I stepped forward with a snarl marring my face, rage like an ice storm ravishing my body. “You can throw around metaphors, burn symbols, and taunt me for a perceived weakness that is truthfully a strength. You can do it all, but those are the hollow mechanisms of a fucking monster, Noel. In the end, even if it takes me an entire lifetime, I’ll see you burn just like that collar.”
I turned on my heel to leave, then thought the better of it and swung back. Noel was already returning to his desk, so he wasn’t prepared for my tackle. He fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes and lay prone as I smashed one of my massive fists into his face. I felt the crunch of his nose under the pressure and knew that, for the second time, I had broken it.
He coughed and gurgled through the spill of blood flowing down his face, and I leaned close enough to feel the spray of pink tinged spittle against my skin. “I told you once, and I will tell you once more, Noel. You touch one hair on Cosima, and I’ll kill you with my bare fucking hands. And that’s a vow I take much more seriously than any I ever made to your precious defunct Order.”
I pushed up from the floor and strode to the door, not hesitating even though I wanted to, when Noel whispered wetly, “Too late for that, son.”
I told myself it was a bluff, that he only needed a way to save face, but I knew the moment I stepped out of Pearl Hall’s massive double doors and saw Riddick pale as a sheet of paper standing beside the car that something was terribly, woefully wrong.
“Tell me,” I demanded as I crunched over the gravel on long steps. I slapped the roof of the car beside him, and snarled, “Tell me, man!”
“Cosima, milord,” was his response, broken up by horror and rage so that his words fell like shards to the ground between us. “She’s been shot.”
She was in a white bed in a white room in a hospital filled with utilitarian white things. I blinked hard at the sight of my strong, passionate beauty shriveled up and utterly still in such a stark home.
She deserved beauty around her at every minute of every day. Elegant furnishings, jewels at her slim, long throat, and flowers to scent her air. She deserved to look like the duchess she would one day become as she lay there fighting for her life.
My chest felt like a cavern of ice as I listened to the monitors she was hooked up to hum and beep with more life than she exhibited herself. I wanted to be able to breathe for her, to give my life in exchange for her own if it came to that.
But it wouldn’t.
I’d already put in the calls. The best doctors in the goddamn world were on their way to fix her. Riddick was at the florist demanding poppies and dahlias, exotic tiger lilies and fragrant roses, anything to enliven my sleeping beauty and help her fight even in her unconsciousness.
I walked fully into the doorframe, ready to claim my place by her side, but a red-headed woman blocked my entry.
“Excuse me,” I said politely because even though I wanted to forcibly knock her out of my way to get to Cosima faster, I was well bred.
She spun to face me, her flame gold hair catching the yellow fluorescent lights and gleaming so bright it made me blink.
Her mouth hung open as she stared up at me, curiously mute. I reined in my impatience and looked over at Cosima again, noticing the two people sitting at her bedside.
A man I instantly wanted to throttle for being so close to her until I noticed his pink and purple pinstripe suit and matching ascot.
And a woman, another redhead, though this one was dark haired with a face cut into fierce angles.
Cosima’s sisters.
Half-sisters.
I wondered if they knew that, or if Cosima had kept them in the dark.
The dark, I decided, because my beauty wouldn’t want them to suffer any pain in knowing.
The one sitting blinked once, her mouth slack with admiration, before her features closed like iron shutters and she jumped to her feet, moving around the bed to block my wife from my view.
My fists curled into heavy hammers at my sides.
“You have the wrong room,” she told me with her nose hiked in the air.
A brief flash of admiration cracked my manic resolve. This sister had to be Elena, the woman with more brain than soul, the one who read everything she could get her hands on in the slums of Napoli, and who handled herself like a princess even when she’d been no more than a pauper.