Page 78 of The Duke and the Darkness

But the way he looked at her, the harshness of his words… Could she bring herself to hurt him if she needed to?

“The fire is rising in you, isn’t it? The anger. The fight.” He caressed his fingers down her neck to her shoulder, where he played with the thin strap of her gown. “Marchand knew that about you, too. That’s why he always fought with you before he bedded you. But then, he always did know too much,” he muttered, a furrow forming between his brows. “Like the truth about my role in your parents’ murders.”

Peyton froze. Every muscle in her body turned to stone.

“You haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” An amused smile teased at the corners of his mouth. “All that information, all those clues you mapped out so carefully…yet you still can’t connect the pieces.”

He leaned toward her, so close she could feel the heat of his breath fanning across her cheeks, and she cringed. Even now, she couldn’t bring herself to shove him away as he deserved.She had to know,hadto learn the truth about everything that happened that night…

“I was the footman who walked ahead of the carriage that night in the fog, holding up the lamp to guide it through the city.” His eyes gleamed like brimstone. “I led them right to the attackers.”

She darted her gaze past him into the darkness, desperate for any sign of movement in the shadows that signaled Chase’s men were ready to help her. But only stillness returned her stare. They weren’t there!

Her heart plummeted. Of course they weren’t. They were outside where they were supposed to have been, watching and waiting. Like her, they would never have thought the enemy would have come from within.

“You were supposed to have been my prize that night. If Dartmoor hadn’t interfered, I would have had you.” He took a half-step back, but the relief speeding through Peyton proved short-lived when he laughed. “Better late than never.”

He lunged.

Peyton sidestepped to the left and threw up her right arm to fling away his hands as they reached for her throat. She tumbled off-balance against the banister and fell. Her back hit the stairs with a hard, teeth-jarring thud and ripped the air from her lungs. But fear kept the pain from registering in her mind, kept her fighting back with all her strength. Without a weapon to use against him, she clawed at him with her fingernails, pushed her thumbs into his eyes, scratched across his face—

With a furious growl, he shoved her hands away, but not before she grabbed at his cravat, yanked his collar away, and revealed his bare neck beneath.

A sickening horror rose up inside her as she stared at his neck where old scars cut jaggedly across his skin. The same scarsshehad put there ten years ago.Good God… Her blood froze.

“It was you that night.” Her accusation emerged as nothing more than a rasping hiss, as if straight from her nightmares. No—straight from the fires of the hell she’d been cast into once more. “It wasyou!”

He laughed, happy that she’d realized his true identity. More than happy…God help her, he wasaroused. The face leering in front of her sparked a horrible recognition inside her head, and with it came the flood of memories, terror, and helplessness she’d suppressed since the night of the attack.

That night crashed back over her as if she were once again there on the wet and cold cobblestones beside the carriage. She remembered the impenetrable whiteness of the fog, the acrid smell of the city’s coal fires…the hardness of the cobblestones beneath her hands and knees as she scrambled to crawl away, choking down the rising vomit in her throat at the sounds and movements around her. No one heard her screams. No one was coming to help! Then a hand caught her ankle and yanked her to the ground, dragging her back as her fingertips dug into the cobblestones so hard that her nails tore away. She kicked and clawed as she fought with every last bit of strength to somehow stay alive. Sticky blood trickled from the scrapes on her hands and knees, and her throat burned, raw from the relentless screams that tore from her and echoed off the empty buildings around her.

It wasn’t until all the air expelled from her lungs that she realized she was once again screaming for her life.

“That’s it,” Wilkins panted as he used his strength and size to pin her to the stairs beneath him. “Put up a grand fight. Make it worth my while.” He grabbed her by the throat with one hand while he shoved the other between them to grasp at her skirt and yank it up past her knees, baring her legs.

With an enraged cry, she kneed him hard between his legs.

Air whooshed out of him like a burst balloon, and he sank onto his side with a plaintive cry.

She scrambled up the stairs, desperate to get away. There was no going down. She would never be able to safely crawl past him, even with him doubled over in pain. The only way to survive was up.

An animal-like growl rose from behind her as she scrambled up the stairs as quickly as she could, ignoring the loud rip of her skirts as the hem caught beneath her feet. But she didn’t dare stop, didn’t dare slow down even to glance back. She could hear him pounding up the stairs after her, charging right behind on her heels. He was so close that he was almost on top of her when she’d reached the third-floor landing, when her hand grabbed the banister and she propelled herself into the nursery.

She slammed the door after herself so hard that the wall shook. She reached to throw the lock—

There was no lock! No key, no bolt. With an anguished cry, she’d remembered that the nursery had never been locked. Her parents had forbidden it. For her own safety. They hadn’t wanted to risk that she’d ever be accidentally locked inside.

Desperately, she grabbed one of the little chairs at her doll’s tea table and jammed it under the handle.

She backed away from the door as Wilkins’s footsteps reached the landing, then paused. He knew where she’d gone—for God’s sake, there was only one door on this floor!—but the silence of that pause boomed over her like thunder, then slithered up her spin when it gave way to the metallic turn of the handle, the soft banging of it against the little chair that kept him from opening it so easily.

The handle fell still.

Peyton held her breath, afraid to move, even to breathe, as a thousand needles of helplessness pricked her skin. She staredat the door, and all her heightened senses strained to figure out what he was doing behind it, why he wasn’t coming after her.

Then came the sound of running footsteps. Cold terror spiked in her chest as she suddenly realized—

Wilkins let out a fierce yell and rammed into the door like a bull, shoving his shoulder into it and bashing it open. The door flung back and slammed against the wall. For one moment, his lanky frame was silhouetted against the moonlight shining through the doorway as he paused.