Page 55 of Wedlock

“Eleanor said nothing of this,” Jag growls. “She told me Asumpta was protecting this house by destroying Viper.”

“Asumpta was only protecting you, not this house.”

Jag turns slowly from me to face the procurer.

“Jag, you can’t believe this,” she whispers, her face ashen as she begins to back towards the door. “After all the years we’ve haunted these kitchens together. You can’t take the word of this scrawnyhumanover mine.”

“How could you betray Eleanor, the woman who’d saved you, raised you? How could you undermine a house she and I love?”

“A house, or a human?” She shrieks, her voice echoing through the otherwise still kitchen and seeming to bounce from wall to wall.

“Does it matter?” Jag asks, his voice low and deadly.

I stand stock-still and slide even further behind Jag as her wild eyes flick to me. I wonder if she’s contemplating ripping me to pieces; it certainly looks that way. But somehow she overrides her base instinct and instead spins and runs from the room.

It’s a long, full minute before Jag turns from staring at the empty doorway she’d run through to face me.

“She loves you,” I whisper when he meets my gaze.

“Cupid's arrows often go astray,” he murmurs.

40

His body lies two to three metres from his head. His eyes are wide, shocked, as though the last thing he ever expected was whomever, or whatever, had decapitated him.

There are no signs of a struggle amid the fallen spruce needles, not even signs of footprints.

Whoever took him out had done so quickly, efficiently and professionally.

I take a deep breath and rub my hands over my face to try and wipe out the image of the first person who springs to mind. There’s only one vampire I know who’s this efficient at trackingand dispatching — the one who, up until recently, I’d also called brother. The one who’d betrayed me with my wife.

What had he said?

‘If you won’t take him in hand, I will.’

And it looks like he’d made good on that promise, despite his claims to the contrary.

“Spider wouldn’t dispatch you quickly and quietly, Brother,” I sigh, leaning down on my haunches to close his eyes, “he’d take his time and crow about it to the moon. So, Jag must have done this. You were obviously killed in situ, and decapitation is one of his calling cards.”

I rock back on my heels and look at the stars as I try to sort out my feelings and logically think through the ramifications of my discovery.

Even though I know now that he’s not my full-blood brother and that he’d defiled my wife, I’m in turmoil. Deep down I love him as I always have. Mother’s explanation for not telling me the truth all these years held no water as far as I was concerned, and raised yet more questions.

“Why, Brother?” I whisper as I stare at Viper’s face. “Of all the fucked-up, shitty things you’ve done over the years, I can’t believe you aligned with Spider to bring down my house. Yet if there’s no basis to that, what are you doing here on his estate?”

Even as I ask this aloud, I know there are only two possibilities: hewasaligned with Spider and Jag killed him, or he wasn’t aligned, and Spider kidnapped him again and killed him. But the latter just doesn’t seem likely. Viper’s body bears none of the hallmarks of a Spider assassination.

Still, there’s only one way to find out.

Rising from my haunches, I set off at a jog through the woods towards Dartlore’s castle. Given that my brother had been discovered dead on his estate I have every right to take my revengeagainst this houseshould the Count admittothemurder.ButSpider,asI’d learned over the years, was very good at muddying the waters. I’d need an open confession in order to evade the Queen’s displeasure.

I think about how to promote this as I run. The Dartlore Estate is generally very well-guarded, and I don’t expect to reach the doors unmolested. But as I gain ground I realise something is amiss.

Squatting down near the first guard I find, I study his remains. All around the castle it seems every guard is dead, but their ends were not as neat or perfunctory as Viper’s — they’d fought hard.

They look to have been killed at least twelve hours ago, maybe longer.

Scowling, I rise from my haunches and look up, my teeth clenching. Spider’s gouch hooks are once more being put to their historic use, and I see two bodies hanging suspended against the wall. One, I recognise as my human spy. She’s wearing the livery of one of his servants and had been in place ever since Sophie returned to this castle. The last correspondence from her had said Sophie wasn’t pregnant, which I’d seen for myself, wasn’t true. I’d assumed she’d been compromised and dispensed with, and I hadn’t had the time or inclination to follow that up. I see now that was also a grave oversight, because the woman on the gouch hook beside her I know only too well.