Page 37 of Greed: The Savage (Seven Deadly Sins #7)

T o reel beneath hopelessness and desperation, one must first be capable of feeling.

Thornwick did not suffer from that defect of character.

Or he hadn’t .

Yes, hopelessness was a stranger once; tonight it clung to him like a second skin.

Thornwick stood at the edges of an impenetrable fortress. A castle of brick and stucco, guarded not by knights of old but by the centurions of a new age: the polite palaces of peers, nobility descended from that ancient giant whose power still held sway.

The customary number of guards were stationed about the grounds and posted at every window of Forbidden Pleasures. Big men, hulking men, who looked out of place in a world crafted by noblemen for noblemen.

Thornwick knew them all. Their names, their stations, their breaks.

He knew their placements—strategic and precise—the largest men at the front windows, where visibility would serve as deterrent to any fool who considered trespass into the playground where London’s most powerful peers came to sport.

He knew because once it had been his assignment: to learn every name, every hour kept, every meal and breath taken within the kingdoms of the Duke of Argyll, the Marquess of Rutherford, and Lord Severin Cadogan.

It was those unscalable walls that fed Thornwick’s all-consuming panic, freezing him where he stood.

He could not reach her.

She was so near.

A stretch of ground, no more than twenty paces, lay between him and her salvation. Yet to cross it meant being stopped and thrown out by Argyll’s guards—or worse, hauled inside for questioning, toyed with until he was rendered helpless.

He measured the gaming hell with a soldier’s eye, tallying obstacles and counting the cost of acting.

If he charged on ahead, they’d know the depth of his desperation. They’d know she’d matter, and have the upper hand, and there was no saying how they’d use his love of her against Thornwick and to their advantage.

Each passing moment scraped his temper raw. They were toying with him. They were costing Thornwick valuable time. Unknowingly, they were costing themselves even more.

Diggory’s fangs were already in them, the feast begun before they sensed their first cut.

Bloody hell.

The pretense under which he’d stationed himself here required he not grab for his timepiece.

The fixed gaze he had on the front windows of Forbidden Pleasures detected the new placement of the full-eyed moon. Even it had made an appearance for the looming showdown with Mac Diggory.

Addien’s arrival earlier that day, followed by Thornwick’s this evening, spelled clearly to Argyll and his partners that Thornwick’s being here pertained to the beautiful firebrand inside.

Mine. Thornwick’s nostrils flared. She is my beautiful firebrand!

Thornwick’s chest constricted. While he’d been tending Dynevor’s business, Addien had sought sanctuary inside Forbidden Pleasures…with another.

Given the way Argyll toyed with him, the playboy duke had surely already begun his seduction.

Images ravaged him: Argyll’s bloody rogue’s grin turned on her. A practiced caress from the seasoned Lothario. A whisper at her ear to draw shivers.

Heat scorched up his neck, a fever born of fury and fear.

She was too clever for the rakish duke. She would not be seduced. She couldn’t be.

It would unmake Thornwick, leave him hollowed and bleeding where no scar would ever show.

“Well, if it isn’t the Devil’s Den’s own Lord Thornwick come to grace us with his presence.”

He stiffened.

At bloody fucking last.

The affable darkly clad gentleman looked to the other equally affable and similarly dressed gentleman by his side and chuckled. “Never tell us. You are also here in search of employment.”

“Another Mauley working for Cadogan,” his compatriot drawled. “Unlikely.”

Thornwick had given a damn once—about his name, about the filth spoken of it. He had. He knew it. But none of it mattered now. Only Addien did.

“Oh,” Ineffectual Guard One said with cutting sarcasm. “He might have use of his services mucking out the stables.”

Ineffectual Guard Two scoffed. “A Mauley being given such a privilege in Forbidden Pleasures. I—”

“I’d sooner burn this place than ask for anything,” Thornwick said frostily. “I’m here to claim something that is mine.”

Both men exchanged a look.

The blond fellow smirked. “I believe you might mean someone . If not, she has already been—”

Rage detonated in Thornwick’s chest. Heat scalded up his throat, his vision narrowing to red. Addien. In Argyll’s bed. In the other man’s arms—

His fist flew before the filthy words could finish.

Thornwick silenced the rest of that profanity with a swift uppercut to the stupid fellow’s chin, crumpling him in a single blow. Before his equally inept counterpoint had a chance to curl a fist, Thornwick caught him with an elbow to his neck.

The man’s eyes rolled to the back of his head.

He slid to join his friend in a heap.

Thornwick stepped over the prone bodies he’d laid low.

He should have stormed the place to begin with.

As anticipated, the moment Thornwick’s feet touched the pavement outside Forbidden Pleasures, a pair of big, bulkier brutes were there to greet them.

In not sending their biggest weights first, it’d revealed the ineptness of Argyll, Rutherford, and Cadogan. Thornwick expected more—of at least the Home Office man Cadogan once had been.

Neither side spoke and Thornwick let them take him by the arms and take him inside.

Thornwick took it all in as he walked. Back when he’d been a young buck employed at the Home Office, Thornwick kept membership at both the Hell and Sin Club and Forbidden Pleasures. He’d been inside this house of sin many times before. Many, many .

Now, as he was marched through the club with curious eyes on him, Thornwick didn’t evaluate the changes that’d been made since his younger years.

As the goons on either side of him marched him through the smoke-threaded gaming hell, he took in the names and faces of people present.

From the men positioned around the leather-padded hazard tables to the gleaming oval and round loo tables, with their every carved mahogany side chair occupied, Thornwick missed no one.

They, for their part, remained ensnared by the beauties on their laps and the cards in their hands to pay Thornwick’s slow march through their playground any notice.

The same pall that’d hung over the Devil’s Den didn’t exist in this place.

Maybe because the more elevated members of Arygle’s hell had already discussed ad nauseum the early morn murder of one of them.

Maybe they’d imbibed so much that grim thoughts weren’t the ones on their slurring, drunken lips.

Either way, they drank, they laughed, they tossed their dice, never knowing they were already carcasses at Diggory’s feast.

When he and the two guards reached the far back of the club, two additional men, even bigger and fiercer than the ones on either side of Thornwick, opened the double doors.

The guards gave him a hard shove at his back, propelling Thornwick through.

They released him quick. That combined with the powerful push sent him stumbling.

Thornwick found his footing. For a moment he contemplated disarming these two, but he knew if he did, it would only further delay him from getting to Addien. His gaze climbed the cream-carpeted, broad ceremonial staircase, as fine and as wide as the one in Thornwick’s future ducal townhouse.

The private suites.

His gut clenched; breath locked in his chest.

Of course, any woman who fled the Devil’s Den and stumbled into Forbidden Pleasures would be delivered to the master’s quarters—questioned, toyed with, and…used.

But this was not any woman.

This was Addien.

“Get climbing. His Grace is waiting for you in his private suites.”

Thornwick allowed himself to be led. Gladly. Willingly. Without resistance, resentment, or pride.

They would bring him to her.

If Argyll had laid claim to her, if he had taken her when she was vulnerable, it would wreck Thornwick, leave him broken beyond repair.

But if Addien gave herself to Thornwick freely, trusted him with her life, her love, she would not only save him, she would make him more than he had ever been.

At last, they arrived at where his meeting with Argyll was to take place, because it was as certain as fact that it wouldn’t be Cadogan. It wouldn’t be Rutherford. Both those two men were notoriously in love with their lives.

Now, the question remained: would it be Argyll alone?

Or Argyll…with Addien.

Thornwick’s hands curled into fists, iron-hard; his tendons stood out like ropes.

The barrel-chested guard put a pointed look at Thornwick’s telling hands. “His Grace was displeased at having his diversion cut short.” His mouth hitched in a taunt. “But he grudgingly allowed an audience when he found out a Devil’s Den dog was here.”

Thornwick flared his nostrils. I’ll bloody choke the breath out of the rakish bastard’s bloody—

The pair of sentries guarding the duke opened the doors with agonizing slowness.

Terrifying visions struck him—Argyll’s bedchamber, the hulking four-poster, the duke’s body over Addien’s, rutting where only Thornwick belonged.

The panels were finally drawn all the way open to reveal…

Addien draped in Italian silk fine enough for a duchess when it should be only Thornwick who clothed her in such splendor.

A dining table lit by candelabras. Argyll, the damned duke himself, had shifted his chair at some point. He was so near Addien that his bulk consumed her shadow.

Thornwick went hollow inside. He’d been wrong. It didn’t need to be Argyll’s bedchamber that would break him. This table—any table, a parlor’s tea-board, a bloody street corner—any place where another man dared press too close to her would destroy him just as surely.

Jealousy ripped through him, but he forced his gaze past the other man to the only person who mattered. “Hello, Addien.”