Page 69 of The Devil in Her Bed

Not like he had.

He closed his eyes, breathing in the chaos while becoming very still. He was a stone. He’d always been a stone. Heavy, hard, and unable to float. If he were to be dropped in the pool of her eyes, he’d sink.

He’d drown.

But the wind could not move him. No matter how it howled and battered.

For Chandler, it was safer out here on the street, safer to endure the tempest than to approach her lair.

And yet.

She had to be stopped, before she ruined everything. Before she distracted him from his ultimate goal, when he was so very close.

Idly, he rubbed at the place where she’d touched his arm, then lifted his fingers to examine his palm in the lamplight. One of his only scars he never regretted.

The mark had meant more to her than he’d originallythought. Perhaps because her brother Ferdinand’s blood had melded with his. Perhaps because it reminded her of her purpose.

A purpose he had to diffuse.

Tonight.

He would breach her gates, so to speak, and scare nine shades of shit out of her. He’d tell her the truth if he had to. If it came to that.

That once he’d been an innocent on the altar of Kenway’s sacrifice.

That the Crimson Council had not taken everything away from him once… but twice.

That he wouldn’t allow them a third chance. Not her. Not this time.

Chandler approached her home, trying the doors and the windows first, gratified to find them locked up tighter than a nun’s knickers. At least she wasn’t a complete fool. He’d been starting to wonder if she had any sense of caution or self-preservation beneath all that boldness and bravado.

As he made his way around to the back of the house, he ran his fingers along the stone, letting it catch and abrade the calluses on his hands. He’d felt matching calluses on her fingers. Ones that might have been made in a similar fashion as his. With weapons, and weights, and physically punishing combat arts.

He scaled her back wall with climbing picks, planting them into the mortared brick beneath the ivy and levering his body above each one. He held his weight with one hand as he drove the other into the stone, waiting for a gust of wind loud enough to cover the sound.

When he reached her second-floor balcony, he picked the lock and let himself in, careful not to get wrapped up in the white drapes that floated around him like the shifts of spirits warning him away.

The second-floor balcony belonged to a guest room, and he tiptoed through it, avoiding the shadows of furniture, and let himself into the hall.

Her house smelled different from most. Less like flowers and perfume and more like herbs and earth. Had he been blindfolded he might have thought he’d broken into a witch’s lair. The pleasant aromatics of magic bubbling in a cauldron over the fire.

He padded up a flight of stairs, following the architect’s map he’d memorized of her home that he’d acquired some nights ago from the records office. The master suite looked over the gardens in the back and had its own balcony, though Francesca had erected an iron fence around it complete with medieval-looking spikes just as dangerous as they were decorative.

He’d done his best not to be impressed.

Chandler’s heart was not an unsteady organ. It didn’t give in to bouts of emotion-fueled pumping. It was a fit muscle, efficient and steady.

Which was why he found it insufferable that its thundering was all he could hear as he put his ear to the door.

Taking a steady breath, he turned the latch slowly and let himself into the darkness.

He was taking a moment to allow his eyes to adjust when a lamp blazed to life with the flick of a switch to reveal his prey.

Or rather, Francesca, her knees bent in a fightingstance, a pistol in one hand and the glint of something he couldn’t make out in the other.

Upon seeing him, she lowered her weapons. “Oh,” she breathed in relief. “I had a feeling it was you.”

“Did you plan to kill me?” he asked.