APRIL 1742
Considering how extremely dull her life had been up until this point, Iris Daniels, Lady Jordan had discovered a quite colorful way to die.
Torches flamed around her on tall stakes driven into the ground. Their flickering light in the moonless night made shadows jump and waver over the masked men grouped in a circle around her.
The naked masked men.
Their masks weren’t staid black half masks, either. No. They wore bizarre animal or bird shapes. She saw a crow, a badger, a mouse, and a bear with a hairy belly and a crooked red penis.
She knelt next to a great stone slab, a primitive fallen monolith brought here centuries ago by people long forgotten. Her trembling hands were bound in front of her, her hair was coming down about her face, her dress was in a shocking state, and she suspected that she might smell—a result of having been kidnapped over three days before.
In front of her stood three men, the masters of this horrific farce.
The first wore a fox’s mask. He was slim, pale, and, judging by his body hair, a redhead.
The second wore a mask in the likeness of a young man with grapes in his hair—the god Dionysus if she wasn’t mistaken, which, oddly, was far more terrifying than any of the animal masks. He bore a dolphin tattoo on his upper right arm.
The last wore a wolf’s mask and was taller by a head than the other two. His body hair was black, he stood with a calm air of power, and he, too, bore a dolphin tattoo. Directly on the jut of his left hipbone. Which rather drew the eye to the man’s penis.
The man in the wolf’s mask had nothing to be ashamed of.
Iris shuddered in disgust and glanced away, accidentally meeting the Wolf’s mocking gaze.
She lifted her chin in defiance. She knew who this group of men was. This was the Lords of Chaos, an odious secret society composed of aristocrats who enjoyed two things: power and the rape and destruction of women and children.
These…creatures might kill her—and worse—but they would not take her dignity.
Although right now she rather yearned for her dull life.
“My Lords!” Dionysus called, raising his arms above his head in a theatrical gesture that showed very little taste. But then he was addressing an audience of nude, masked men. “My Lords, I welcome you to our spring revels. Tonight we make a special sacrifice—the new Duchess of Kyle!”
The crowd roared like the slavering beasts they were, but Iris blinked. The Duchess of…
She glanced quickly around.
As far as she could see in the macabre flickering torchlight, she was the only sacrifice in evidence and she was most certainly not the Duchess of Kyle.
The commotion began to die down.
Iris cleared her throat. “No, I’m not.”
“Silence,” the fox hissed.
She narrowed her eyes at him. Over the last three days she’d been kidnapped on her way home from the wedding of the true Duchess of Kyle, had been bound and hooded, and then shoved into a tiny stone hut without any sort of fire. She’d been forced to relieve herself in a bucket, and had been starved and given very little water. All of which had given her far too much time to contemplate her own death and what torture might precede it.
She might be terrified and alone but she wasn’t about to go down without a fight. As far as she could see she had nothing to lose and possibly her life to gain.
So she raised her voice and said clearly and loudly, “You have made a mistake. I am not the Duchess of Kyle.”
The wolf glanced at Dionysus, and for the first time he spoke, his voice smoky, “Your men kidnapped the wrong woman.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Dionysus snapped at him. “We captured her three days after her wedding to Kyle.”
“Yes, returning home to London from the wedding,” Iris said. “The Duke of Kyle married a young woman named Alf, not me. Why would I leave him if I’d just married him?”
The wolf chuckled darkly.
“She lies!” cried the fox and leaped toward her, his arm raised.
The wolf lunged, seizing the fox’s arm, twisting it up behind his back, and forcing the other man to the ground on his knees.
Iris swallowed, staring. She’d never seen a man move so swiftly.
Nor so brutally.
The wolf bent over his prey, the snout of his mask pressed against the man’s vulnerable bent neck. “Don’t. Touch. What. Is. Mine.”
“Let him go,” Dionysus barked.
The wolf didn’t move.
“Obey me,” the Dionysus said.
The wolf finally turned his mask from the fox’s neck. “You have the wrong woman, a corrupt sacrifice, one not worthy of the revel. I have the right to claim her. She is forfeit to me.”
Dionysus tilted his head as if considering. “Only by my leave.”
The wolf abruptly threw wide his arms, releasing the fox and standing up again. “Then by your leave,” he said, his words holding an edge of mockery. The firelight gleamed off his muscled chest and strong arms.
What would make a man with such natural power and grace join this gruesome society?
The other members of the Lords of Chaos didn’t seem as sanguine at the thought of having their principal entertainment for the evening snatched out from under their noses. The men around her were muttering and shifting, a restless miasma of danger hovering in the night air.
Any spark could set them off, Iris suddenly realized.
“Well?” the wolf asked the Dionysus.
“You can’t let her go,” the fox said, getting to his feet. “Why the bloody hell are you listening to him? She’s ours. Let us take our fill of her and—”
The wolf struck him on the side of the head, a terrible blow that made the fox fly backward.
“Mine,” growled the wolf. He looked at the Dionysus. “Do you lead the Lords or not?”
“I think it more than evident that I lead the Lords,” the Dionysus drawled, even as the muttering of the crowd grew louder. “And I think I need not prove my mettle by giving you this woman.”
The wolf was standing between Iris and the Dionysus and she saw the muscles on his legs tense. She wondered if the Dionysus could see that the other man was readying for battle as well.
“However,” the Dionysus continued, “I can grant her to you as an act of… charity. Enjoy her in whatever way you see fit, but remember to make sure she can never tell others about us.”
“My word,” the wolf bit out.
He grabbed Iris’s bound wrists and hauled her to her feet, dragging her stumbling behind him, as he strode through the mass of angry masked men. The crowd jostled her, shoving against her from all sides with bare arms and elbows until the wolf finally pulled her free.
She had been brought to this place hooded and for the first time she saw that it must be some sort of ruined abbey. Stones and broken arches loomed in the dark and she tripped more than once over weed-covered rubble. The spring night was chilly away from the fires, but the man in the wolf mask seemed unaffected by the elements. He continued his pace until they reached a dirt road and several waiting carriages. He walked up to one and without preamble opened the door and shoved her inside.
The door closed and Iris was left panting in the dark empty carriage.
Immediately she tried the carriage door, but he’d locked or jammed it somehow. It wouldn’t open.
She could hear men’s voices in the distance. Shouts and cries. Good Lord. She imagined a pack of wild dogs would sound the same.
She needed a weapon. Something—anything—with which to defend herself.
Hurriedly she felt the door—a handle, but she couldn’t wrench it off—a small window, no curtains—the walls of the carriage—nothing. The seats were plush velvet. Expensive. Sometimes in better-made carriages the seats…
She yanked at one.
It lifted up.
Inside was a small space.
She reached in and felt a fur blanket. Nothing else.
Damn.
She could hear the wolf’s voice just outside the carriage.
Desperately she flung herself at the opposite seat and tugged it up. Thrust her hand in.
A pistol.
The door to the carriage opened. The wolf loomed in the doorway, a lantern in one hand. She saw his eyes flick to the pistol she held between her bound hands. He turned his head and said something in a strange incomprehensible language to someone outside.
Then he got in the carriage and closed the door. He hung the lantern on a hook and sat on the seat across from her. “Put that down.”
She backed into the opposite corner as far away from him as possible, holding the pistol up. Level with his chest. “No.”
The carriage jolted into motion.
“T-tell them to stop,” she said, her voice stuttering with terror despite her resolve. “Let me go now.”
“So that they can rape you to death out there?” He tilted his head to indicate the Lords. “No.”
He reached for her and she knew she had no choice. She’d seen how he moved, how fast and how ruthlessly.
She shot him.
The blast knocked him into the seat and threw her hands up and back, narrowly missing her nose with the pistol.
Iris scrambled upright. The bullet was gone but she could still use the pistol as a bludgeon.
The wolf was sprawled across the seat, blood streaming from a gaping hole in his right shoulder. His mask had been knocked askew on his face.
She reached forward and pulled it off.
The face that was revealed had once been as beautiful as an angel’s but was now horribly mutilated. A livid red scar ran from just below his hairline on the right side of his face, bisecting the eyebrow, somehow missing the eye itself but gouging a furrow into the lean cheek and catching the edge of the upper lip on that side, making it twist. The scar ended in a missing divot of flesh in the line of the man’s severe jaw. He had inky black hair and emotionless crystal gray eyes—though they were closed now—and she recognized him.
He was Raphael de Chartres, the Duke of Dyemore, and when she’d danced with him—once—three months ago at a ball, she’d thought he’d looked like Hades.
God of the underworld.
God of the dead.
She had no reason to change her opinion now.
Then he gasped, and those cold crystal eyes opened and he glared at her. “You idiot woman. I’m trying to save you.”