Dark and Stormy Knights (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 0.80)

“I’m coming. I’ll find you,” she tried to reassure him, only to hear another soulful moan.

Her right foot hit chilling iron, and she dropped to her haunches. Feeling the links of chain, she could tell they were encrusted from years of use. She felt her way toward him, using the iron as a guide.

His hot breath hit her face, a panting heat of desperation as he clasped her shoulders. Without being able to see his eyes or read his expression, she didn’t understand what he was clearly begging of her.

“Tell me,” she urged, reaching toward him. She felt a sweat-slicked chest, smelled the heavy odor of captivity all over his skin. “I don’t know what you need!”

I am not allowed . . . to speak.

“You just did. Now.”

Inside . . . you. Only. By . . . my will.

“Then do it again.”

Grimy fingers felt her face, her jaw, her mouth, more desperate and aggressive than he’d been in any of the previous dreams. She mirrored the gesture, trying to absorb him, to comprehend what he needed. “Tell . . . me,” she whispered, feeling the heat of her own tears as they rolled down her face.

Freedom. Life.

He released her, shoving her backward, and for a dim, black moment she would have sworn she heard the rustle of fur. The click of nails

upon decaying stone.

But then there was only piercing light and the drone of her noise machine.

Claude insisted on overseeing every moment of her work as she handcrafted the costly puzzle he’d commissioned, and although it should have made her nervous to have him seated just beyond the penumbra of light, studying her with his shrewd gray blue eyes, she found his presence oddly soothing. The illogic of that effect, how counterintuitive it was to his physical demeanor and shady behavior, didn’t even bother her.

Her new patron revealed few secrets as to his own provenance, and she was fine with that fact, but not with how closemouthed he remained about her knight. With the painting nearly complete, she grew frustrated with his lack of communication.

“Look, Claude, I need to know who he is,” she said, studying the scene on her easel. It was an image of a dazzling, armored knight battling a lion—just as he had requested. It was also a radically different painting from the one she’d created on her three previous attempts to free the warrior.

Claude had been very detailed in his specifications for the puzzle’s image. From the man’s golden hair—to be applied with the Templar bullion—to his height and weaponry, to the other knights watching his display of gallant bravery. Even in his description of the open Bible that a monklike figure held, standing off to the far left side of the display. His insistence upon twin deer appearing in the far background only made her laugh. Talk about medieval stereotypes; Claude produced them in spades.

“What are the deer really doing?” she asked at one point, but he merely inclined his head.

“They are part of our scene, Anna. Would you deny them entry?”

As long as nobody in the painting sat in a deer stand, her southern girl soul was fine with including the creatures. So she worked at the canvas day after day, compliant as she fulfilled each of her money man’s specifications.

Now, all that remained to finish the painting was to apply the Templar gold to her knight’s armor, and if the gleam of his radiant hair was any indication, he would be truly breathtaking once she finalized the piece.

“He is magnificent,” Claude murmured, his accented declaration filled with wonder. Admiration.

And something much darker that caused her to turn and face him.

“Not what you expected?” she asked, sliding her wire frames atop her head.

Claude’s gray blue eyes were fixed on the knight, widening, then narrowing. “He is . . . alive. Is he not?”

“In some world. I guess.” She folded both arms across her chest, not caring that they were covered in paint and that she’d get her smock even dirtier. “Who is he? Like I said, it’s time you told me what I’m involved in here.”

Claude kept his eyes locked on the representation. “You will have your answers, Anna. Keep working,” he answered, exactly as he had from the beginning.

“His name. That’s fair,” she insisted, tossing her dark ponytail over her left shoulder. “With all he’s put me through? Totally fair.”

Claude stepped back out from beneath the lights, reclaiming his place in the shadows. “In due time. First, you must finish. It is time to apply the gold.”

There was a rustling sound from his seat at her work desk, the brush of velvet against rough hardness, and suddenly she was holding the satchel. He’d kept it from her except for that one hour when he’d instructed her to use gold for the knight’s hair.