Lord of Sin. Susan Krinard
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the garden and faced him again.
For a moment they simply stared at each other. “I know you have many questions for me, Lord Donnington,” she began, unable to bear the silence.
“Do you?” he asked. His gaze swept from her shoes to her hat. “Strange to be calling you Lady Charles. I should never have thought to see you in London. How quickly you’ve risen…Nola.”
“That name was a temporary one,” she said, refusing to be intimidated by his deceptively casual manner. “My true name is Nuala.”
“I remember.” He looked over her shoulder at the window, as if the view beyond it held some great fascination for him. “You left Donbridge very suddenly.”
“Yes.”
“I wonder why? What were you afraid of, Nuala?”
“My work at Donbridge was finished.”
“Your work.” His lips curved in a chilling smile. “The work that led you to deceive all of us. The work that resulted in my brother’s death.”
There would be no beating around the bush, no benefit of the doubt. Nuala closed her eyes, remembering how it had all begun—when her powers had called upon her to aid a young bride, Mariah Marron, wife of Sinjin’s elder brother Giles, the Earl of Donnington. A wife who had been left a virgin on her wedding night, for Giles had plans for her that few mortals could comprehend: he intended to deliver her to Cairbre, a lord of the Fane, the unearthly denizens of the Faerie realm Tir-na-Nog. Cairbre had intended to use Mariah, unknowingly part Fane herself, as a means of taking power from the rightful king of Tir-na-Nog.
In return for Mariah, Cairbre had promised to give the avid hunter Lord Donnington the greatest prize of all: the unicorn king known as Arion. But Cairbre quickly learned that Mariah could not be forced through the gate to Tir-na-Nog by one she did not love.
Arion, exiled to earth in human form, had been deceived into believing that he would be permitted to return to Tir-na-Nog only if he could win Mariah’s love and lead her through the gate. Lord Donnington had left his estate, Donbridge, immediately after his unconsummated wedding, intending to throw Mariah into Arion’s path and simultaneously removing any obstacle to their love.
But his plans had not gone as expected. Mariah had not only fallen in love with Arion, he—called Ash in the human world—had fallen in love with her. Nuala, who had posed as the maid Nola in hopes of helping them defeat the evil plans of Giles and Cairbre, had not foreseen the complications that would ensue. Giles’s mother, the dowager countess, had wished to break up her son’s marriage to Mariah. She had conspired with beautiful, blond Pamela, Lady Westlake—Sinjin’s mistress—who loved Lord Donnington and thought only of destroying Mariah. Pamela had used Sinjin, while setting out to ruin Mariah’s reputation in Society.
But no one, least of all Nuala, had anticipated that Giles would unexpectedly return to England, confront Ash and break his deal with Cairbre by claiming Mariah for himself. Or that, in the chaos that followed, Arion would prepare to sacrifice his life, Mariah would give up her freedom, and both Giles and Pamela would meet tragic ends because of their own hatred, jealousy and betrayal.
The guilt that surged in Nuala’s chest nearly choked her.
“I did not kill your brother,” she whispered.
“No. But his death could have been prevented. You could have stopped it.”
“I…” She paused to whisper an instinctive and surely useless spell meant to quiet her racing heart. Naturally it had no effect, neither on her profound discomfort nor on her physical awareness of Sinjin’s masculine power. “I did not have the ability to control or anticipate everything that happened,” she said. “My purpose was to—”
“Save Ash and Mariah. ‘They are destined to be together,’ you told me. What happened to anyone else was of no concern to you.”
Her fingers trembled. She hid them in her skirts. “That is not true, Lord Donnington. I merely observed for nearly the entire time Ash and Mariah were together. My powers—”
“Your powers.” His eyes were dark with unspoken pain. “You claimed they were fading. Yet you maintained your illusion for months. You traveled to Tir-na-Nog twice on Ash’s behalf…oh, yes, Mariah told me. You helped heal Ash when he was dying.”
“Nevertheless, I—”
“You instructed me to ride after Giles, to stop him from hunting Ash. You knew that Pamela had helped my brother and was willing to do anything to protect him, yet it never occurred to you to consider that she was mad.”
“You knew her far better than I.”
He flinched. “I never claimed to hold superhuman abilities. You knew of Pamela’s earlier conspiracies, did you not?”
“I could not be everywhere at once.”
“Then you chose to begin something you could not hope to finish.”
Anger, however unreasonable, gave Nuala a sliver of courage. “Would you have let your brother betray Mariah and kill Ash?”
“Not if I understood what was going on. You could have approached me at any time, and I would have helped you before things got out of hand. You assumed that you could interfere in our lives without consequence.”
All he said was true. She had attempted too much. Even before Donbridge, she had known that her power had gradually been growing weaker, though she had not understood the reason. She should have taken heed of her limitations. Only she was to blame. Yet to do as she had intended, to admit her mistakes to this man who so despised her…
“I deeply regret what happened,” she said, meaning it with all her heart. “But Lord Donnington chose his own path.”
“Perhaps you wanted Giles dead.”
The accusation took her breath away. “You are wrong,” she said. “I would not wish to see anyone—”
Would you not, Nuala?
She turned her back to him, clasping her arms across her chest. “I wished no one such a fate,” she said. “Not even a man who would sell his wife for the chance to hunt and kill a unicorn.”
The silence fell like smothering snow. “My brother made many mistakes,” Sinjin said at last, his voice thick with emotion. “But he planned to defy the Fane and keep Mariah.”
“At the cost of Ash’s life.”
“You couldn’t even help Ash in the end. You left it all up to Mariah.”
“Because she had become strong enough. She didn’t need me anymore.”
“You were so certain of that, yet so ignorant of everything else?”
She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t explain what she didn’t fully understand herself: how she had always depended upon her witch’s instincts to tell her when to take direct action in the lives of those she watched over, and when to leave them to determine their own ultimate fate. It had always been a fine balance, and she had utterly failed to find it at Donbridge.
Sinjin’s footsteps moved about the room, the tap of his heels beating out an agitated rhythm. He clearly wanted much more from her than an apology.
For his guilt was almost as great as hers. It simmered beneath his righteous anger and grief for his brother. He and Giles had never been close; to the contrary, both Giles and their mother, the dowager, had been cool and distant with Sinjin since his childhood.
And that made matters all the worse for him. He had to convince himself that he had not sacrificed a lifetime’s closeness to his only sibling because of his own choices. He wanted to prove to himself, and to her, that he had not betrayed his brother by loving Lady Westlake, for refusing to recognize the depth of Pamela’s obsession and determination to claim Giles for herself at any cost…even the former Lord Donnington’s