Page 18 of Greed: The Savage (Seven Deadly Sins #7)

B attering his fist against Dynevor’s carriage ceiling, Thornwick gave Hinkley a curt command to drive and the blistering pace he expected him to set.

Hinkley took the cue, launching them into quick motion.

Thornwick didn’t look at her.

No—he did not look at Addien. Because the moment he did, he’d be ordering the damned carriage to turn straight back to the baroness’s residence so he could finish the job on her swine of a brother.

And yet—stunningly—an urge stronger than bloodlust, stronger even than the thirst for Lord Dunworthy’s blood and hide, won out.

He looked at her squarely. The redness had faded from her cheek, but the mark remained, a stark reminder of what she’d endured while he’d been wasting his time with the baroness.

A haze of crimson rage dropped over his vision, blinding him.

When it cleared, Addien was giving him a strange look. “You all right, Malric?”

Was she mad? “Am I…?” The rest wouldn’t come.

He tried again. “Am I—bloody all right?”

The look she gave him said she already knew his answer—and that it wasn’t good.

“Dynevor’s going to sack us,” she said.

“I don’t want to speak about Dynevor,” he gritted out.

“Yeah, because you can afford to be sacked and thrown in the streets. You ain’t going to end up on any streets like I am.”

This is what she’d worry about. Thornwick looked incredulously at her. She’d been handled by Lord Dunworthy and worried instead about her future at the Devil’s Den?

“Did he rape you?” Thornwick bluntly asked the question that had tortured him since he caught sight of her limping through the baroness’s gardens.

Her brow wrinkled the way it ought if she was confused about a question that didn’t deserve to be asked. As if she hadn’t had a face-to-face meeting with the baroness’s brother and found herself subsequently assaulted, all while Thornwick had been occupied with the tiresome widow.

“I asked a question, Addien,” he snapped.

Dread and rage lent his voice a harsh, hoarse quality.

“Dunworthy?” she asked. She snorted. “Nah, I handled him.”

He stared incredulously at the unfazed spitfire. Staring at her, it was all too easy to believe her disaffected tones, ones that were both fatally amused and insulted. But Thornwick stared so penetratingly at her that he saw the show she put on.

God, she was breathtakingly proud and as much as he wanted to hold her close, she’d hate him for it. Granted, she hated him anyway and already. But he had too much damned respect for her to not allow the woman her pride.

Only selfish bastards sought comfort from women who’d been assaulted to make themselves feel better. That experience hadn’t been about Thornwick, but rather her. As such, he took his cues from Addien and looked outside.

“I’m going to hang,” Addien said after a while.

Her quiet pronouncement drew his focus from the passing window scene of Grosvenor’s Square, giving way to the outskirts of respectable London.

He stared at her with a question in his eyes.

“Hanged.” She made a motion of holding a rope and tilting her neck to the side in a macabre rendition of the scene described.

He snorted.

“I never took you for the melodramatic sort,” he drawled.

Addien glared at him. “And I did take you as the entitled, privileged nob who doesn’t know shite about anything.”

His shoulders tensed.

“I hit a lord. I hit the viscount,” she hissed through her teeth. As she spoke, her voice grew increasingly pitchy and panicked. “People like me don’t put their hands on a noble person for anything. We get the noose.”

And it was a humbling moment where he was laid low for a second time this day, to discover how right Addien was.

Thornwick did come from a place of privilege.

His elevated status shielded him from everything except maybe murder.

And even that with the right connections and money and power exchanged, maybe not even that.

It haunted him that she, his undaunted warrior princess, should show her first cracks.

“Do you believe I’d let you hang?” he asked quietly.

Whether it was the question or the tone, something in her panic stilled.

She gave her head a small shake. “I…” Addien turned her palms up, helpless.

“My God, woman—do you think so little of me?”

Had he truly given her cause to think so low of him?

“Never much thought there’d be a time I’d need you to save me from a hanging,” she said slowly, as if it were explanation enough.

That eased some of the earlier sting…but only some.

Her expression darkened again. “Ye can’t save my work at the Devil’s Den though.”

“I did yesterday,” he pointed out.

“This is different. You know it.”

He didn’t know any such thing. Addien—having survived years under Mac Diggory and then having carved out a life on her own—had no reason to trust the world, let alone him.

He kept his voice low. “Dynevor isn’t the kind to see you pay the price for Dunworthy’s despicable actions. Any other nobleman, maybe. But Dynevor? No.”

His reassurances didn’t seem to touch her.

Thornwick heard something unspoken in the silence. He narrowed his eyes. “What?”

Addien paused a beat more, and her next admission came haltingly. “He said Dynevor sent me there for that reason,” she said.

“ Who ?” Lost, Thornwick shook his head. “What reason?”

“Dunworthy said the Devil’s Den is sending out…” Her cheeks went pink. “Girls like me for men like him.”

The fresh mention of Dunworthy set off fresh rage within Thornwick. He only managed to restrain himself for her benefit. “I’m aware of all club business, Addien. What happened back there—” His fury flashed hot. He had to remind himself to breathe and offer her calm. “That was not sanctioned.”

“Dunworthy claimed Dynevor had new uses for me, and the only reason he gave me work at the club was a pity hire—because he and all the Killorans are known for pity hires. Said I’m too ugly to be one of his finer girls.

But I do hold appeal for those lords who want a taste of a girl from the streets. ”

I’ll fucking kill him—all over again.

“Diggory used to provide that service,” she said quietly.

Demons lived in her eyes, and he wanted to slay them.

Thornwick was an expert reader of men. Dynevor wasn’t one of the bad sorts. Quite the contrary. His opinion, however, didn’t matter here, only Addien’s. “Do you believe he’s the kind of man who would do that?”

Addien worried her lower lip. “I don’t believe so…”

He caught the unspoken but. “But?”

“The only thing I trust when it comes to men is that they’re capable of anything—especially men in power.” With that cynical testament to her life, she turned to the window.

And the truth was—he didn’t disagree. His own life, his daily deeds, were proof enough.

“Ye seemed to have a good time today,” she murmured, her gaze still fixed outward.

He frowned, not following.

“With the baroness,” she clarified.

His gut clenched. “Oh.” The word felt stupid on his tongue.

While the baroness had draped herself across his lap, he’d been thinking of everything he wanted to do with and to Addien Killoran—while she’d been out there with Dunworthy’s hands God knew where, fighting for herself when she should have been safe at his side.

He’d questioned her opinion of him earlier? After today, he’d be a damned fool to expect her to see anything good—or honorable—in him.

He held her gaze, willing her to see the truth he proffered. “I didn’t enjoy any of it, Addien.”

The only part of this day he’d relished had been pounding Dunworthy into the floor and leaving him for dead.

“It sure looked like ye were.” Bitterness edged her words.

“She climbed on me, Addien.”

She angled her neck just enough to cast him a sidelong glance. “How strong she must be—that a man your size couldn’t fend her off.” Her eyes were a raw mix of hurt and something he couldn’t name.

That look hit him like a fist to the gut.

“I threw her off the instant she touched me,” he heard himself say.

“What a man of honor you are,” she replied, the wounded bite in her tone impossible to miss.

And even more impossible for him to ignore.

She cared—some.

He’d never make her admit it. Never gloat.

But knowing she cared whether he’d been with another woman stirred something in him that wasn’t unpleasant.

Maybe because he’d had his own taste of the green-eyed monster earlier, learning about her and Roy.

Hell, maybe that’s why—despite his ennui—he’d let Lady Darrow linger as long as she had.

Addien shrugged and turned back to the glass. “Not my business either way.”

“I was thinking of you,” he said quietly. As soon as he spoke the words, he wanted to slap himself for them.

In the warped reflection of the leaded pane, Addien’s features spasmed with pain—and it knifed through him.

Addien’s breath caught, sharp and uneven, and agony not to reach for her.

“Ye think that matters to me somehow?” she rasped, her voice raw and ragged as torn silk.

He’d hurt her, and worse, even more unforgivable, he’d left her in harm’s way.

He squeezed his eyes shut, every muscle tight with strain. “You mistake me. While she climbed on me, I felt nothing—because all I could see in my mind was your ankle from when you climbed in the bloody carriage.”

Her surprise struck like flint to steel, and the air in the carriage turned hot, volatile, alive. Cut raw by the admission, Thornwick’s neck heated, the silence bristling with a tension he could neither name nor master.

For the remainder of the ride, the carriage rattled and swayed, the wheels clattering over the road, the only sound, the only movement. It forced Thornwick to live in his own head with his crimes that day.

Had he stuck to the damned interview for Dynevor—instead of sniffing out the baroness as a potential wife to infuriate his father—Addien wouldn’t have been left to fend for herself. Wouldn’t have had to fight her own way free.

She should have been able to rely on him.