Read Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles for Free Online

by remaining where I stood—or perhaps it was his spite I obliged. The eyes he settled upon me were not welcoming, nor were they kind as they had so often been in my previous engagements with the man.
    Piers Everard Compton had always been the second son, the spare who had enjoyed his time in the gaming hells and stews of London low with great relish. I had met him once in passing within an opium den, but did not know his identity then.
    He had not known mine, either.
    Through his elder brother’s pursuit, Lord Piers had been something of an enigma. He’d liked me well enough, and had gifted me with a journal that my mother had given his own. I appreciated his friendship, and I thought him both witty and a little bit reckless.
    I had liked him easily in turn. I had thought that we might be friends.
    Until his brother—my husband—was murdered on our wedding day.
    The grief I had felt must have been nothing as to what Lord Piers had suffered. For my part, the faded remnants of it five months later had not dulled the bite.
    I looked down at his shoulder. “Please don’t call that name here,” I said quietly. Though I recognized none of the sweets, it did not mean that my name would go unremarked.
    His hand, gloved as it should be, caught a brown lock of hair. “I never thought to see you here again.”
    I flinched. He dropped the curl, where it settled over my shoulder.
    “Are you acting a harlot tonight?” he asked coolly. “Should I expect a showing?”
    That hurt too, but only for the truth of it.
    As those given to a certain peculiarity of hedonism, he had been there when Hawke and the Veil had revealed my identity to an audience. He had seen with his own eyes the madness of the unveiling Hawke had forced upon me. Though he too had a taste for the Turkish tar, I found it more likely that he recalled more than I, who had been too far gone on the stuff.
    What he made of the chaos unleashed by sorcery and alchemy and bloody mutiny, I dared not ask.
    I could not meet those eyes now. “Please, my lord.”
    “Should I strip off that hair and reveal you for them, then?” he pressed, and when he stepped towards me, my body tensed. The closeness of his face to mine filled my nostrils with the stinging reek of brandy, vapors so strong that my eyes watered with it.
    He was soused. And in it, aggressive.
    Another time, and I might have let Lord Piers take out a bit of his justified anger upon me, if for no other reason than for guilt’s sake. He was a gentleman, but I could not fault him for considering me less than a lady.
    I swiftly shuffled through all those things I had learned at Ashmore’s side, searching for the one that might defuse the whole of this situation. Unfortunately, I had not come prepared with any alchemical concoctions ready-made, and I had only mastered the first two of the Trumps used by them what practiced the art. None would help me, for neither
Apis
nor
Bacatus-Typhon
contained power that would matter in this particular arena. I had not progressed into the third Trump that followed both, and try as I might, there was no symbolism wrapped within either I could apply. More so, Ashmore would have my hide for his wall if I dared apply the exoteric arts in front of so many eyes.
    I was stripped of all weapons but my wits.
    And the blade bound to my calf—though I could not imagine using it upon a man who had once been so dear.
    I had not drawn blood since my father’s.
    I was all too weary of it.
    Lord Piers—Earl Compton, in truth, but I could not bring myself to think of him as such—bent forward, reaching for a part of me within grasp. Shoulder, hair, arm—I wasn’t certain which. I snapped a hand around his wrist, thicker than my fingers could encircle. “Don’t do this.”
    He bared his teeth in something of a smile. “What have we to lose?”
    Damnation and a thousand bloody bells.
    I had nothing by which to buy his silence, and a debt of owing so large that I wasn’t certain any