Redeemed by Molly O'Keefe

Author:Molly O'Keefe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Molly O'Keefe

Eleven

The black dress was too small. It pulled across her breasts and she couldn’t take a deep breath without fearing for the seams. Her body had changed in the eighteen months since her mother’s death. Skinnier everywhere, except her bust.

She’d been a child at that graveside—in so many ways.

Corsets were for the devil. She sat very still and very quiet, despite the bead of sweat making its tickling, trickling way down her spine, despite the voice screaming in her head for her to stand up and walk and just keep walking for the door.

But no, she was supposed to sit here and trust James. Trust Delilah. Trust all these people she didn’t know.

If she could catch her breath, she’d laugh at the idea.

She watched him from the corner of her eye, trying not to make it obvious. Trying not to draw attention to him.

Maybe this was the justice she deserved for being so faithful to her mother’s cause.

Maybe this was the justice she deserved for playing any part in that terrible war. She should have just tried to survive, like so many other women left behind in that city.

But even in this whorehouse, so like every other whorehouse she’d been in in the last eighteen months, she couldn’t come to truly regret what she’d done. Every time Charles attempted to reduce her to this symbol. This black-dressed betrayer. An evil seductress.

Just. Like. Her. Mother.

She felt herself rise up against it.

Morphine or not.

Laudanum or not.

Try, she thought, her hands in fists in her lap. Try and rewrite what happened. Try to dress the part of victor. Or hapless victim. Or righteous soldier.

I know the truth.

And so did he.

Charles Park was a killer. A murderer.

And Helen—with her beautiful, brave, intelligent mother—had fought on the side of righteousness.

And that’s why this farce continued. It would never end. He could not break her.

But he would keep trying.

The card game was not the point of this night. That speech he gave was the point. The way he made every man in this room turn to look at her like she was a version of every single thing they hated and were forced to hold, or loved and were forced to walk away from.

Everyone here wanted to hurt her. Not for her perceived crimes, but for pain and memories that had nothing to do with her.

Yes, Charles had an eye for staging. And he kept the war alive in every town they went to.

And James said she should trust him. And he must, after all that, understand that trusting him was simply not an option. She’d been a spy in hostile territory. Trust had been the very first thing to go.

But she found, sitting here, that she couldn’t not hope. And hoping was very uncomfortable. Worse even than the corset.

So she stared into space and unearthed memories of her mother, like fossils from clay. The smell of her hair. The trill of her laugh across the dining room table, a sign that all was going according to plan.

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