Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles Read online

  Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

  By Karina Cooper

  Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

  Forced out of London's coal-blackened streets, Cherry St. Croix is faced with her most difficult undertaking yet: sobriety.

  At long last, my guardian, the enigmatic Mr. Oliver Ashmore, has revealed himself—and his order is clear: I am to be dried out at once, regardless of my wishes.

  I loathe the country estate I am imprisoned within. Footsteps follow me, voices call for me, and my sanity wavers. In my fevered dreams, I am haunted by those I failed, while waking proves no protection from the ghosts of my reckless past. The craving for laudanum plagues me. I require a distraction.

  To unravel the alchemical mysteries of my mother’s family, I must rely on Ashmore’s tutelage. I am lured to the art and drawn by the secrets my guardian possesses. Yet the deeper I delve, the more I believe that something dreadful disturbs these haunted corridors. In my madness, I fear that what it wants most…is me.

  106,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  My vow to you is to not mention the holiday that starts with a V in this letter for the February releases. If you’re like me, you’re probably on holiday overload after all of the winter festivities, and you wish you could just blank out all of those advertisements for diamonds and chocolates and fancy dinners. Of course, if someone wanted to buy us any of that, that would be okay…

  Instead, let me tell you about the sometimes-romantic and sometimes-not lineup of books we have for you this month! Fans of Alison Packard’s The Winning Season will be glad to know that JT and Angie’s story releases this month. Look for sparks to fly in Catching Heat. Author Christi Barth finishes up her Aisle Bound series with A Matchless Romance. You won’t want to miss this playful story about a sexy gamer who just needs a beautiful Chicago matchmaker to help him see how hot he really is.

  Also in the contemporary romance category is Party Girl by Tamara Morgan, following up her well-reviewed romance The Derby Girl. When a good-time party girl meets a backwoods hermit, the only thing bigger than their differences is their attraction. Fan favorite Inez Kelley joins the contemporary romance offerings this month with smoking-hot lumberman Jonah Alcott, who wants to do more than fight with gorgeous mountain activist Zury Castellano in The Place I Belong.

  Lynda Aicher brings her trademark sizzle to a new erotic romance story in her Wicked Play series. In her first male/male romance, Bonds of Denial, security nerd Rockford Fielding finally finds a man worth coming out of the closet for, but Carter Montgomery has to move past his own insecurities before they can claim a future they both thought was impossible.

  Opium addict and Victorian bounty hunter Cherry St. Croix is back again in Karina Cooper’s Tempered. Dragged to a neglected estate and forced to dry out, Cherry tries on the role of helpless Gothic heroine—and tumbles headlong into danger when she takes to meddling in her family’s alchemical history instead.

  Returning to Carina Press with a new series is Eleri Stone with the first book in her new paranormal romance series. In Reaper’s Touch, Jake and Abby work together to find a cure for the infection that turns men into flesh-eating monsters. We’re also welcoming back Jody Wallace with her newest paranormal romance, Witch Interrupted. Wolf shifters heal from tattoos as if they were never inked, so why is the same sexy wolf back in Katie’s tattoo parlor for more? And last but not least in the paranormal romance category, we’re also pleased to bring back Victoria Davies and her newest novella Demon by My Side. When a tempting demon prince crashes into her life, a demon hunter struggles to figure out who she can trust and one wrong move will cost her not only her heart but the safety of the human world as well.

  Concluding her wonderful epic fantasy series, Shawna Thomas wraps up with Journey of the Wanderer in which to save Anatar once and for all, Ilythra must risk everything she loves.

  But with every ending there’s a new beginning, and we’re happy to welcome male/male romance author A.M. Arthur to the Carina Press team. A reformed troublemaker meets his match in an inexperienced bookworm when what was supposed to be a casual relationship starts to look a lot like love in No Such Thing.

  And we’re happy to introduce debut author Holly West. Holly delivers a fascinating, well-plotted historical mystery, the first in a new series. In Mistress of Fortune, Isabel Wilde, a mistress to King Charles II who secretly makes her living as a fortune-teller, is threatened when one of her customers is murdered after revealing a conspiracy to kill the king and the diary of her illicit activities as a soothsayer goes missing, a page of which turns up in the dead man’s pocket.

  Coming in March: look for the newest installment in Marie Force’s Fatal series!

  Here’s wishing you a wonderful month of books you love, remember and recommend.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Editorial Director, Carina Press

  Dedication

  For all my dedicated readers. There would be no hope for Cherry without you.

  Acknowledgments

  This book, and possibly the world at large, would have seen a very different story were it not for my editor. She kept me focused, on track, and asked all the hard questions. I may have been driven to drink on more than one occasion, but the result was worth it. Thank you, Mallory.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  I shall never forget the moment I first laid eyes upon the estate that would contrive to take my life.

  The wound festering in my back was too painful to tolerate on my own, and I had not slept for what seemed an eternity. Every rut in the road from London, every depression and fissure in these rural lanes, had become a litany of pain quelled only by the ruby draught of laudanum. My once guardian and now twisted savior, Mr. Oliver Ashmore, allowed me only enough to ease the agony on this long journey.

  He paid no mind when I demanded more.

  My name is Cherry St. Croix, and I am a collector—or, rather, I had been, before the series of unfortunate events that culminated in an injury of body and soul.

  As a seeker of bounties for coin, I was no stranger to wounds acquired when hunting down a quarry. Such prey were often born of those too far in debt or too dangerous to leave unchallenged, and they occasionally gave as good as I delivered, yet of all my various scrapes and bruises, none had ever been as bad as that I suffered now. This gash in my back, raw edges seeping through hastily wound bandages, had been delivered by a vile murderer, quite infamous in the broadsheets, in those few moments before I struck him down. What should have been victory, painful as it was, turned into betrayal, and my injury was subsequently aggravated by the machinations of a criminal Chinese mastermind determined to bring me low.

  Such maneuverings had succeeded.

  I slumped in the curtained carriage my heretofo
re absent guardian had acquired for his planned evacuation from London. My feet curled up on the seat, and every jostling sway felt as if it would bore holes through me. Every shudder of the wheeled monstrosity seemed designed to lay upon me the greatest of the impact—I could not breathe for fear of jarring the aching injury, and could not sleep without pain startling me awake again. The ermine tucked about my shoulders did little to ward off the October cold; a welcome contrast to my overly heated flesh.

  Rain pattered gently against the window, tapping the vast emptiness of the moor into dreary submission. As the road curved—a pitted country lane, given the pitching and yawing of the conveyance—I flattened one pale hand against the water-beaded pane and struggled to make out the details of this unfathomable hell I was to be dragged into.

  All that had come before remained a nebulous haze; all that spread before me loomed dark and dreary. The indistinct blur thrusting from the gray moor turned into a sprawling estate with all the welcome of an asylum for the terminally insane.

  If this was to be my haven, I could not fathom how.

  What charm the manor might have once exhibited had long been worn away by neglect. The moor had reclaimed what care had been taken for the extensive grounds, swallowing all in an endless shroud of brown vegetation too thick and brittle to wade through without effort, until there was no distinguishable path beyond that of the narrow lane we navigated. Two turrets, reminiscent of a lighthouse, sprouted from each end of the manor, jutting into the frothy gray skies and shadowed in part by the black clouds colliding overhead—as if the very gods themselves frowned upon our arrival.

  The paint peeled from the exterior, leaving a bruised and cracked appearance stained by weather and time. The whole of the manor, once quite fine gauging by the bones beneath the façade, now seemed to squat like a skeletal boil upon the unforgiving landscape.

  I could not fathom who had once lived here, nor why the empty windows seemed to scowl down upon me in warning—of danger, I thought. A dismal declaration of souls abandoned and hope lost. Something dreadful turned over in my chest. For the first time since being whisked from London’s familiar streets—even beyond the laudanum turning my thoughts slow and my blood sluggish—I was afraid.

  This house represented all that would destroy what was left of me. I had very little doubt of it.

  The carriage finally halted, jarring loose a strained uncivility as the momentum tipped me too far forward. I grasped at the straps beside the window, groaning aloud when that tore at my bandaged wound, and the ermine wrap slipped to my waist. A perfunctory knock introduced my taciturn guardian to the interior.

  I was too laden by the opium I’d been drinking steadily to care that I had not been allowed to change from the thin blouse and bloomers I’d been forced to wear for the Menagerie’s last showing. The man who’d rescued me—who’d kept me full on laudanum throughout the journey—seemed to feel no shame.

  “We’re here,” he announced.

  I summoned a word to my cracked lips. “Where?” My voice croaked.

  “Siristine.” The name was not familiar, and evoked no response. Not in the same way the appearance of it had. “Out you come,” he added. He grasped my bare arm, his gloved hands firm and grip unbreakable—not that I had the strength to try. Tears of pain, already thick in my gritty eyes, overflowed with the effort I made to stand.

  He noted my discomfort, for as I ducked below the carriage’s entry, one dirty foot desperately seeking for the step, Ashmore swept my legs out from under me and pulled me into his arms.

  It shamed me that he was little more than a red and brown blur. My world had always been soft along the edges, courtesy primarily of the opium I had taken to consuming in quantity, but now I struggled to make sense of the color of his skin—pale, almost unhealthily so—and the look in his eye. I could do neither.

  Where I blinked blearily, I saw blue eyes tinted with madness, and heard the voice of a woman who called my name. They filled my thoughts so completely that I might have sworn that Ashmore’s eyes gleamed like the twin hearts of a flame burning azure bright; but no, these were the eyes of the madman Micajah Hawke had become, ere his attempts to subjugate my will, and they haunted my waking dreams. The opium fantasies that filled my sleep had only grown in strength—until I could no longer be sure of what I dreamt and what played out across the canvas of my waking reality.

  In the shadow of the leering house before me, such dreams were preferable to the truth of the world about me. I found reality to be a miserly master, empty of bliss or succor, and the estate looming over me to be the harbinger of fear.

  I was miserable.

  Ashmore’s heartbeat beneath my ear was steady, a strong beat that played at odds with the sluggish throb of my own. Rain peppered my skin, until he reached inside the carriage and scooped the ermine from the floor where it had fallen.

  My fingers did not grasp with any strength, but curled listlessly against the damp fabric of his greatcoat, tucked beneath the covering he pulled tight about me. My eyelashes drifted down once more.

  Sleep. I just wanted to sleep.

  Like a good girl.

  “Will that be all, sir?” asked a gruff, unfamiliar voice.

  “That will,” Ashmore confirmed. The rumble of his pleasing tenor through his chest snapped my eyes once more wide, as if a physical hand had shaken me. His was not the voice of a showman, but it bore an uncanny effect on my senses. Nestled deep within polite, if brusque, tones, I fancied I heard a roar. “See to the horses and be on your way.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Wait,” I croaked, my throat rusted through by disuse.

  Neither man cared to listen—or if they did, they made no sound to acknowledge me. I strained against the arms of the man who carried me, but his restraint did not soften and the shapeless figure I took to be his driver did not turn to see my struggle.

  “Be still,” Ashmore told me, his tone even but not wholly kind. Not at all like the gentle reassurance he’d given when first I’d woken in that carriage—and in his care.

  Or had I imagined that?

  I tipped my head up, but the world seemed inclined to tilt with me, and I closed my eyes as a fierce ache seized my head and throat. “Please,” I whispered. “More. It hurts.”

  “I know.” Footsteps crunched against harsh ground. “It will the more, soon enough.”

  I couldn’t grasp the intent of such words, not wholly, but something must have forced its way through the too-bright haze my world had become. Suddenly, I trembled; an unwilling tremor that would not stop. I looked up, stared wide-eyed and fearful at the looming structure that grinned with such skeletal glee, and I cowered.

  The grip about my shoulders and knees tightened. “You won’t thank me, before this is done.”

  “Let me loose.” Even to my own ears, it sounded weak as a kitten’s starving mewling.

  “I will not.”

  In the gloom afforded me, I saw little more than the angle of his jaw, gilded by a darker corona of whiskers nearly the same shade as my own loose hair, and the autocratic flare of nostrils as he used his shoulder to brace the door wide.

  The musty smell of disuse poured from the interior.

  My trembling turned to violent shuddering. “I don’t want to,” I managed between chattering teeth. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “Hush.”

  I found the energy to drive my elbow into his chest. “Let me go!”

  He cursed, more a gasp than a fully formed uncivility, and his arm at my shoulders slipped down to gouge into the bandaged injury I suffered. This stole the blood from my face, dragged vicious agony across my senses as the foyer—little more than a gray haze in front of me—wobbled.

  I shrieked, flailing madly. There was no thought, no intellect guiding my actions. Only raw feeling filled me, and the overwhelming sense that I was one precarious step from being devoured by the blackened depths of the abandoned manse.

  Ashmore nearly dropped me, but
for his quick thinking. Letting my legs fall, he seized my upper arms and steadied me half upon my feet and half against his own body. The ermine caught between us. The grip at my flesh bruised.

  A much fainter concern beneath the torment of my wound, and the vicious need for the balm of opium to ease the pain.

  “It would be better, Miss St. Croix, if you did not fight me,” he gritted out over my head. He paid no mind to my gasping efforts, did not allow me any opportunity to steady myself. He pulled me deeper into the foyer, leaving the comfort of the wrap behind us on the floor. I glimpsed wide stairs curving at either end of the room, reaching up to a landing whose corridors were shrouded in shadow.

  Within those black corners, my mind painted visions of leering faces.

  I twisted in his grip, only hurting myself all the more. “I won’t stay here. You can’t keep me!”

  “I can.” With a move I did not wholly understand, he simply turned my arm just so and I was once more airborne—yet this time, over his shoulder as if I were no more than a sack of flour. My hair fell over my face, obscuring my sight in a tangled curtain of red. “And I will,” he continued, heedless of my strangled screams. “It is long past time you were dried out.”

  A clap of thunder punctuated these chilling words. As the walls shuddered beneath such stormy rage above, I found myself gripping the man’s coat, all the breath driven from me in abject fear. “I won’t.”

  “You will,” he countered. “Mrs. Fortescue should have done this years ago.”

  The mention of my erstwhile chaperone’s name did not drive splinters through my heart, as it once had. Frances Fortescue, a stern widow from the outset, had been first my governess and then my chaperone. It was to her credit, and that of my staff, that I had turned from a hellspawn of thirteen to the well-educated miss I’d become. That she had not cared for the scientific interest I displayed was not her fault—Fanny had always been a lady of the ages, and it was not at all the thing for a young miss to be enmeshed in such tools of men.