In the gray light of morning, she slept uneasily—and naked, the sheet twined about her like Eve’s serpent. He touched her, her cheek, her ear, her hair. He should not touch her again. But that knowledge only made the illicit, forbidden sensation of her wholly and sharply arousing.

She shifted, revealing a small smear of blood on the bed, a sight that hit him with the force of a stone to the temple. He remembered very well what had transpired the night before, but to stare at the evidence, to know that she would see it too…

He covered her and stepped away from the bed. From her. What had happened to him? His plans had been simple: The marriage would exist in name only, until the time came for a convenient annulment. The execution of such a plan had promised to be equally simple: She wanted to be near him about as much as a fish wanted a walk.

And yet he had failed.

He’d meant only to put her to sleep. Instead, he’d allowed himself to be seduced by a Machiavellian virgin.

Her skin had been velvet, her hair silk, her body a geometrician’s fantasy of curves. And yet her fleshly charms had not been his downfall. His undoing had been the pleasure she took in his company, her wholehearted, drunk-naïve delight—her inebriated infatuation.

Part of him had perceived perfectly that she was stewed, that she was not herself, and that the stars in her eyes were but reflections of the Sauternes flooding her veins. But it had not been the clear-seeing part of him in charge last night. It had been the lonely, deprived, stupid him, the one who was still affected by her smiles, who was all too eager to let a mere bottle of whiskey be excuse enough. When she gazed at that him with wonder and marvel, when she murmured that he made her happy, when she touched him as if he were made of God’s own sinews, nothing else had mattered.

Illusions, all illusions. He’d gladly succumbed to their seduction, to that false sense of intimacy and connection. And if it had not been for her cry of pain shattering the bubble—

He looked back at her. She stirred, whimpering as she did so.

I want more.

More what?

More you.

And he had believed her. More fool he.

The room he’d marched into the night before and marked for his own contained her belongings. Most of her things were in two large trunks, but there were walking boots, gloves, hats, and jackets scattered about.

On the writing desk sat her treasure chest, approximately fourteen inches wide, nine inches deep, and eleven inches high, with a lid that was curved on the top and flat on the bottom. Vere had already looked through its contents, which, except for the Delacroix, were souvenirs meaningful only to her.

He opened the chest again and looked at her parents’ wedding photograph. Such antecedents—his father would have expired of an apoplexy. He had not even mentioned in front of Freddie the worst Lady Avery had told him; that given her birth date six months after the wedding, no one knew for certain whether her father was really Andrew Edgerton, her mother’s husband, or Algernon Edgerton, Andrew Edgerton’s uncle and Charlotte Edgerton’s erstwhile protector.

Absently he ran his thumb down the underside of the edge of the lid. Something caught his attention—a tiny aperture, and then another one, and another. He turned on the electric light, opened the chest fully, and peered at it.

The chest was inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl on the exterior and padded with green velvet on the interior. The underside of the lid too was lined in green velvet, except around the edges, which were painted with scrolls and cartouches.

The slits, almost invisible, narrowly scored the left edge of the lid down the center of a black stripe. They were thin as a fingernail and little more than a quarter inch in length. He examined the right edge of the lid. The same, a line of tiny slits.

What were they, decorative grilles?

A knock at the suite’s door startled him. Reluctantly he left the chest to answer the door: it was the arrival of his breakfast, along with a cable from Lady Kingsley.

My dear Lord and Lady Vere,

It is with much relief that I inform you all traces of the rats have been eradicated from Woodley Manor. And although we still have yet to discover the culprits behind the prank, the local constable is eagerly on the case.

Lady Vere will be relieved to know of my guests’ orderly departure from Highgate Court yesterday, under Lady Avery’s oversight. She will also perhaps be relieved to know that Mr. Douglas had yet to return as of this writing—a delivery boy I passed on my way into the village assured me that he’d just come from Highgate Court and that the master of the manor remained absent.

I enclose many more congratulations on your marriage.

Eloisa Kingsley

He stuck the telegram into his pocket, returned to the bedroom, and scrutinized the chest further. With the blade of his razor he sliced off a fraction of a calling card and folded that fragment into a thin, but still relatively stiff stem. The slits were not deep; most of them cut into the lid’s edge by barely one-sixth of an inch. But there were two slits—one on either side of the lid—into which the card stem sank more than half an inch.

He suddenly remembered the minuscule key in the safe in Mrs. Douglas’s room.

Elissande awoke to an epic clash in her head. Or rather, a titanic clash. For weren’t the Titans defeated by Zeus? Her head, too, must have been split by a thunderbolt. She pried her eyelids apart, then squeezed them shut immediately. The room was unbearably bright, as if someone had shoved a torch directly into her eye socket. Her head splintered further in protest. Her innards, in contrast, decided to die in slow, roiling agony.

She moaned. The sound exploded in her ears, discharging shrapnel of pure pain deep into her brain.

How ironic that she was not even dead, when she was already fully in the embrace of hell.

Someone removed the blanket that covered her. She shivered. The person, careful not to jostle her, further disentangled her from more sheets that were twisted and bunched about her. She shivered again. She was vaguely aware that she was not wearing much—if anything. But she could not care; she was skewered on Beelzebub’s spit.

Something cool and silky settled around her. Her unresponsive arms were lifted and stuffed into sleeves. A dressing gown?

Slowly she was turned around. She whimpered: The movement had intensified the pounding in her skull. Once she was facing up, her head was raised, causing her to cry out.

“Here,” said a man’s voice, his arm strong about her. “A cure for your bad head. Drink it.”

The liquid that came into her mouth was the vilest concoction she’d ever tasted, swamp ooze and rotten eggs.

She sputtered. “No.”

“Drink it. You’ll feel better.”

She whimpered again. But there was something at once authoritative and soothing about the voice, and something at once authoritative and soothing about the way he held her. She complied.

She stopped to gag after every swallow, but he kept tipping the cup at her lips and she, gasping and rasping, drank.

After she’d swallowed every last drop of the foul brew, he gave her water, and she’d never tasted anything so sweet. She gulped eagerly, thirstily, happy to feel the water spilling down her chin. When she’d at last had enough, she turned away from the glass and pressed her face into his chest.

His waistcoat was a very fine material, the linen of his shirt soft and warm. Her head still banged awfully, but she was—she was safe. She had a protector, for once, someone who cradled and looked after her and who smelled wonderful at the same time.