Page 31 of The Devil in Her Bed

He needed a distraction from the bleak void that threatened to swallow him on nights like this.

A silken fall of vibrant red hair glistened over a pair of eyes the color of the Cliffs of Moher. Pretty pink lips quirked beneath a nose just a little too crooked to be comely.

The counterfeit countess. She was anything but bleak. The opposite of bleak. God, she was… luminous. Vivid. Dazzling. Radiant.

So very alive.

Or at least, he’d begun to wish it so.

He just needed to be sure. He needed to see her hand. He wanted to prove her lie, to kill the hope beginning to bloom in his chest.

He needed to touch her again, regardless of her identity.

For something irrevocably told him she was no more a countess than he was the actual devil, but that didn’t stop him from yearning to fuck her.

Lord, he really was a devil.

What a word they’d assigned to him in the as-yet-unofficial Secret Services. He’d never quite learnedwhy it stuck. Because he looked like depictions of said devil? Handsome, satirical, and swarthy. Because he was without a conscience, compassion, or empathy for the men he was assigned to punish?

Because he enjoyed condemning those who deserved it. Bringing evil men to their final reward…

Someone had to. Someone needed to be a ballast to the weight of rot and malevolence rising in the empire, in the souls of men. Someone must atone.

Who better than he? When he had so much to atone for.

Thud.

Chandler’s hackles rose and his knife appeared back in his palm in the space of a blink. He’d thought that sound a figment of his dream, but no. It came from directly above him.

The Lord Chancellor was kept at the other end of the house.

Someoneelsewas upstairs.

Fetching his pistol from the table beside the bed, Chandler flung open his door and pointed it down both ends of the hallway. Finding it dark and empty, he turned to a click at the end of the hall from the rooms of Mrs. Kochman, the cook and housekeeper.

“M-Mr. Alquist?” she said in a trembling voice.

“Stay in your rooms, Mrs. Kochman, I’ll investigate.” He mounted the stairs two at a time, tearing through the third-floor chamber above his. Nothing but an empty cell, awaiting another prisoner of state, or sometimes a refugee for hiding until they could be deported. This was a modern version of the Tower of London, a building in which people often disappeared, one way or another.

Cautiously, he made his way to the Lord Chancellor’s cell, a room that might have been the master suite once upon a time, when this part of town was more fields and fewer factories.

A light glowed from beneath the Lord Chancellor’s door. Chandler retrieved the key from his pocket and unlocked it one-handed, training his pistol on the hall the entire time. Kicking the door open, he barreled in, thrusting his weight against it lest someone be on the other side.

He found the room empty but for the Lord Chancellor sprawled on the floor.

Chandler ran over and checked the portly man for wounds. A gash on the head, nothing more. He was breathing, in fact, and fighting for consciousness.

“Who did this, you piece of filth?” Chandler demanded. “How did they get in here?”

“The-the—shhh.”

The criminal pointed at the shutters of the window before his eyes rolled back in his head.

The roof? Impossible. One of the reasons a man of the Lord Chancellor’s station had been stashed here in the first place was that he had an outdoor area from which to see the sun yet remain hidden.

Chandler threw open the shutters and leapt onto the balcony, searching the dark night with the point of his gun. Instead of speaking, he listened to the night. Waiting for a breath, a step, or a presence to manifest.

On his next step, the ground moved beneath his foot. Or, rather, a cylindrical part of it did. Bending, Chandler picked up an astonishingly long stick. No, not a stick. A vaulting pole.