Page 126 of All Scot and Bothered

“She’s awake,” Winston called from the other side of the door.

“Thank you, Winston.”

With a cold wash of ice, Cecelia’s memory returned, flushing over her with absolute heart-rending betrayal.

She’d put her gun down at Elphinstone Croft. She’d let her enemy through the door. She’d been the architect of her own demise.

Because she’d trusted Genevieve Leveaux.

“Genny?” she whispered, unable to believe her own memories, even as they slammed back into her with bone-jarring force.

The woman had pounded on the door, begging to be let in. She’d cried out that she’d come to Scotland to warn Cecelia. That Lilly and the girls were in danger.

She’d sounded so frightened, so incredibly convincing, Cecelia had admitted her immediately.

And she and Jean-Yves had been ambushed.

“Genny.” Cecelia rushed to the door. “Genny let me out.”

“Hello there, honey.” The soft regret in Genny’s dark eyes conjured a little flame of hope in Cecelia’s middle. Perhaps Genny had been helpless in all this somehow, coerced by the Lord Chancellor to betray her. One couldn’t fault her for that.

“Genny?Please.Don’t keep me underground.” Cecelia fought sobs of hysteria threatening to overtake her. “Tell me everyone’s all right, that they’re alive.”

Ramsay would not have allowed her to be taken. Had he been overcome? Killed? Where was Phoebe? Jean-Yves?

She couldn’t imagine a world without them in it.

Genny tilted her head to the side, her ringlets flowing flaxen over her bare shoulder. “Honey, there are too many bodies to count now, all because of this.” She held up the codex. “I couldn’t tell you who survived and who didn’t.”

Cecelia leaned forward, pressing her forehead to the glass, fighting a dark anguish. “I know,” she sobbed. “Burn it. It’s brought nothing but pain.”

That pain welled within her. Deep and abiding. Was this how she ended? Was everyone she cared about hurt or… worse? Were they after Frank and Alexander next? She wanted to ask again, to insist, but was terrified of the answer. If she did not know, there was still hope.

And hope might be all she had left in the end.

“Step back, doll.” Keys rattled on the other side of the door as Genny unlocked her prison. “I’m coming in there with you.”

The kindle of hope flared to a bright glow, and Cecelia scurried out of the way.

The door opened. Winston and two other men preceded Genny into the room. Two of them carried crystal oil lanterns and set them on what used to be student desks before the explosion and subsequent chaos had decimated what Cecelia could now see had been a classroom.

Something else filtered into the room behind them. Something that extinguished any hope with astonishing immediacy.

The cries of children.

They echoed down the long hall, each of them breaking her heart. The calls and pleas of captive young girls locked beneath the earth as she was. Begging for mercy. To be released. To be fed.

This was her fault, Cecelia realized. Once she’d gone to Scotland, Henrietta’s had become the hellish prisonRamsay had initially suspected it was. The girls hadn’t been here when she’d taken custody of the property, but they’d been moved in when she’d fled.

There were no words for the horror of the din. For the memories they evoked in Cecelia. All the blood drained from her extremities and, had her stomach not been empty, she’d have heaved its contents onto the ashes at her feet.

“What have you done?” The demand escaped as a hoarse whisper of dismay. “What sort of nightmare has this place become? Did Henrietta know about this?”

Genny’s features arranged themselves into a smug, repulsive mask of disgust.

Cecelia stepped back, shocked at the first time the woman hadn’t appeared a stunning beauty.

“Henrietta Thistledown could dress this place in all the lace and silk she wanted, but at the end of the day the girls who worked in the casino were all still nothing but a line of pretty cunts. And she was the queen of us all.”