Heartless (The House of Rohan 5)

He was a plump young man with a red face, soft hands, and watery blue eyes that always seemed filled with petulance or lust or occasionally both, and he’d been wanting revenge for a long time.

“What are you doing here?” He also had a nasal, high-pitched voice and a tendency to lisp his r’s, and she honored him with the haughty expression that had always infuriated him.

“I believe I work here. I assume the hospital still has the misfortune to employ you?”

He was rubbing his hand, the spot where she’d pricked him that time, and she felt a moment’s regret. Her own pain didn’t give her the right to hurt other people, even someone like Grimley, and she was about to apologize when his eyes narrowed in triumph.

“You’d best not let Mr. Fenrush see you,” he said. “The trustees told him you were going to be in charge of the students, and he was . . . displeased.”

Emma could imagine it. “I have no interest in meeting with him. I’m simply here on an errand. I don’t believe I’m scheduled to work for. . .”

“You won’t be working here again,” Grimley said triumphantly.

Emma had concluded the same thing, but irritation managed to sneak through her misery. “Is that so?” she said coolly. “According to whom?”

“You’ll see.” He turned away from her, addressing an approaching figure. “Here’s Mrs. Cadbury, Collins. She just showed up without warning.”

“I hardly think I have to give notice. . .” she began as Mr. Fenrush’s huge manservant loomed in front of her, and she took an involuntary step back before she could stop herself.

He put one heavy hand on her arm, and she looked down at the bruised knuckles, the scratched skin, before searching his face. That was bruised as well, as if he’d suffered at the fists of someone in a fury, and a strange sense of familiarity washed over her. Of course he looked familiar—she’d seen him skulking around the hospital building for the last two years she’d been training there. But it was something else, the dark eyes like currants in a pasty face, the. . .

“No,” she said, frozen in shock. Those eyes had been staring into hers as those hands tried to choke the life from her. But it was impossible, it made no sense. . .

“She’s going to faint, Collins,” Grimley said.

The hell I am, Emma thought, but she felt her knees dip slightly as if she were about to collapse, and immediately those huge, vicious hands yanked at her.

Clearly, not a man who learned his lesson. Even hampered by her skirts her kick hit her target, and Collins doubled over with the same girlish scream she’d heard a few short days ago. Grimley stumbled back in gratifying panic, and she thought she might have a chance to escape when Collins rose up in a roar, launching himself at her and then she was falling, falling and everything went dark.

It was the smell. Horse dung, urine, unwashed bodies and something else that she couldn’t quite recognize, pushing into her mouth, her nostrils, her lungs. It was the motion—she was cramped, restrained, unable to catch herself as she rolled back and forth in what had to be some kind of conveyance. It was the darkness—everything was an unbreathable blackness. Her arms were clamped to her body with heavy rope, her wrists tied even tighter.

Someone had thrust a gag in her mouth, and if she thought about where that rag might h

ave come from she would vomit, and then she could very easily choke and die. She’d seen it happen in patients who hadn’t been carefully tended. Her stomach was roiling with an onslaught of revulsion, but she willed herself to think of cold, cool things as she was tossed back and forth in the blackness and filth.

Her first sense that she wasn’t alone in whatever instrument of torture they’d placed her was when someone kicked her, hard, in her already bruised ribs. “Can’t you keep her away from me?” came Amasa Fenrush’s fretful voice.

“Could have finished her back in London,” the slow voice of his manservant answered. “Then when I dumped her in the river this time there’d be no one around to fish her back out again.”

“And when is the riverside ever deserted?” Fenrush’s tone was waspish. “She’s the one who created this debacle, and you’ve failed time and time again. We can’t risk another mistake.”

“Your mistake in the first place, telling a whore about your side business,” Collins said. “Anyone knows you can’t tell a whore anything, but no, you had to go and talk about our side business while you were having at her. What did you think, she was some holy nun and you were making your last confession?”

“She was a whore,” Fenrush said stiffly. “She shouldn’t have known what I was talking about, and besides, most trollops are dead by the time they reach twenty-five. I never thought I’d see her again.”

Collins made a disgusted noise. “Life doesn’t work out so nice, gov’nor. It’s a good thing that toff sent her to your hospital to learn her trade—else who knows who she might have told. You’re boneheaded, is all I can say.”

“May I remind you that you are my servant?” Fenrush said frostily.

“And may I remind yer bleedin’ worship that I’ve killed for you, time and again, and if those Rohans find out you have something to do with this bitch’s problems then you may as well kiss your comfortable life goodbye.”

“I’m dying of syphilis. My comfortable life is over anyway.”

Collins expressed no sympathy or regret. “At least you’re taking Mrs. Cadbury with you. Should have kept to cleaner whores, but you like a bit of the mud, don’t you?”

“It was her fault. After that young girl died she wouldn’t allow me into her tawdry establishment, and I had to make do with the filthiest of streetwalkers. If her life wasn’t about to end I’d rape her myself to make sure she died of the same disease.”

“I thought all whores had it.” Collins sounded no more than mildly curious.