Page 95 of The Business of Blood

Suddenly, I understood. I understood the Hammer’s wrath. Night Horse’s lust for blood. All decency and humanity leached away from me with an unholy knowledge that if anyone harmed a single beautiful, golden hair on Aidan’s beloved head…

I’d cut them to bloody pieces.

21

The screams echoing against the painted ceiling of St. Michael’s mirrored the tortured sounds I’d imagined Thaddeus Comstock had made toward the end. It was the sound of a man losing a part of himself.

Partsof himself.

They stirred something inside me. Fractured my soul into many sharp and crystalline pieces, like a mirror I could no longer stand the sight of.

I couldn’t say why I took the time to brush the cobwebs I’d snagged in the crypt from my shoulders and skirts as I raced down the hall toward the chapel.

Perhaps because I was as afraid of spiders as I was of death.

Or maybe because I was about to meet destiny, and a strange part of me wanted to look my best.

Either way, it was absurd. As irrational as avoiding the front door of the abbey had been.

I didn’t know what I was thinking. At the time, it seemed more reasonable to gain access to St. Michael’s by way of stealth, and I knew where Aidan kept the spare key to the crypt in the groundskeeper’s shed. I must have figured if I were to gain any sort of upper hand with the Ripper, I’d need the element of surprise.

The agony contained within the sounds emitted from the chapel sent every plan or rational thought scattering to the night like a murder of crows picking at a corpse as wolves descended.

I picked up my skirts and sprinted forward when every instinct I had yearned to flee. I could not let Aidan suffer. I couldn’t let him die. Not if there was a chance the Ripper would listen to me.

I skidded through the oratory, ignoring the candles warning me away with frantic golden flickers. The arched door dumped me at the front of the nave, where the shadows of empty pews were arranged neatly in the pious expectancy of a devout congregation.

I was still partially concealed by what was left of a rood screen. The ruins of an earlier time, of a more brutal, secretive church.

What I saw between the slats, crumbled the very foundations of my being.

I surged from behind the screen and tripped up the three steps to the sanctuary altar, holding my hand out in supplication.“Aidan!”

I didn’t stop to think how foolish I was. I didn’t process what my mind readily yearned to reject. I only knew that stealth no longer mattered. Only Aidan mattered.

Saving him.

Because he wasnotthe half-naked man tied on his back to the cross, prostrate on the altar, the flesh of his shoulder and chest flayed away to reveal the fiber beneath.

Aidan—my Aidan—was the one wielding the knife.

I wished in that moment that I could rip everything I ever felt for him out of my heart and stomp it into the sparse rivulets of blood pooling beneath the altar.

But, alas, that wasn’t how love worked.

Altars, it occurred to me, had been invented for this very purpose. The spilling of blood.

It shamed me to my soul that relief combined with the revulsion, the terror, and the shock of seeing him thus. A tiny, glowing bead in the Pandora’s Box I’d just opened.

Aidan was alive.Thank God.

Aidan was a killer. Possiblythekiller.

Oh, God.

I couldn’t rely upon the Hammer to rescue me this time.

“Fiona.” Jorah David Roth rasped my name from a throat made hoarse by screaming. His lovely, elegant fingers reached toward me from their bindings, even as he wheezed,“Run.”