Page 32 of Sloth: The Fallen Earl (Seven Deadly Sins #4)

S omehow, Wakefield found the will and restraint to not run off more than half-mad and hunt down Cressida’s brother. Instead, he’d set out and gone to find Lord Markham. Not charging off half-cocked, since he credited himself and had also earned a public reputation for being a master of restraint. Yet not charging off after Cressida’s brother had proven his greatest feat of strength.

But the baroness and her new husband, Cressida’s brother, had wrought enough hell over society. They’d hurt people time and time again and would continue to do so. Markham would deal with them and their just means, so that Wakefield could put his entire self on the one who mattered most to him.

The sight of her visage, bruised and swollen and—

Fisting his hands so tight, his knuckles blanched, Wakefield willed the memory of her injuries away. He needed his head about him.

Seated upon the carriage bench of Lord Markham’s conveyance for the past five minutes since they’d arrived at the baron’s residence, Wakefield remained staring at the file he’d read along the way here. He stared dumbly at the words he’d read enough times in their short journey as to have memorized them.

The address. He was fixed on the address of where the baron called home because it also meant it was where Cressida had called home. Not had—did.

His throat worked painfully. This hellhole was what Cressida called home. The falling-down structure was as bereft inside as it was out. These ruthless streets not even a rat should live in was where she lay her head, where she took her meals, and where, he’d guarantee, she never took company. She’d withheld the truth of this place from him. She’d indicated Trudy had been her nursemaid and now lived in this structure where she worked for a cruel master.

The part she’d left out was that cruel master was Cressida’s brother, and that she and Trudy lived together. She’d confided in him about Trudy being abused by her employer, but she’d neglected to point out that she herself was a recipient of that same violence.

Taking in a shuddery breath, he scrubbed both of his hands over his face. Yes, if she had not proffered that information to him, her pride being too great to have allowed it, she’d have never ever allowed any lady of Polite Society to visit her in this place. How bloody alone she’d been, how much she’d endured, how much she’d let herself to take on in caring for her old nursemaid.

How bloody remarkable she was.

“I’ll confess,” Markham said through Wakefield’s tumultuous thoughts, “were I any other man, had I not seen the things I’ve seen, I’d be shaken to see what the lady has endured.”

Wakefield managed nothing more than a taut nod. The fear she must live with was no more.

Regardless of whether she’d known or not known about her brother’s duplicity, if there had been duplicity, no longer mattered. It had only been a handful of days, but he knew her. She was a proud woman of integrity and strength.

Anything she’d done with the baron would’ve only ever been coerced or forced. A memory intruded of Cressida as she’d been, her face bruised and battered. His eyes drifted shut, and he squeezed them tightly. Even as he knew it was futile, that sight would live emblazoned on his brain until he died. The bloody baron would never lay a hand upon her again. Wakefield intended to see to it.

Without a word, he opened the carriage door and jumped down. Markham followed close at his heels. They strode side by side along the uneven grimy cobblestones. How many times had Cressida walked this same path? Hundreds? Thousands? That also meant hundreds and thousands of times she’d been in peril. One breath away from being raped, robbed, or worse.

Fury blackened his vision and left him nearly blind. Propelled by rage, Wakefield didn’t bother knocking. He let himself and Markham inside, and unlike the previous times when he’d come here in search of Cressida and there had been an eerie silence within these halls, now there came an ominous, screeching caterwauling from abovestairs. Instantly, Wakefield recognized those animalistic sounds for what they were.

Wakefield took the stairs two at a time, intent on using the element of surprise for his benefit. The minute he breached the main landing, he headed towards the grotesque cacophony only to discover they weren’t alone. A tall, hulking figure slouched against the doorway. No doubt a servant who’d been made into a pitiable, pathetic guard. Even five paces away, the fellow reeked of sweat. Too busy frigging himself off to the sounds of his employer in the throes of passion, he failed to hear Wakefield’s and Markham’s approach until it was too late. His already beady, buggy eyes bulged the minute he finally did register their presence.

Markham already had a hand around his neck and touched a point somewhere that sent the man’s eyes rolling back in his head and crumpling. Markham easily had him before he hit the ground with his big body and dragged him aside silently. While he tended to the disposal of the wretched fellow, Wakefield entered the bedroom.

Without the glow of a candle, a flickering sconce, or even the faintest ember in the hearth, the room lay submerged in utter blackness. He paused, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom, and as they did, the space slowly took shape around him. It was a curious contrast to the rest of the townhouse. Where the halls beyond were stripped bare—absent of tables and chairs, their walls marred by gaping holes and torn, curling wallpaper—these rooms held a certain quiet respectability, though no one would mistake them for royal quarters. Modest, yes. Worn perhaps. But orderly and far better suited to receiving a gentleman than the wreckage beyond the threshold.

It felt like a moment of irony that Wakefield himself should have been discovered the same way by his now-brother-in-law when Latimer made the wrongest assumption possible about his relationship with Livian. Now, to find himself on the other side of such a situation, being interrupted while having sex with a lover. Though where Wakefield had still possessed the wherewithal to be aware that his room had been invaded, Cressida’s brother remained wholly oblivious. His enormous and saggy arse flapped while he sawed away at his lover.

That same absorption, however, eluded the baron’s partner. Even as she responded with the appropriate moans and cries and keening, her bored gaze remained fixed on the ceiling above.

That painted, now aging face from years of treachery and debauchery had since faded from the bloom of life. She only bore a marked resemblance to the sought-after creature she’d once been, a former diamond in her age, now a scrap of coal. But there bore a hint of who she’d once been, enough so that Wakefield recognized her all too easily.

His former best friend’s lover, Lady Marianne, also the Viscountess Waters’ tormentor, who’d destroyed Marcia’s name and saw her stranded at the altar by the man she loved first before Andrew, Viscount Waters. When the baroness came to destroy Marcia, an entire army existed behind the young lady.

Cressida had been forced to brave it all alone.

God, he’d never admired a woman, loved a woman, more than he did her. There came no shock at the revelation. From the moment his eyes found her center stage of The Devil’s Den, his soul became twined with hers.

How many lives had the baroness destroyed before the black threads of her evil had become entangled in the fabric of Cressida’s life?

He tasted the bitterness of Cressida’s helplessness and vowed it would end here.

The baroness noticed Wakefield’s presence first. His blood already chilled all the way through, or so he believed, went glacial, ice freezing in his veins.

She smiled coyly, and the previous boredom dissipated from her glassy gaze, no doubt from too much opium and spirits. A fire sparked to life, revealing a lust that could not be feigned at the thought of Wakefield as a voyeur to her bodily display of carnality.

These were the people Cressida’s brother kept company with. Not that he should be surprised. The report Markham provided revealed a dissolute man whose genitals would likely no doubt be rotting off soon from all the whoring he’d done. And that’s if his liver didn’t fail him from the cheap spirits he’d consumed.

One thing remained certain, something that existed beyond the shadow of a doubt, the question about why Cressida, an innocent virgin, had been sold off at The Devil’s Den was directly a product and direct result of these two and their consummate evil. A vicious knot tightened his stomach, and he wanted to throw his head back and rail. But even more than that, he wanted vengeance against the baron on behalf of Cressida.

A blistering rage fueled his footsteps. The baroness’s already hot gaze grew even hotter. All the while, she lifted her hips up, driving them hard to meet her lover’s violent thrusts. This time, her efforts were not feigned.

She dug her long talon-like fingernails into the sweaty back of the pig, grunting like a swine, biting them into his flesh with such ferocity she left trails of blood along the hairy expanse.

My God, it occurred to him. The black-hearted doxy actually believed Wakefield was coming forth to join in their vile performance.

Moving with deliberate steps, Wakefield headed for the bed. The moment he reached Cressida’s brother, Wakefield hauled the knave up and hurled the bastard’s body against the opposite wall.

The cry that emerged from the bastard’s mouth came devoid of all sound and only a raspy, gasping swift inhalation and exhalation. His small member jutted out, already wilting from the suddenness of the attack.

The baron’s eyes went wide, and Wakefield relished the terror glittering in the man’s eyes.

Wakefield wasted no time at all. Straddling Cressida’s brother, Wakefield brought his arm back and delivered a violent right hook that drove the baron’s head hard against the wood floor. Wakefield followed that with a swift left hook.

This sent blood spurting from the wretch’s fleshy lips. “Why—why-whyyyy?”

How many times had Cressida been made to cry so at this bastard’s hands? Wakefield punched him again solidly, this time in the nose. He shattered the bulbous appendage and crimson sprayed everywhere, spattering Wakefield’s face like flecks of raindrops splashing as they fell from the sky.

Wakefield hauled off on Cressida’s brother. He continued to wail on him, careful to beat him violently enough, but not so much so as to render the blighter unconscious.

When he’d pulverized him enough that his face was riddled with bruises and scrapes, black and blues already, Wakefield was out of breath from his exertions but far from satisfied.

The other man’s death would be the only welcome outcome. And even then, it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough for a sense of satisfaction, not with what Cressida’s brother had done to her. The vile acts he would never ever again carry out, not so long as Wakefield lived.

“Here is a word of warning,” Wakefield said evenly while he trembled inside with rage. “You are never again to go near Cressida Alby. If you touch her, I’ll kill you. If you breathe her air, I’ll kill you. If you so much as walk in her shadow, I’ll end you before you even take a full step near her. You, Baron,” he snarled, “are a walking dead man. One wrong move, if you so much as utter her name even, I will make what happened to you here a bloody picnic. Are we clear?”

Moaning miserably, the baron couldn’t manage a word.

“Ah-ah.”

“Not good enough,” Wakefield taunted. Catching him by his neck, he forced his head forward and then slammed it hard against the oak planks of the floor.

“Yes,” Cressida’s brother cried out, weeping like a babe.

“Say it. Say all of it,” Wakefield insisted.

“Won’t, won’t, won’t touch her. Won’t, won’t, won’t…”

Towering over the man as he lay on the floor, Wakefield slapped him in the face.

“Say her goddamn name,” he shouted. This time his rage overwhelmed the calm he’d somehow managed.

“I won’t touch Cressida.”

Wakefield backhanded him on the other cheek.

“Her entire name, Baron!”

“I won’t touch Cressida Everly Alby.”

Cressida Everly Alby? Cressida Everly Alby .

He hadn’t even known her full name before now. Now he’d never forget it.

Wakefield drew back and delivered a final knockout blow. The baron’s form went limp, and then his eyes rolled back as he collapsed, sprawled on the floor.

Wakefield reared back and spit in his face. And then, with Markham standing sentry at the door, Wakefield left.