Page 30 of Hounded (Fire & Brimstone)

30

Loren

Manhattan, New York December 3 rd , 1902

They’d sent Beatrice home to fetch the girls and, in the quiet sanatorium ward, it was just Jonathan and me. I’d come every day for weeks, watching as his health continued to decline. No amount of sunshine and fresh air would cure the disease determined to siphon the life out of him. So, we waited for the end.

He was only thirty-six. I’d imagined decades more together—sharing fragments of his life and watching his daughters grow up. His life was mine, in a way. I was a piece woven into their tapestry, a close family friend, an honorary uncle, a secret lover. But I didn’t have it in me to be secretive now.

In the bed, Jonathan dipped in and out of restless sleep. His features had grown gaunt, and his body was frail. Despite that, it was a tight squeeze maneuvering myself onto the mattress beside him. I crowded into the narrow space and laid my head on his chest to listen to his heart’s muffled beat.

He turned and draped his arm over me, smoothing my hair against my back while I gulped down sobs.

“You’re always here, aren’t you?” he said softly. His ribs rattled through an inhale. “You always have been.”

I couldn’t speak. I’d often been silent while watching him waste away, knowing I would soon be alone. Bereft. Somehow a widower without ever being wed.

He kissed the top of my head, and I threaded my arms around him, loathing the feeling of his bones too prominent, his figure too fragile. I wondered if he would dissipate beside me, wither and crumble, leaving me clinging to ashes and dust.

“You’ll be there for them, won’t you?” He spoke so quietly that I strained to hear him, but his next words came through with greater conviction. “You’ll take care of Bea and the girls.”

I raised my head to meet his gaze while blinking through a film of tears.

Jonathan smiled. “You should marry her. It would be advantageous for you both.” He coughed, and the sound felt ripped from him. His body convulsed, and I squeezed my eyes shut so I didn’t see the blood dribbling from his lips.

He rubbed my back again. “You could have a family. I know you want that.”

I wanted it with him. Only with him.

I held no ill will for Beatrice, and certainly not for his daughters who were far too young to lose their father. But Jonathan left a void I could not fill. I would care for his family as best I could, but they would never be mine .

Jonathan coughed again, and his hand snagged in my hair. “I’ve been good to you, Loren. Now, you can be good to them.”

At the far end of the room, a pair of white-dressed nurses bustled in, escorting Beatrice and the two young girls. I scrambled out of the bed, nearly tumbling onto the floor in my haste.

Jonathan’s next coughing fit commanded the attention of the arriving women. The nurses rushed ahead as their patient’s wracking hacks speckled the white sheets with red.

Edith and Dorothy clung to their mother’s skirt. All three of them stopped in the aisle between the rows of empty beds while I worked my way to standing.

Beatrice covered her daughters’ eyes with her hands as she looked at me. Her expression wavered between confusion and concern.

I’d never been sure how much she knew. My arrangement with Jonathan was longstanding enough she might have accepted his visits to my flat as a matter of fact. But I doubted any woman wouldn’t have grown wise to the true nature of our relationship after twelve long years.

If she’d questioned Jonathan about it, I imagined he would have reminded her—as he did me—of all she had because of him. How good he’d been to her.

I imagined, too, that she had decided what I had.

It was enough.

The nurses shooed me out of the way as they eased Jonathan onto his back and daubed his mouth with a kerchief. I continued retreating, then skirted the foot of the bed to approach Beatrice and the girls.

Bea’s hair was pulled into a bun, enhancing the strain on her features. “Thank you for watching him, Lorenzo.” Even her voice sounded tight. “I think we should be with him now.”

I looked at Edith and Dorothy with their matching braids and their faces blanketed by Beatrice’s careful hands. That nagging sob surged up my throat as a swell of feeling I wished I could expel. I swallowed, but it didn’t move, so I forced words past it in a croak.

“I’m sorry.”

For whatever she knew and everything she didn’t.

Jonathan’s coughs rang out like a death knell. I couldn’t stand the sound of them or the sight of the nurses flurrying to administer care, so I sucked a breath and held it while I marched toward the exit.

My lungs burned by the time I made my way out of the medical ward and into the hallway beyond. Once there, I doubled over and breathed out a whimpering cry.

There was no one else for me. I knew that the day I met Jonathan. Before him, I was orphaned and abandoned in an unkind world. I had lost my parents and sister to an illness I barely survived myself.

I was sick, ragged and reeking of fresh death, when Jonathan found me. He saw something in my nothing and took me in. Without him, I would have fallen victim to some other virulent plague or been worked to death building a country that wasn’t mine.

He saved me. I lived because of him. For him.

If I could have, I would have died for him, too.

Another nurse approached. I thought she would pass into the large room beyond the closed double doors, but she stopped. A man stood beside her, strikingly handsome with pale blond locks and a strong, stubbled jaw. While the woman was in her work uniform, the man wore a tailored suit with a silk cravat tie as green as his eyes. He must have been a visitor like me, attending to a loved one. But his expression was so fixed and stoic that I wondered if he was already past the point of grief. If so, I envied him.

“Are you all right?” the nurse asked. She was slender with long, black hair and crimson eyes like faceted rubies.

I studied her when I should have responded, then was startled when she laughed.

A narrow wooden bench lined the wall nearby, and the nurse moved toward it while beckoning me to follow. She sat, her male companion stood, and I remained on my feet as well until she took my hands and pulled me down beside her.

Once we were both settled, she asked, “Who are you here for?”

I paused.

Did I have to deny Jonathan even now? All the way to the end?

Even if he hadn’t been married, our relationship was criminal. Obscene in the eyes of the public and of the God I’d been raised to believe in. Sodomy was a sin, the damning kind.

“My friend,” I replied.

The nurse’s attention roamed from my face to the hem of my wool coat and back up again. The smile that tilted her lips seemed odd in this desolate place .

“ Close friend?” she inquired.

I hesitated long enough that the nurse spoke in my stead.

“Tell me about him.”

My focus shifted to the man standing by. He seemed distant, disengaged, and he failed to meet my eyes.

The nurse squeezed my fingers. Her touch seemed scorching, prompting me to jerk back as she laughed again. Her expression turned earnest as she leaned toward me and added, “You can tell me anything.”

My lips parted and stayed that way until I found the words to explain. “He has a wife and daughter. He wants me to care for them, but I…” I cupped a hand to my mouth, suddenly choked. With a growl of determination, I freed my voice to conclude, “If I can’t live without him, how can they?”

I’d already considered the loss. Dorothy and Edith would grow up fatherless, Beatrice would be left to find a new husband, and I would be cast out. I hardly expected Jonathan’s widow to continue paying the rent for my apartment, and I couldn’t afford it myself.

I had no skills to speak of. My father had worked as a glassblower in Murano before we immigrated to America. Those talents were wasted here, where he’d been forced to toil in a crowded factory for twelve hours a day, six days a week. Thanks to Jonathan’s charity, I avoided a similar fate. I’d enjoyed a gentleman’s status and a level of comfort I did not earn. With my benefactor absent, I would be sent back to where I belonged: the dregs of society.

The nurse offered a sympathetic smile. “Do you want to care for them?”

“I can’t,” I replied. “I’m not enough.”

The nurse’s hand settled on my thigh, and I stared at that point of contact as she continued.

“What if you could give your friend more time with his family?” she asked. “Then he could care for them the way you cannot.”

My shoulders slumped. “There’s no time. He’s dying. They’ve called everyone in.”

And sent me out.

I looked at the closed doors a few feet away, a physical wall between my beloved and me. The divide had always been there, but it wasn’t always so tangible.

The nurse patted my leg, commanding my focus again. “He’s a young man, isn’t he?” Her delicate brow pinched. “Near your age?”

She must have seen Jonathan lying in there. Perhaps she’d tended to him.

I nodded.

“What do you suppose he could do with another… twenty years?” she asked. “He could see his children grow, perhaps even become a grandfather.”

It felt cruel to suggest, given his prognosis. I shook my head, refusing to let the seed of false hope take root.

“You could give him that time,” the nurse insisted. “Give it to them.” She gestured to the brick wall between us and the medical ward.

I should have been in there. Should have been with Jonathan. Like I’d always been.

I bit my lip until I tasted the bitter tang of blood. Pain fended off the tears that seemed determined to overtake me. When I ducked my head, the nurse cupped my chin in her palm. Her touch sent a cold shock through me.

“You could repay everything he’s done for you,” she said. “Show him what’s plain to me.”

I stared hard into her gemstone eyes. “What’s that?”

“You love him.”

Breath stalled in my lungs. I expected condemnation or loathing, but the woman remained unfailingly kind. The nurse brushed her thumb along my jaw. I should have pulled away, but the comfort was so unexpectedly welcome, so desperately needed, that I leaned into it.

She smiled, and I felt better than I had in weeks.

“I think you love him enough to save him,” she said.

“How?” The word slipped out, unbidden.

The nurse brushed my hair behind my ear, touching me in a way only Jonathan had. It seemed intimate, and I found myself melting against the warmth of her skin.

“You wanted to belong to him,” she murmured, speaking truth she shouldn’t have known. “Unfortunately, my power doesn’t extend that far, but you could belong to me. Be wholly mine. Fully possessed.”

The conversation had become utter nonsense. A complete stranger offering to take me in, trying to mend wounds I’d believed to be hidden. It had happened before. Jonathan took similar pity on me, but it failed to explain why this woman wanted anything to do with me, or how her interest could save Jonathan’s life.

I shook my head, unsettling the locks she’d tucked away and breaking her hold on me. “I don’t understand,” I said.

Her smile persisted. “I would have you at my side, not hidden away. Never forgotten. You could be quite dear to me. Would you like that?”

To be dear, yes. But not to her. It was the same as Jonathan had said, offering me his family when I wanted my own. I wanted him.

More than that, though, I didn’t want him to die.

“Your friend would have the time he needs.” The nurse’s voice wove itself into my thoughts. “And you would have your heart’s desire. To be loved. Cherished. Adored.”

My attention roamed again to the closed medical ward doors. I imagined Jonathan inside, suffering, wasting away. Soon there would be nothing left. His end would be mine. I would die with him; I knew it. Maybe, this way, we could both live.

Tears welled up, and I stubbornly blinked them back. “Could I see him still?”

In a flash, the nurse’s kind face turned malicious. Her red lips peeled back in a sneer. “I said wholly mine, did I not?”

The blond man standing by shifted, his polished boots scuffing against the floor.

I glanced at him, then back at the nurse, who remained startlingly severe.

“And Jonathan—?”

“Will live.” She flapped her hand. “Twenty more years. You need only agree, and I will make it so.”

Her focus fixed on me in a way that seemed to bring weight, bearing down. She was waiting. I still wasn’t sure what for.

“How?” I asked .

Her smile returned, thin at first but gradually filling. “My pet, the details never matter as much as the outcome, and this is an arrangement that will satisfy us both.”

The blond man moved again as though suddenly restless. When I looked to him this time, I caught his gaze. His pale green eyes met mine, but he didn’t speak.

“Do I have your word?” The nurse leaned over, interrupting the line of sight between her companion and me before prompting, “You will come with me now and be mine forevermore?”

The phrasing was strange, and I couldn’t fathom how she had the authority to do what she claimed. But I wished she could. I wished it, and I believed it when I nodded and whispered, “Yes.”

Her mouth tipped in a satisfied smirk. “Swear it,” she said.

“I swear.”

She beamed, then, revealing white teeth with sharp tips I hadn’t noticed before. Lunging forward, she threw her arms around me in an embrace. “Such a good boy,” she cooed, holding on tight. “You’ll be good for me, won’t you, Lorenzo? For eternity.”

For all the things I was unsure of, I was certain I never told her my name.

Her hands skimmed over me, up my back to my shoulders, then my neck. When her fingers curled around my throat, I jerked away, but the clink of steel and a cinching pressure stopped me short. She held something that hadn’t been there before. A metal chain I now wore like a collar.

I pitched back again, increasing the strangling sensation, surprising myself when I couldn’t break her grip.

“Mine,” she said, pulling me so close I could feel her breath rush across my face. “Solely mine for twenty measly years. I should thank that friend of yours for making you believe you weren't worth any more than that.”

Her amusement was scorching, blistering in its heat.

I grabbed the chain, struggling in vain to loosen it while the nurse stood and dragged me off the bench. I hit the floor on all fours, still being pulled and sliding across the tiled ground.

“Show us out, won’t you, Whitney?” she asked the other man.

My eyes watered from breathlessness and tears as I watched the blond man turn away. As he moved, I caught the glint of another, similar collar fastened around his neck.

He went to the wall and waved his hand over it, barely touching the brick as he drew a single arching line. The surface opened into a gaping black hole, and that was where she led me, choking, crying, and clawing at the floor until darkness swallowed everything.