Her Dark Curiosity (The Madman’s Daughter #2)(39)
Author: Megan Shepherd

The cold wrapped around my arms. I glanced back through the glass door at the candlelit ballroom, where a girl in a swan mask glided and laughed. Overhead, the stars and the moon shone as brightly as before, and I cursed them. Darkness was what I needed now. A place to hide.

The door opened again. The man in the wolf mask stepped onto the balcony. We might as well have been the only two at the party, alone outside under the stars, only a few feet of flagstone separating us.

I wouldn’t let it end like this.

I ran down the staircase into the garden, knowing that the dark boughs of the hedges were the perfect place for a murder, but also my only chance of drawing him away from the crowd and escaping. At the end of the garden was a gate that led into the back alley, and from there I could lose him in the streets.

The man in the mask started down the stairs after me.

The garden hedges behind Lucy’s house were as familiar to me as the basement hallways of King’s College. So many memories here: Lucy and I exploring every inch of this garden, chasing fairies, playing Catch the Huntsman. That was my one advantage—I knew the maze of hedges, and the Beast did not.

I darted behind the closest hedge wall. It had thinned with age, and I could peek between the branches to see the man approaching. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back to make sure no one had followed us outside, then moved toward the hedges. I darted to the next row as snow soaked into my satin slippers. They’d be ruined. It hardly mattered. I just had to reach the back gate and pray I could climb over.

I froze and listened. The hedges were fuller here and blocked my view. He could be anywhere.

I took a deep breath and darted around the hedge wall, past another row until I reached the brick wall. The black gate loomed ahead. Just a few more paces . . .

A hand came out of the shadows and grabbed my wrist. I started to scream, but the man’s other hand was over my mouth in a flash. I felt his chest against my back, all rigid muscle. I looked up at the lights shining onto the balcony, only a few dozen paces away from us, but it might as well have been another world.

“Shh,” the man in the wolf mask whispered. “They’ll hear you. They’ll think this is a secret tryst and come to investigate.”

I nearly choked with shock. That voice, so tender and yet so deep. It wasn’t the Beast’s.

It wasn’t Edward’s, either.

My wrist went slack in his hand.

“Montgomery,” I breathed.

TWENTY-ONE

THE MAN REACHED UP and pulled off his mask, blond hair falling over his broad shoulders, but I already knew what face I’d find. There was no mistaking the voice that belonged to a young man I’d known forever, a voice that brought back memories of our hands intertwined, his lips on mine, my fingers tangled in his blond hair.

My head wouldn’t let me believe it. Reason told me that he was just another hallucination, and yet my heart knew Montgomery was real.

The mask slipped from my hand into the snow.

His face had lost its sun-bronzed color, replaced by a few fading cuts. The angles of his features were sharper. He’d always been strong, but now he held himself differently: tenser, hardened. Seeing him again stirred those painful memories of that last night on the island, waiting in the dinghy as the compound burned in the distance. I still remember seeing the rope fall from his hands, the jolt from his boot as he shoved the dinghy away with no warning.

But I need you, I had yelled across the waves.

The island needs me more, he’d called back.

With those words, Montgomery had shipwrecked my heart.

The memory made my knees buckle, but he came forward and caught me in his arms before I felt into the snow. Still so quick. Still so strong.

Our eyes met.

Still so handsome.

He was so close that I could feel the beating of his heart through our clothing. “Christ, I missed you,” he said, his voice just a whisper as it grazed my lips. His tender words shook me from the sense that this was all a dream. All the pain of his betrayal rushed back like a reopened wound. I shoved hard against his shirt, stumbling away from him before he could kiss me.

If he thought I would forgive him so easily, he was wrong.

I sensed the snow seeping into my slippers. The laughter from the ballroom, the dancers, the music . . . none of it mattered as much as this young man with me amid the hedges.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “You said you weren’t ever coming back. You left me.”

“I am sorry for that,” he said, warm breath clouding the air between us. He stepped forward slowly as if I was a horse spooked by only a falling leaf. “I didn’t want to leave you. I had no choice.”

“You might have told me, instead of shoving me away in a dinghy with your boot!”

“I know,” he said, glancing at the balcony overhead to make certain we were alone. “It was cowardly, but I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t think you’d understand, and I feared you would insist on staying behind with me. I needed to know I’d done everything I could to keep you safe.”

“Safe? I nearly died in that dinghy.”

He ran a hand over his face, searching for words. “If you’d stayed on the island, you would have died for certain.”

The note of regret hanging in his voice gave me pause. He never would have abandoned the island, not unless something terrible had forced him to. What had happened on that burning piece of land after I’d left? I had tried not to think about it, though ever since that time I’d been plagued by waking nightmares of reverted beast-men turning on one another, flesh ripping apart, and Montgomery like an ungodly prince amid the madness.

“If you’re here,” I said carefully, “does it mean all the islanders are dead?”

“Dead, or close enough to it.” His words were flat, but his broken voice betrayed him.

“What happened?”

He glanced again at the balcony, and then frowned at me shivering in the snow. “You’re freezing out here. Let’s go inside, and I shall explain everything.”

“I’m not a fragile child who can’t handle a little cold. Tell me.”

He watched me through the darkness as though weighing whether or not to believe me. At last he removed his suit jacket and wrapped it around my bare shoulders, rubbing them through the fabric. The friction wasn’t nearly as warming as his proximity. I’d forgotten his smell, fresh hay and sunlight even in the midst of the city.

“I had no choice but to leave,” he began. “The compound had burned. The islanders had reverted to feral creatures and taken to the jungle. They didn’t know how to hunt for themselves or feed. I made my home in Jaguar’s old cabin, thinking I could at least help them adjust by breeding the rabbits and feeding the beast-men myself. But their instincts took over, and it wasn’t rabbits they wanted. They hungered for larger prey, and turned on each other instead. After a few months, they forgot I had ever been a friend to them. I was forced to hunt them down one by one, and kill them before they killed me.”