Page 32 of The Autumn Wife (King’s Girls #3)

Shivering on the hay-strewn floor of her jail cell, Cecile hugged her knees to her chest. Three days of nothing but bread and water had left the walls of her stomach scraping together.

Rocking for warmth, she yearned for sunlight, a wool cloak, and uninterrupted sleep.

And yet, in a strange way, she was grateful that thoughts of worldly needs consumed her, for they turned her mind away from the phantom rope tightening around her neck.

A clank of an iron key jerked her alert. She glanced beyond the bars of her cell to the rattling wooden door of the shed. Was it time for another interrogation?

The door swung open, and light poured in, slinging daggers into her eyes.

“Terce bells will be ringing soon,” said one of her guards, speaking to someone following him in through the blinding light. “At the first chime, your time is up. Got it?”

A man grunted an assent—deep-chested, rumbling—and at the sound Cecile’s heart leapt.

Scrambling to her feet, she pushed filthy fingers down her unkempt braid.

The closing of the door engulfed the shed in darkness again.

Gripping the iron bars that kept her caged in a corner, the sole prisoner in the room, she blinked as Theo’s figure approached through hazy filaments of light seeping through the badly caulked walls.

With a half sob, she shot an arm through the bars to touch him, fingers grazing his jaw. He sported an inflamed cut on his brow and a black eye from the beating he’d taken for trying to save her from the arresting soldiers.

“Oh, Theo.” She hazarded a gasp, her throat dry. “Does it hurt?”

“It’s nothing.” He slid his hands between the bars, hissing as his warm hands cupped her cheeks. “You’re freezing.”

He released her long enough to shrug off his cloak and shove the garment between the bars. As he struggled to settle it across her shoulders, the wool cocooned her in pine-fragrant warmth.

With Theo’s battered face only inches away, she noted another scratch on his throat and a split in the lobe of his right ear, healed over in the three days they’d been apart, but still red and angry.

She ran a finger over a nick on his short-whiskered jaw. “What have they done to you, my love?”

“You’re the one suffering.” He tugged the collar so the cloak would cover her more fully. “And you’re worried about my bruises.”

“I thought…” She swallowed hard. On the day she’d been arrested, the last thing she’d seen, as one guard had pushed her toward the canoe, had been Theo grappling with the two other soldiers blocking his way. “Those soldiers’ flintlocks were primed, Theo… I thought—”

“The captain pulled us apart before any real blood was spilled.” He huffed in frustration. “I don’t think any other man but Lucas could have managed that.”

“It was foolish of you to fight.” She slid her hands through the bars to grip the linen of his shirt, to feel the warmth of him in the fibers. “You might have been arrested—”

“They tried. But the captain knew the soldiers and talked them out of it.” He ran his thumbs over her cheeks.

She couldn’t tell whether the roughness was due to the calluses on his hands or the gritty soil on her face.

“That doesn’t matter. I’m safe, Lucas is safe, Marie is safe.

You are not. I’ve been trying to see you for days. ”

He pressed his face against the bars, gripped her cheeks in place, and locked his lips over hers.

A gasp died in her throat. His strength flooded through her, melted her spine, urged her to lean into him as far as she could despite the iron bars between them. She couldn’t quite feel her feet upon the hay anymore—she might as well be levitating.

He murmured her name as he tilted his head, shooting his fingers into her loosened, plaited hair, squeezing with desperation, speaking words she no longer understood as language, but only as the melody of love.

He finally pulled away, pressing his forehead against hers as best he could with iron bars keeping them apart. She’d thought she had no more tears to shed, but they prickled, now, at the backs of her eyes. Tears not of sorrow or fear but of a swelling love for this beautiful man.

What a tragedy, that such a love arrived in her life only when her life was soon to end.

He cleared his throat and pulled back from the bars, taking in the small shed and the smaller cage, glaring at the narrowness of her cell and then at the empty pewter plate on the floor next to a dry, tipped-over cup.

“We don’t have much time,” he said. “Have they interrogated you yet?”

“Yes. On the first day and yesterday, and I suspect they’ll be back today.” She swallowed, her throat sore. “They take me out of this cage, put irons on my wrists and ankles—”

Theo grunted and seized her hands, raising them for his perusal. The grunt deepened as he turned them over and saw the chafed marks on her wrists.

“Who,” he asked, fury rippling through his words, “did this?”

“Soldiers—different ones. They change my guards every day.”

“Did they hurt you in any other way?”

A fresh chill washed over her. “Not…not yet.”

Theo nodded, but she knew by the sudden stoniness of his face that he, too, was banking panic.

“The interrogators,” he continued, placing her hands palm to palm so he could cover them both with his own, warmer ones. “What are their names?”

“They didn’t say, but I can describe them.” She shivered at the memory as she described the trio of interrogators to Theo, down to their velvet coats and lace collars, each man colder-eyed than the next. “I suspect they are the investigators sent by Talon, but I can’t be sure.”

“Seems likely.” He met her gaze, his green one deadly serious. “What evidence do they have?”

“I don’t know.” She caught a sob before she became undone. “They asked me the same questions in a hundred different ways, but they tell me nothing. Except that they found his…body.”

“Yes, I heard that in the tavern.” Theo released her hands and slid his arms through the bars to wrap them around her so he could draw her close enough to whisper in her ear. “They found him on a bank of an island at the mouth of a river out of Trois-Rivières.”

Her mind screamed. He tightened his grip as if he heard her distress.

She squeezed her eyes shut. To think she’d once been considered the good girl.

The orphan all the nuns had adored. The one student who’d never felt the smack of a ruler on her hand.

The woman who would never throw herself into danger like Marie or flaunt disobedience like Genny, yet had done something a thousand times grimmer, bloodier, more unforgivable.

“The river,” Theo whispered, as his gaze darted to the shed walls that were riddled with cracks and lingering shadows.

“It runs by most of the homes in Trois-Rivières. Homes owned by those who might not have liked Eduard Tremblay either. According to gossip, your husband was deeply in debt to a lot of people. Do you have any idea why Talon’s investigators would single you out? ”

Because I’m guilty.

“Whatever they found,” he said, thinking aloud, “it can’t be enough to convict you. That’s why you’re still being interrogated. They need a confession.”

Icy fingers squeezed her mute. She knew that if the authorities failed to get a confession by questioning her, they would use more violent tactics. They might pound wedges beneath the wooden staves of a boot. Lay a braided whip against her back. Or brand her in places unseen.

“Ceci.” Theo pulled back to meet her eyes. “You didn’t sign any papers, did you?”

“No.” Though the interrogators were wearing her down. She’d become keenly aware that telling the truth of what happened would put an end to the exhaustion, the hunger, and the whole investigation. All her worries would end—but so would her life.

“Lie,” he whispered with force. “Lie over and over again and never sign anything.”

A tear slipped down her cheek. She plunged into his gaze, steady with determination.

Darling Theo, so worried for her…but she had been doomed from the start.

Perhaps, from the very moment Eduard had returned to raise a fist to Etienne, she had known she would end up with a rope around her neck.

She’d been flailing ever since, trying to stave off the inevitable, holding desperately to the faintest thread of hope.

And now here she was, dragging Theo into her nightmare.

She sank a little in his arms. She was so tired of fighting.

She didn’t regret fighting Eduard. She didn’t regret preventing herself and Etienne from being slaughtered like lambs, but she did kill a man.

Furthermore, her actions had put everyone she loved in terrible danger.

If she confessed, the torment would be over.

And she’d be protecting everyone else, too.

Straightening, she pulled herself away from the iron bars and the man beyond them, urging him to let his arms fall away.

“You’re a free man, Theo.” What a beautiful name he had. What a life they could have built together on the wooded banks of the Saint Lawrence River. “You can go and do whatever you want now. Forget about me.”

His eyes blazed like green fire. “I will never leave you.”

“I release you from all promises.” Her throat closed, as if already encircled by a prickly hemp rope. “The magistrates will hang me, no matter what—”

“They have no evidence.” He gripped the bars. “They can’t convict you if you don’t confess.”

“They convicted you four years ago, and you didn’t confess.”

“That situation was different. The viscount paid for false witnesses.” He rattled the bars. “If I have to put my own head in the noose, Ceci, I will see you freed.”

“That’s the problem.” She fixed this moment in her memory—the chill of the air, the fierceness of his expression, the love on his face. This would be the remembrance she would fill her mind with when she climbed the scaffold. “If you do anything rash, they’ll arrest you, too.”

“Ceci—”