Chapter Sixteen

Late that night, Patience turned in her bed, blinking and mentally sorting dream from reality. Some pieces came together while others fell away.

Except for one thing…a noise. Had she dreamed it, or had a loud thump woken her? She squinted at the window. Black. She couldn’t have been asleep more than a few hours, else a hint of color would be infusing the sky.

She lit a candle and gave Ashcroft a gentle touch on the shoulder. “Did you hear something?”

Without stirring, the marquess lifted his eyelids. His head sunk in the large downy pillow, he stared upward, going perfectly still. His pupils narrowed.

When the sound came again—a sound from outside—he pushed from bed in an instant, grabbed his banyan, and hastened from the room.

Throwing on her shift and wrapping a large shawl around her shoulders, Patience dashed out to follow.

…

Giles ran. The faint scent of smoke permeated in the air, but there was an odd note to it. It was neither pure wood smoke nor the product of coal fire. Falling icicles of fear shattered in his heart.

The stones of the bare castle passageways were frigid as the soles of his feet battered the hard surface. So frigid, in fact, it was as if any moment the floor would turn to ice that would twist up his limbs and trap him. But this wasn’t a dream; no such thing could happen.

He burst into the solar. And stopped dead. The entire room had been ransacked. Pots lay broken on the floor, spilling their contents like slain soldiers gutted on a battlefield. Easels lay overturned. Freshly stretched canvases had been slashed.

And all his work…gone.

Hot panic thumbed through his veins, scalding him from the inside out. “Where are my paintings?”

“What happened here? Who would do this?”

Startled, he whirled to face Miss Emery. The candle she held illuminated her face, gone a ghostly white as she perused the room, eyes huge.

Who indeed?

The back of Giles’s neck prickled.

From the windows overlooking the courtyard came a hellish orange glow. He stepped slowly forward, more corpse than man, hollow inside as he went to face whatever fate held. Below, a fire burned.

This was no dream. It was a nightmare burst into life. It could not have been worse had a gleaming steel blade pierced his heart. His paintings were disappearing in an angry blaze.

Before the crackling flames stood a black figure, his back to the windows where behind him Giles and Miss Emery watched. The man in the courtyard was tall and lean, his shoulders hunched just so, like he had one hand atop another on the handle of a walking stick before him. The tails of his coat picked up, curling and snapping in a sudden rush of wind.

The figure turned and caught Giles watching.

The duke. Eyes narrowing on his son, Silverlund smiled.