Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) by Sierra Simone

Author:Sierra Simone [Simone, Sierra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-11-29T18:30:00+00:00

“I know this isn’t strictly door-related, but did you know there are records of plague in the Thorne Valley?” Poe is saying to Auden.

“Not the Black Death plague,” Becket cuts in. “Some sickness that overworked clerks nonspecifically called the plague.”

“It could have been the bubonic plague,” Poe counters. We’re sitting around the dining room table, having finished a scrummy meal of chèvre tart tatin and Cornish crab, and I am very, very aware of the toy inside me as a fresh bottle of white is opened and passed around.

The toy is not buzzing. It hasn’t buzzed once since I came down to find Rebecca already at the table, eyes glittering and phone in her hand, but I know it could buzz at any moment. I know with a swipe of her thumb, I could be trembling in my chair and panting through another insane orgasm, and the possibility of it, the denial and threat of it, is almost as delicious as the buzzing would be itself.

Even more delicious? The way Rebecca smiles every time she sees me twitch or stir in my chair. Which is usually when I see her look at her phone. I swear she’s handling it more than she ever does at the dinner table simply to tease me, to keep me wondering if she’s going to put me out of my misery and turn the bloody thing on.

“The first record you found mentioned it was the same sickness that came to the valley during the reign of King Stephen,” Becket says. “That’s too early for it to have been the bubonic plague, because that plague didn’t reach Europe until the 1300s.”

“Fine,” Poe says impatiently, “but lots of people did die. In plague-like numbers, one might say.”

“Any idea what illness it might have been?” Rebecca asks. She doesn’t look at me as she does—she keeps her eyes on Poe—but she traces the screen of her phone with one long finger.

I shiver.

“There are lots of sicknesses that have since disappeared,” Poe says, “so it’s hard to say if it’s something we’d even recognize or just some lost disease.”

“Lost disease?” echoes Auden.

“You know. Like the sweating sickness, and . . . okay, the sweating sickness is the only one I can think of, but diseases in the historical record whose symptoms don’t match anything we know of today.”

“Ah,” Auden says. He runs his fingertips along an eyelid and then takes a drink of wine.

A quick, soft buzz, like a kiss, reverberates through my body and I gasp.

“Are you okay, Delly?” Auden asks, looking concerned.

“Yes,” I say quickly. The buzz is gone. Rebecca’s face is totally impassive—save for her eyes, which seem to dance. “Just realized I forgot to charge my ring light upstairs.”

This has the effect of immediately boring everyone at the table, and the conversation moves back to plagues. And as Poe and Becket start debating again, talking about the difference between the records in the early medieval period and the Restoration, the toy jolts inside me, a powerful pulse that has me squeezing my legs together and forcing myself to breathe.

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