Chapter 2
London, England
Early morn
Since his wife had been cut down on the muddied cobblestones of Mayfair three hundred and fifty days earlier, there was not much William Helling, the Duke of Aubrey, had to be grateful for.
On the days that his head was not throbbing from the injury sustained in that crash, the memories of Adeline’s sightless eyes staring up, untrained on anything but the sky above, ravaged his mind.
Quiet.
That was the one, small, remaining gift left to him in an otherwise desolate world.
And even that should be taken from him on this day.
The rap on his chamber doors might as well have been a thundering pounding, for the break in stillness that had become such a part of this household, one previously so full of life and laughter and—
He dragged a pillow over his head, trying to will the sound gone.
The reflexive movement inadvertently sent pain shooting to his temples.
Rolling onto his side, he covered his head with his hands, a groan tearing from him, muffled by his pillow and lost to the sputtering snores of the two women at his sides.
Moments later, the door opened, and William shoved the pillow aside enough to see who’d entered his chambers.
Reeve Stone stepped inside. “You’ve a visitor, Your Grace,” he announced in his gravelly voice. His heavily scarred face gave no outward notice of the barely clad whores in the throes of sleep, or the gentleman he served who writhed in his bed like a wounded beast. Not a once-great leader. But then, Stone had long ago earned a reputation as the most ruthless member to ever serve in the ranks of the Brethren.
And now he played at the role of caregiver.
A bloody waste of his efforts, and a mark of the obstinacy of all those bastards.
William’s brother stepped into the room, the most obstinate of all the bastards. A different groan, one born of frustration and not agony, pulled from him. Lying on his back, he slapped his palms over his face.
The well-sated crimson-haired beauty emitted a bleating snort, but remained sleeping.
Edward frowned. With an ease better suited to the role of Sovereign than William himself commanded, his younger brother clapped his hands loudly. “That will be all,” he called out.
Shrieking, both women popped up. Eyes heavy with sleep and red from the bottles of spirits the three of them had consumed hours ago, they searched the room.
“You are looking better than you usually do,” Edward greeted William as he picked his way around the room, fishing the scandalous gowns from the floor.
“Get out,” William mumbled.
Ignoring him, Edward tossed the garments to William’s latest bed partners. “It is time to leave, ladies,” he drawled.
“The evening’s only begun,” the more voluptuous beauty slurred.
“It is afternoon, and you are done here,” Edward said crisply.
They pouted, glancing briefly to William, and when no words of protest were forthcoming, they climbed from the mattress and quickly dressed.
“Need a visit tomorrow, Your Grace?” the shorter, plumper, blonde beauty offered, flashing him an enticing, yellow-toothed smile.
Need a visit? From them? William needed nothing. Those fleeting moments of mindless bliss provided by the string of actresses and whores were mere distractions. “Tomorrow,” William agreed.
Edward watched the exchange with disapproval in his hard eyes. Returning to the doorway, he held the oak panel, ushering the women into the hall.
William scoffed. How easy it was for one to be disapproving of how he now lived his life. His brother’s once-turbulent marriage was now a blissful one. He had a son and a babe on the way. All gifts that William would now never know.
His heart clenched, and he angled his head away from the sight of his brother.
“Use the servants’ stairs,” Edward called out to the women as they stepped into the hall. When they’d gone, Edward shut the door behind them.
Without hesitation, his brother moved deeper into the room, and as casually as pulling up a chair at White’s, he dragged the leather armchair closer to where William lay and sat there—in silence.
The quiet was a telling statement of control from a man who had no intention of leaving.
There was a time when Edward would have obeyed, at all costs, an order to get out. There was a time when he would have dropped a bow and beat a hasty retreat, regardless of their fraternal relationship.
But that had been before, when William had been the respected, all-powerful Sovereign and leader of the Brethren. When people had answered to him and found themselves among the ranks of the Brethren, or dead—whatever command had dripped from his lips on a given day.
Back when I was a living, breathing man… and not… this.
He laid his arms out and stared up through his greasy hair at the nauseatingly cheerful mural overhead. And then promptly closed his eyes. But it was too late. The pale pinks, blues, and purples of chubby cherubs flitted past, ushering in the past. Ushering in a singsong voice filled with a purity and enthusiasm reserved only for children.
There are angels, William. They are so very beautiful. I should like them painted upon my own ceiling, so I feel closer to you—
“I’ve come with news.”
William blinked, cursing the interruption, railing in his mind at Edward for stealing the sound of a voice that had become increasingly distorted in its clarity.
I’ve come with news. Something else familiar in a world that had been flipped upside down, with no meaning or order to it.
That phrase had once been shared by agents revealing the status of their assignments. Long ago, a thrill had accompanied that revelation, excitement that had come only from his work with the most secret branch of the Home Office, answering only to the king.
In the end, an unwillingness to abandon that thrill and be grateful for what would be fleeting happiness with a woman he’d never deserved had cost him everything.
Guilt stabbed at his chest, a thousand dull blades that, with the mere remembrance of her name, unfailingly found their mark.
Edward hooked a knee across his opposite ankle. “There was a time that statement would have had you demanding every last detail,” his brother finally said.
William stared grimly overhead, refusing to answer.
After all, what was there to say?
He’d been forever changed. Broken, shattered, and destroyed, a fate he’d exacted on other men.
Mayhap this had been his punishment, then.
Only, she had paid the ultimate price.
“I’ve found someone to help you.”
That pierced the fog.
William angled his head sideways, peering at his brother through the slick, disheveled strands covering his eyes.
“I see I have your attention.”
How the roles had been reversed between them. Two years younger, Edward had looked up to William, come to him for guidance when they’d been boys. When he’d been admitted into the Brethren, with William as his superior, the role of elder sibling in possession of knowledge and experiences that his brother wasn’t had shifted a fraction, morphing into a relationship that was similar and yet different in every way.
“I don’t want help.”
Edward shifted in his chair, rolling his shoulders. “It does not escape my attention that you do not deny needing help.”
“I don’t need help,” he said belatedly, the words coming out thick. His tongue struggled to form words that were slightly garbled from another evening of drinking and his aching jaw.
“I’m your younger brother, William,” his sibling said gently. “Your inferior in rank, skill, and place within the Brethren. I’m not, however, a simpleton.”
His inferior in rank? If that were indeed true, it would be Edward’s life that had been upended. His wife lost. His head broken. His mouth unable to form coherent words.
And it was another dark mark upon his worthless soul that, for a fraction of a moment, he wished it had been Edward. That his own life had been left intact, his wife spared.
He felt Edward’s gaze on him.
“Your initial rejection of help spoke more clearly than your useless denial.”
William remained fixed on the hated mural. What would it be to paint over it? To make the jubilant smiles and overjoyed expressions go away. But then, that would require people to enter this place, to steal this room that was a sanctuary of sorts.
Nay, a prison. He’d made it into the cell he deserved.
“Are you listening to me?” Edward asked impatiently.
“No,” he said in a deadened tone.
“You’ve a family that cares about you. A family that needs you.” Edward paused. “Leo needs you.”
That arrow found its mark. Leopold, his nephew and godson, a far-too-clever-for-his-own-good lad, had been born with a perpetual air of sadness upon the passing of William’s sister.
So many people failed. My wife. My sister, who I let marry a blackhearted devil. Leo.
His tongue grew heavy, the craving for a drink hitting like a physical blow to his senses.
“You are not even curious about the person I’ve brought to help you?” his brother was saying. “You have no questions? A well-planned interrogation? You always do.”
Correction, William always had. But that had been before. What Edward, Bennett, Stone, and all the ranking members of the Brethren failed to realize was that one had to care to put questions forward. There was nothing for which William cared enough to rouse himself from his room. “Get out,” he repeated for a second time.
Edward chuckled, the first laugh he’d heard from his brother—or anyone—in a year. It grated. And what scraped his nerves raw more was the damned need to know what had his younger sibling so amused. And God help him, he hated him all the more for being able to laugh when William had forever lost the ability.
“You want to ask me,” Edward correctly surmised. “You wish to know what I could possibly have found humor in that I’d freely laugh before you, that I could manage it.”
William scrubbed a hand over tired eyes. Damn Edward for knowing him far more than he’d ever credited. Just another area of his miserable existence in which he’d pompously overestimated his own skills.
The leather groaned, indicating his brother had shifted in his chair. “Because you are my brother, I will take pity on you one more time—”
“I don’t want your pity,” he rasped, and pain exploded at his temples from the echo of his own voice in his ears.
“—and tell you what has me so amused,” Edward went on as if William hadn’t strung together the most words he had in a year for his benefit. “It is what you said.”
William had once been perceptive and quick to make sense of dialogue.
His brother’s smile faded. “You don’t recall what we were speaking of,” he said quietly, with a dawning understanding in his like eyes.
William angled his head away from Edward, training it on the rumpled sheets of his four-poster bed, which took up a large portion of the center of his rooms. He’d picked out hidden meanings conveyed by adversaries, expressed in nothing more than a look and a grunt. As such, the last vestige of a pride he’d already thought shattered snapped in that instant over his inability to follow what his brother was talking about and what he’d previously said.
A failure. You are a bloody, blasted, pathetic excuse of a man.
And they wished him to resume his roles and responsibilities with the Brethren. They were as mad as he’d become.
“You told me to get out,” Edward reminded him. “Those are the same words tossed at me by the one person I believe can help you.”
Because Edward still had not given up on the foolish hope that William could be somehow fixed.
“And you brought him anyway,” he said emotionlessly. As dulled as his reflexes and ability to think had become, he was still astute enough to know his brother wouldn’t have failed to bring forth anyone if he so wished it.
Edward chuckled again. “You presume much.” Shoving to his feet, he stepped over the tangle of Williams’ garments and made a path to the armoire. Without asking or awaiting permission, he opened the rose-inlaid doors and fished around the dark articles that hung there.
More than a year out of fashion, the garments stood frozen in time, a reminder of what life had been when he’d donned the finely tailored pieces. Happy. A man wholly content with the world and his place in it.
He’d been so blinded by a belief in his own infallibility. Until it had been too late.
“Here,” Edward murmured, withdrawing a jacket, trousers, and shirt. Returning with his arms full, he stopped so that he hovered above William. “You stink like sweat and whores.”
“Because I spent the early morn hours bedding two whores,” he said flatly. He’d shrived them until he’d passed out in blessed oblivion, and they’d drunk themselves into a like stupor.
His brother grunted. “You’ll need to bathe.” Shifting the garments to his left arm, Edward fished out the familial watch fob given to every Helling male and consulted the timepiece. “Eventually,” he amended as he let the chain fall between his fingers. “You do not have time.”
Ironically, all that William had left in this world was time. Too much of it. Each day stretched on, eternal, both a purgatory and a hell combined, a waiting room of sorts until he would find himself burning alongside Satan for all the wrongs he’d done on this earth.
“William?” Edward urged.
“I’ve no intention of meeting anyone whom you believe will”—he peeled his lip in a sneer—“help me.”
Edward tossed the swiftly wrinkling garments onto the chair he’d vacated moments ago. They landed with a solid thump.
For a moment, William believed his younger brother would go and, this time, finally leave him be. He hoped for it, wanting him gone, so he could…
What? Lie here and wait for an end that will not come?
Alas, he still apparently had not yet learned the folly in hope.
Edward dropped to a knee. “You cannot go on like this.”
He spoke as though William had a choice. As though everything that had come before could be set aside and forgotten, all the suffering and pain undone because, for the world, time enough had passed. But this was William’s life. And what had come before could not be untangled from who he’d become.
“You were happy before Adeline,” Edward went on.
Wrong. William had been a carefree rogue, seducing widows and unhappy wives, all the while believing himself happy. He hadn’t been.
“If you cannot move on from the loss of A—”
William skewered him with a single look, silencing the remainder of the name he didn’t want to hear spoken aloud.
“From the loss,” his brother substituted, “then do so for the Brethren. You’ve not been severed from your position.”
“Because the king is as mad as the world proclaims him to be,” he muttered.
“You are needed. For the good of king and—”
“To hell with king and country,” he rasped, struggling up onto his elbows. William pushed himself upright and swung his legs, weak under him, over the side of the bed. “King and country can rot.” And he’d not feel an ounce of emotion over the loss, because he was incapable of feeling anything. They’d taken it all from him. Because he’d allowed it. He’d cared about the Brethren and his role within that noble organization more than anyone or anything else and hadn’t realized until it had all been taken away that the Brethren and his role within it was nothing but rubbish. All of it.
Grief knifed at him, rolling together with guilt and lancing at wounds that would never heal.
“You don’t mean that,” Edward said somberly.
He did. He’d not, however, debate the point with his brother, whose life within the Brethren and with his wife was still whole. As such, he couldn’t understand.
One didn’t… until it was too late.
William stood on unsteady feet, and Edward rose alongside him. “Tell him to find another.”
“The order of succession is clear. The only way for you to be severed from the role is through a direct appeal to the king or by a lack-of-confidence petition made by at least three members of the Brethren.”
He chuckled, the sound rusty and sharp. “I’m sure you can find a good deal more.”
“No one will betray you, William. Therefore, you are the only one who can end your service to the Brethren, by petitioning the king yourself.” Edward gave him a pointed look. “And I believe the fact that you haven’t indicates that, for all your protestations, you have not given up on the work you do.”
A mirthless laugh, bleak, black, and empty, rattled William’s chest. “Is that what you believe? That I want this title? You are a bloody fool.” But then, why shouldn’t Edward believe that? William had displayed a single-minded devotion to his role and the organization.
Edward didn’t so much as flinch at the invective tossed at him. “Very well, then the Brethren can go hang,” he said in hushed tones. Damning words that, if overheard, would see him absolved of his role. “The others, the members, they are concerned about the implications for the Brethren.” He took a step toward William. “I care about what happens to you. You were fortunate enough to survive. I don’t want to see you like this anymore.”
Like what? Battered by headaches, eerily empty, incapable of feeling… of being around anyone.
Edward settled a hand on his shoulder. “You must at least want justice.”
“Justice,” he repeated, the echo dripping with condescension. “Justice is the rubbish of books and ancient legends.” What good would justice do? It would change nothing. The woman whose safety and happiness had fallen to him had been failed. Whoever his enemy was, and the number of suspects was undoubtedly vast, he—or she—had won. The only end that would see him nameless foe ultimately triumph was William’s death, and that was a fate he’d prayed for daily over the past year.
“I’ll not bother you any further…”
“Good. Do not.”
“I’ll ask you but one more time to think of your godson.”
Leo. His bookish nephew’s somber visage flashed in his mind’s eye.
Had his brother always been this damned tenacious? William ground his teeth, and as soon as he did, agony bolted along his jawline. He swallowed back a gasp, refusing to give in to the pain. William struggled for control of it.
Edward held William’s gaze, his eyes tortured. “This is not who you are.”
“You are wrong,” he said flatly. Pinpricks of pain dotted his vision. “And furthermore…” He sank back into the mattress. “No one can help me.”
In the days following the attack, when William had hovered between life and death, the king’s best, most-skilled doctors had tended him. Not a single one had managed to rouse him. And when William had at last opened his eyes to a blurred world and a buzzing in his ears, they hadn’t helped then either. Instead, he’d drawn forth only fragmented memories that, when put together, did not make a whole story. Those gaps remained still, with only Adeline’s terrified screams cementing the experience.
His temples pulsed, and a sharp ache radiated along his jaw.
“But if someone could…” Edward dangled. “A life free of pain. One where you don’t spend your days bedding whores and losing yourself in drunken oblivion.”
William fixed on the former part of that enticement. Those five words hung there, a temptation.
A life free of pain.
What his brother spoke of was not an emotional healing that could never come, but rather, the healing of a physical wound that had turned William into a prisoner in his own household. It was a gift he didn’t deserve, but he’d always been selfish. He proved as much now.
Wordlessly, William nodded slowly. The movement and the extensive talking he’d done this day sent agony lancing through him.
Edward opened and closed his mouth several times. “I… I… I will return shortly.” And as if he feared William would change his mind and toss him and the supposed savior out on their arses, his brother rushed off.
As soon as the door clicked shut behind Edward, William hunched over and gave in to the pain that the exchange had cost him. Curling into a ball, he moaned.
Edward insisted that he was fortunate to be alive. When, in truth, his nameless enemy had notched the ultimate victory, for William had survived when death would have been easier… and preferable.