Brimstone Seduction. Barbara Hancock J.

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       Chapter 4

      Her bags were taken to a room off the corridors that surrounded the opera hall itself. They wound in concentric circles with the apartments set like the spokes in a giant wheel. It was dizzying, the walls a kaleidoscope of rich cherry wainscoting filled with elaborate carvings like the first hall she’d traversed to reach Severne’s offices.

      Her passage was lit by flickering sconces that made her wonder if the almost subliminal hiss her ears detected was air conditioning or gas to fuel primitive lamps. The dancing light made the carvings gambol around her in tumbling shadows. But it was her playing for John Severne that had upset her equilibrium. The music echoed mockingly in her ears. Too. Too hungry. Too evocative. Too needy of his reaction. Any reaction. The uncertain light made her path waver, but she wouldn’t have been firmly grounded even if there had been bright runway lights.

      He was hard. Both physically and mentally. To touch him with her music, even for a second, had been too heady for her own good. He wasn’t a man. He was a monster. He was a being all human souls had been taught to fear for centuries. But as the night deepened, the flutter in her stomach didn’t feel like fear. Not exactly.

      Her room was beside her sister’s. Supposedly Victoria’s room had remained untouched. When Kat tiptoed hesitantly in, not wanting to disturb the dust and silence, the room taunted her. It wasn’t empty. Seeing the normal, everyday mess her sister was prone to create—silk slippers tossed to the side, smudged tissues on the vanity table, the pale ivory stockings from her costume rinsed out and long since dry on the bathroom rack—tightened Kat’s lungs until each stale breath hurt. The air tasted bitter on her tongue.

      If Victoria had been free to sing and build a reputation under her own name, she would have been a much bigger star than a regional theater would hope to hire, but Vic loved to perform. It didn’t matter how or where. She could almost feel her sister’s anticipation for performance in the air.

      Gone.

      She’d known it. But seeing it was too final, too real. She sniffed the faint, weeks-old hint of Victoria’s perfume, and tears prickled.

      She stopped in the center of the room and willed them away, widening her eyes. She was not going to hide behind tears. She was here for a reason, and grief wouldn’t help her sister now. Katherine waited until her eyes were so dry they hurt. Then she forced an inventory of every detail.

      What had happened?

      There was no evidence of violence. All was painfully normal and undisturbed. Victoria could walk in at any second complaining about the lack of honey for her tea. But as the seconds ticked by, Katherine knew waiting for her sister’s familiar tread was in vain.

      Gone.

      On the bed, nestled on Victoria’s pillow, was a pair of opera glasses. They were the only item in the room that seemed out of place. Kat walked to her sister’s bed and picked up the binoculars. The opera glasses were white porcelain with gilded edges. The handle she used to flip them over and hold them up to her eyes had a grip on the end of a brass extension that matched the porcelain around the lenses.

      The lenses were meant to bring the action onstage closer to the viewer’s perceptions. They distorted her view of the room.

      She lowered the opera glasses and opened her hand on the grip, where she could feel a brass plate. It was engraved with a letter and a number corresponding to the box and seat from which it came. Each seat in every private box at l’Opéra Severne had a slot in the right armrest where the opera glasses rested when not in use.

      It wasn’t normal for one of the company to have taken a pair back to her room.

      Suddenly, СКАЧАТЬ