scars as he washed. A familiar reminder of what he’d been through and what he still needed to accomplish with the long life the Brimstone had given him.

Father Malachi was his objective. Finding him, capturing him, delivering him to Lucifer’s court. It wasn’t revenge. It was justice. Not only for the abuse he’d suffered at the obsessive monk’s hands—all in the name of “training”—but also to keep him from harming other children.

This dance with Victoria added another element of challenge to his mission. If she knew he was aware of why she’d come to Nightingale Vineyards, she might become even more determined and reckless to find and free his prisoners before Lucifer’s Army came to claim them. The Loyalists came when the moon was full each month. On that night, he held a party to provide cover for the prisoner delivery. The full moon galas were much larger than the occasional dinner parties held at other times. The gala was a coveted invitation, never more so than in June. To commemorate his mother’s birthday each year, he brought in an orchestra, dancing and a Firebird theme. He needed to keep Victoria in the dark until then, or longer if possible.