The Unchaste

You say we sleep.

When consciousness came back to Delilah, conscience followed not far behind.

She woke up to a soft caressing motion on the side of her head, velvet touch scraping her loosened hair under which lay the black smudge from being stricken by Lord Richard. It throbbed with the slightest stroke and no rhythm of those skimming fingers seemed to evade the agitation. Or spare her the melancholy.

Firelight and frigidness, gleaming gold and bleeding velvet of crimson; her eyes stared blankly across the room from the odd angle her head was laid onto the table and she found that to blink was to smash her head against a burning brick wall.

A shadow came over her face and she saw Lord Richard looming above her hunched figure, his brows fixed with a concentrated frown as he studied her…like she was a life cut open on dissection table and she came to understand, in dread if not disgust, it was his finger cosseting her hurt head. On watching her awaken, his frown dissipated, and instead, a cold lack of sympathy marred his face.

She sat back with a jolt, prevaricating his touch and found herself in the same room where she had gone senseless, except for that there was no Philip anymore. Not even his body. No blood; the stone floor had been made to shine.

Windowlessness of the chamber eluded her of the knowledge whether it was day or night.

Her hands were tied to the chair she was slumped on.

The dread, the affront and the anarchy of the situation didn’t go unseen by her, but she swallowed away the abuse.

A very impassive looking Lord Richard turned her chair sideways and took the another one across her himself, facing her, dressed impeccably to all marks_ from his creaseless snow-white shirt, dead black evening coat and sharp, black bow-tie, with all grace that she had been stripped off of.

“We found a dagger on your person, Miss Eves.” He spoke in a calm, casual manner. “Enlighten me why.”

Delilah sat dreadlocked, staring at him, utterly aghast. She couldn’t bring herself to say anything for some minutes but when she did; her voice shivered and didn’t sound like her own. “I was…I was groped at in my daze?”

“No.” He propped his chin upon his fist, looking at her with his probing, blue gaze. “It dropped too when you did.”

Delilah shut her eyes and looked away, trying to shrink from his proximity and being quite incapable of that. Her lips bitten, she tried not to show him her crumbling serenity.

She looked back at last. Slowly. “Where is George?”

“Who?”

“George, my…” Delilah’s mouth worked soundlessly. “The footman.”

“There.”

She looked up at Lord Richard and saw him looking down, past herself, in the same lackadaisical manner. She turned her head and paled.

George lay on the floor, huddled and curled against the wall. Unconscious, bleeding lips, nose, head and viciously bruised. Two men from before stood at his either sides, and as if his disorientation was not apparent enough, they had tied George’s hands at his back.

“George!” Delilah called him out in desperation, aching for George like she had never ached for no other man. “George, please, look at me! Please.”

He didn’t. Of course. He was blacked out.

But was he even breathing?

“Oh, he is alive, all right.” Lord Richard answered her thought gently, making her look back at him. “But do not exert yourself, Miss Eves; he will be out the whole night for all I understand.”