Dangerous Exile by K.J. Jackson
{ Chapter 13 }
“This is your house?”
“Aye.”
Ness looked up at the four-story townhouse as she stepped down from the carriage. Her fingers tightened around Talen’s grip as she studied the building.
After riding in the carriage in silence for the last two hours, she couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just delivering her to another madhouse. A double-wide townhouse, the front façade was a deep red brick with bright white triangular pediments over the symmetrical windows. A deep blue double door centered the building. Impeccably neat and tidy in the twilight. Not even a stray leaf marred the wide marble steps leading up to the house.
“Head down.” He reached out and tugged the hood forward along her face that had fallen backward as she gawked upward, then stepped away to talk to his driver.
The carriage rolled away as he stepped back to her side. “Let’s go in.”
She hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t expected this quiet street in the middle of London. What little she’d seen of the city was loud and dirty with squalor overwhelming. This was the opposite. A peaceful park centered the middle of the square with the sound of children laughing twinkling in the air.
She stole a glance at him as they stepped up to the house. “I thought you lived at the Alabaster.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Why would I not? You were there all the time as far as I could deduce.”
“Aye. I do spend far too much time at the Alabaster, and I do have a room there as well.” He set his hand on the small of her back and ushered her through the entrance of the house, setting her in the middle of the foyer as he went back to the door.
The large entryway soared three stories upward along a gilded spiraling banister. Impressive. But something was off. It wasn’t until she looked to her left that she realized it was the drawing room. The well-furnished but eerily cold drawing room. She studied it for a long moment then glanced over her shoulder at Talen. “No one uses the drawing room?”
“Why do you say that?” Talen turned around to her after locking the door.
“Everything is perfectly positioned within it. No books. No drinks on the sideboard, not even a water ring stain on the wood. Just the gleaming furniture with perfectly plump cushions that appear as though they’ve never been sat in.”
His mouth quirked to the side. “Your eye for detail is interesting.”
“Interesting how?”
“Interesting as in you’re right. No one uses the drawing room. No one uses any of the rooms here. They are dusted and cleaned. That is all.”
“What?”
He crooked his finger over his shoulder to her. “Follow me.”
Talen walked along the main corridor that led into the depth of the townhouse, not waiting and not looking back at her.
With a quick hop, she hurried behind him. “But you just said this is your house.”
“It is. That doesn’t mean I use it.”
He opened the rear door of the townhouse and stepped down onto wide marble steps that led to a picturesque courtyard. Hedges surrounded all sides and rows of flower beds held roses that had started to go dormant in the fall weather.
He shifted to the side, waiting for her to exit the house before closing and locking the door behind her.
He tucked the key into an inner pocket of his dark coat. “We should wait until darkness full descends, but dusk will have to do.”
“Do for what?”
“We aren’t staying here, Ness.”
Her forehead wrinkled, fully flummoxed. “We aren’t? Where are we going? I thought you sent your driver onward?”
“I did.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I need you to be quiet now. I’ll answer your questions in a few minutes.” He held his left elbow out to her. “In the meantime, take my arm and keep your head down.
Her lips pursed, she set her fingers along the crook of his elbow and they walked down the three steps to the garden, weaved past the rosebushes and exited out the rear wrought-iron gate to the mews.
Talen tugged her hood farther down over her brow, glanced to the right and left, and then started forward, straight through the coach house. After walking past stalls and carriages, they slipped out a back door onto the mews behind another row of townhouses. In silence, he ushered them to the left, walking along the shadows of the cobblestoned passageand crossing three streets before he turned to the right to lead her through another passage where he opened a tall metal gate at the rear of a townhouse.
Into the wide gardens—double the size of the gardens at the first house they’d walked through—he brought her up to the rear door and quickly set key into lock.
Ness only managed to keep her mouth shut until they were both inside and the door was firmly closed behind him. “Where are we?” She didn’t care for the slight shake of fear in her voice, but couldn’t quite control it.
“This is where I actually wanted to take you. The last house was the home everyone thinks I live at when I’m not at the Alabaster. Including my driver.”
She pushed the hood off her head and peered down the dark hallway to her right. “But you don’t live there?”
“No. I live here. No one knows this place exists.”
Her look snapped to him. “No one knows of this place?”
He shook his head. “No one except for Declan. That’s it.”
Her jaw dropped, gaping for several seconds. “But why?”
In the dim light still eking into the hallway through a window beside the doorway, his icy blue eyes looked even chillier. “There are plenty of people that wish me dead, Ness. This is the only safe haven I have.”
“What? Who wants you dead? Why?”
He moved past her, walking along the main corridor. “People I have destroyed. People that want revenge. And I have power. Other people want that. The world has never been any different.” He shrugged as though that simple answer satisfied him.
It didn’t satisfy her. “So, you own one home that you don’t use, except to stroll through on the way to your real home? A home that’s hidden because you cannot sleep peacefully when you’re exposed?”
“Yes.” He stopped in the front foyer, went to a side table and lit a lantern.
The flicker of the flame lit the area about her. The last home they had been in had been grand. But this was palatial, if the imperial staircase that cascaded down from the level above was any indication.
Her look fixed on the marble stairs as she shook her head. “It just seems like such a…”
“Waste?”
“Yes.”
“It is.” He moved to the right arm of the staircase and swept his hand upward to move her along. “But this place fell into my lap and I like having a place where no one knows me. Where no one wants anything from me.”
Picking up the front of her skirts, Ness moved up the staircase in front of him. “What about neighbors?”
“The house to the left belongs to an earl that is never in town and there was a house being built on the other side, but the family ran out of money to finish it. They made it all the way to the full exterior, but have never been able to scrape the funding together to finish the interior and furnish it. Yet they refuse to give it up. Either way, this street is empty and it suits my needs perfectly.”
She glanced back at him. “And how did this place ‘fall into your lap’?”
“There was a duke with a son with a rather large debt run up at the Alabaster. The duke didn’t have the resources to pay the debt, so I accepted the house as payment.”
“And no one knows of it?”
“I used a solicitor that only serves…clients of a certain esteem.”
“Wealthy ones?”
“Yes. He deals in secrets knowing that his life is forfeit if he spills said secrets. The man knows I received it from the duke for an undisclosed sum, but he doesn’t know the business I am in. Declan knows. And now you know.”
Ness paused at the landing at the top of the staircase. “But this townhouse, I can hear the echoes of my footsteps up the walls, it’s monstrous. You must have staff here?”
“Just a maid that comes and cleans every week. She doesn’t know who lives here. And a cook drops off salted beef, biscuits, and brandy in the kitchens twice a week. It’s all I need here as I usually eat at the Alabaster.”
He halted at the top of the stairs, his right foot atop the landing and his left foot on the last step. Even at that, he was still taller than her. “I didn’t think about food. You’ll probably need more than some tough meat and bread. And I can’t have you soused all the time.”
She glanced away from him, spying what looked to be a wide ballroom to her right. “So, this is where I am staying?”
“Yes. It’s the only other place that I trust to be safe, Ness. No one knows of it, so no one would ever find you here. You could, quite frankly, grow old and die here, and someone would find your bones tucked into a bed a hundred years from now when the building is torn down.”
She chuckled, unease in the sound. But as long as she wasn’t locked in an insane asylum, she was grateful. “Please tell me that is not my fate. Please tell me there is another way.” She exhaled a quivering breath. “Another way to be free of Gilroy. I can’t live hidden away forever, Talen. I cannot.”
His gaze locked onto hers, the rasp in his voice dropping to a low rumble, both calming and determined. “Once I find the men looking for you, we will figure out a path forward, I swear it.”
She held his stare for a long moment, trying to judge the sincerity of it. Trying to not break under the weight of the fear that had crippled her bones for the past four years. She wanted to believe him. Wanted so much to believe Gilroy wouldn’t find her—couldn’t find her.
But what then? He would always send more. And this was no life. Hidden away in an empty, cavernous house.
She straightened her spine. Patience.
A path forward would reveal itself eventually, she just had to be patient. Patient and quiet and hidden away from everything and everyone.
A prison of a different sort, just not the terrifying one she’d existed in under Gilroy’s thumb.
Her bottom lip jutting upward, she nodded.