houses in this area were boarded up. This was the only one occupied.
If it was occupied.
‘She’s in there,’ the woman said, shifting the child again. It was awake and the angle she held it, with its head on her shoulder, showed the full length. Yes, this was a child who could be his.
His. A burgeoning warmth, hope, bloomed inside his chest and he crushed it. Cursed ever reading Odysseus’s tale and giving him ideas that there could be more for him. Nothing and no one ever was.
There would be no hearth and home at the end of his journey. There would be only death. His only hope was that he took his family down with him.
‘Let’s go in.’
She looked to the child, then him.
He had no intention of taking that child now or later. He was free to block attacks and to make one of his own. Unburdened, he was free to leave and continue his games.
The woman eyed him, surprised he refused the child. ‘One look and you’ll know it’s her you spilled your seed in,’ she said. ‘You’ll know this burden’s yours.’
Even if it was...it didn’t matter. He was too close to what he’d been born to do: to take down his family.
‘Then we shouldn’t tarry much more,’ he said, fully intending for her to enter first. ‘One more look and you’ll be a rich woman. What’s keeping you?’
The indecision in her eyes turned to greed again, to cruelty. Ah, yes, he was familiar with people like her. They were easy to manipulate.
She pushed open the door. The sounds and the smells accosted him immediately.
Sobbing. A woman’s cries as if everything in her world was gone and missing. Deep racks of grief interrupted by coughs and wheezes. By wet gurgles, like a clogged brook.
Like blood that didn’t stay within the body, but came up through the lungs and out of mouths and noses, forced through tiny pores in the skin.
Which explained the smells. The dank smell of mould, a leaking roof allowing mildew to move along the walls. That smell fought for dominance over the acrid smell of piss and human waste.
But it was a deep cloying scent that permeated the entire house and settled against his very soul. Death. Human decay, as if they walked straight into a desecrated tomb of newly buried bodies.
It stopped him in his tracks.
‘Told you to stay at your fancy home, didn’t I?’ the woman sneered at his side. ‘I told you to stay and take the babe, but you had to come. Suits me fine, but I was only trying to be nice, to do you a favour. Had to make it difficult for me. Wasn’t as though I wanted to come back to this either. I’ve had to suffer enough these last months, waiting for you to return. Should make you pay me more for coming back when I thought I didn’t have to.’
What was wrong with him this evening? Why did he stop? He didn’t let boredom overcome his safety and allow strangers in his home, especially those he was soon to kill.
‘Cilla? Cilla, is that you?’ A woman’s thinned voice wafted from another room. Cultured and reedy with sickness. ‘Do you have her, Cilla? Did you bring her back to me?’
The wretch, Cilla, glanced his way, her eyes narrowing. He shook his head once which was enough for her to understand she needed to stay quiet about his presence. It didn’t hurt that it suited her purposes as well.
With a shrug, she swept into the other room. ‘I’m here with your bastard, my lady.’
‘Oh!’ Fresh tears, the sound of joy and gratefulness. ‘I thought you’d left. I thought you took her.’
Reynold held back. He needed a bit more exchange between these two to satisfy his purposes.
‘I merely took her for a walk,’ Cilla said. ‘She needed a bit of air.’
‘What would I do without you, Cilla? You’re so...good for her and me. Staying with me when everyone else left. Keeping her well, keeping her away from the sickness. Of course, she needed air. But...she needs me more. Bring her here, please.’
The tone of her voice, a cadence broken by hacking coughs, he did not recognise, and Reynold waited longer in the shadows. He liked waiting in the shadows.
A snapping of blankets, grunts from Cilla and wheezes from her mistress. Reynold envisioned Cilla giving the child back to its mother.
‘But you were wrong to take her without letting me know,’ the woman’s thin voice now containing some superiority. ‘You made me worry. You know how I cannot have any worry in my condition. Once I recover, your deeds will have to have some consequences.’
‘Of course, mistress,’ Cilla said. No doubting she had heard this argument before. The words held no threat. The woman in the other room was dying.
Dying, but cultured with a ring of privilege. Perhaps she was the noblewoman he had lain with those many months ago. There was only one way to discover that, by stepping into the other room.
Silently, a few paltry steps and everything was revealed to him. The room held scant pieces of furniture, no tables or niceties. The wooden floors highly polished where a rug once had been. The colours of rose and yellow in the broken bench hinting at what the room once must have been. A grand parlour.
Now it was a sick bed with a full chamber pot underneath, and various small linens flung around it like bloodied halos.
A few more moments lost as the woman spoke to Cilla, but kept her eyes on the child like a lifeline. The sickness had made harsh lines fan from her eyes, but as she gazed at the child, they softened.
Privileged. Entitled. But that gaze was of a mother to her child. Whether she was a fallen noble or whore, she loved the child who was trying to sit in her arms.
‘Did you bring any...?’ The woman’s voice drifted as her travelling gaze fell on Reynold and held there.
He didn’t recognise the house or the room because he had never been here before. But he did recognise the woman lying on the bench with blankets draped over her thin frame. The sickness had ravaged that frame and sucked the glow from her cheeks.
He didn’t remember her name, her station, or the night he found temporary relief within her body.
He didn’t remember the thick gold of her hair because every woman he’d lain with had a similar colour. However, he did remember the colour of her eyes. He remembered that all too well, for when he first saw her he calculated that colour against his own dark grey and wondered whether the dark blue was too close to his own. That if there was a babe, it would be mistaken for his.
No woman was worth any unnecessary risk. But he remembered her false haughtiness and her weakness. Traits that suited his purpose as well as the feminine parts of her body. So they shared a bed for an hour or two and he paid her well. He always paid them well.
‘You,’ the woman whispered.
‘Me,’ he answered.
Weak and dying, but at his appearance, she attempted
