Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

We’ve something for all, and all for you.”
    The suggestive leanings in what I imagined to be a phrase drilled into the youth’s repertoire proved too much for my bile. I stopped in place, tugged my hand free, which earned me a pout that truly was stunning.
    Regardless of the changes I did not like, regardless of what monster had been left in charge, the Menagerie still had an eye for beauty. The boy was a doll, perfect in every way, but he was narrow-limbed and gangly as youth could be. I was taller than he was.
    I was not often taller than anyone.
    My heart ached, the fury that had kept my knees from buckling now threatened to tear free of its chains and cause an altogether different sort of scene.
    I took a deep breath. One of many this night. “I’m looking for someone,” I told him, and forced myself to ruffle his hair as though it meant nothing. “Be a good lad and fetch me Delilah, would you?”
    His head canted beneath my hand, and he rubbed against it as though he were a cat. “Don’t you like me?”
    “I like you fine,” I assured him, and because this was my role, I bent to place my lips upon his brow. His face upturned before I could right it, and his lips met mine.
    Soft, cold and tasting of wine.
    Revulsion filled me. Temper spiked.
    “Delilah’s broken,” he said cheerfully, as though it wasn’t the first he’d done so. “She’ll be right as rain in a fortnight. Will you take me instead? I can do what she does.”
    Broken, how? I wanted to know, but was afraid to ask—that doing so might tip my hand.
    Delilah—a dark-haired sweet with strong bone structure and a gift for swordsmanship—was among those who had been punished for her temerity in knowing me somewhat more personally than the others. The last I recalled of her, she had picked up one of the Chinese blades to defend two other sweets from the Veil’s aggression.
    So much of that time seemed little more than an opium dream, but I remembered Delilah still as a kind soul, a good woman with a laughing grasp of what it was to live. She had feared nothing.
    Now she was broken.
    I dared not ask who did the breaking. Not while I struggled to leash the wrath welling up from within me.
    “I see,” I said instead, and once more touched his hair. Soft, curly gold. A veritable cherub. It broke my heart that I would have to leave him. Leave them all. “Then I’ll come again—”
    “Cherry St. Croix.”
    The masculine voice, framing a name I had never dared to reveal in the pleasure gardens I’d frequented as a collector on employ, flipped anger into a fear so sharp that aggression was all I had left. I spun, heart pounding, and pinpointed the speaker with startling accuracy.
    Eyes of a foggy green, as though jade glinted under a sheer whisper of gray. Hair the color of sand.
    My late husband’s face stared out from a blur of others, painted in fire and shadow, and this time, my heart did not rise, but sank. With it, the blood from my head.
    The world tilted.
    The boy yelped, reaching to halt my errant fall, but it was the ghost I faced that succeeded, clearing the narrow distance to wrap both arms around my waist. He held me upright despite the loss of will in my knees.
    “I’ve got her, lad,” said Earl Compton, from a mouth that seemed naked without its accompanying mustache. “Go fetch a glass.”
    The cherub left us on the fringe of the decadent firelight revelry, and I could only stare up into a face I had thought lost forever.
    His mouth hitched into a smile that was as grim as it was familiar. “You will not escape me so easily, my lady.”
    “Compton,” I croaked.
    “Now,” he agreed, and he turned us both so that the leaping flame no longer shadowed his features but lit them gently.
    Familiar though his features were, they did not wholly match those of my late husband. “Lord Piers,” I gasped.
    “So you
are
among the living.” Once assured that I would not fall, he let me go, but only just. I obliged his confidence