My Husband Never Dies - Chapter 14
2. Escape
The capital has already grown quite warm. How is Brumfield in the north? Are you well? You must be enjoying blissful days as newlyweds, but even so, I hope you won’t let your guard down — as a member of the royal household, you know better…
Evelyn crumpled the prince’s letter mid-sentence and hurled it across the room. Her teeth ground together at the oily sweetness of his pleasantries. A fraud in royal garb, that one.
The prince’s reason for writing was laughably transparent. He feared she might’ve grown too comfortable — forgotten the mission in the haze of silk sheets and northern peace.
“Bastard!”
The curse burst from between lips as delicate as petals, directed without apology at a prince of the realm.
And rightly so.
He hadn’t told her what kind of man the Duke of Brumfield really was. In their line of work, such omissions were criminal. Assassination targets came with warnings, with dossiers, with meticulous lists of abnormalities. Whether out of ignorance or pure deceit, Adrian had failed to mention the obvious: Calix Brumfield was anything but ordinary.
So this was fraud, plain and simple. A contract laced with deception. And yet, Evelyn couldn’t find a single way out of Duke Brumfield’s grasp.
The morning after that nightmare of a wedding night, Evelyn slipped away from the manor in silence. No attendants, no farewells. Of course she ran. The Duke was immune to even the most virulent poisons. No, worse — the poison had worked. And yet, the bastard had come back.
He had come back to life. Gods damn it all. She had ended countless lives, but never once had she seen a dead man rise back from the dead.
Then came the madness. Mumbled nonsense about memories, then wild laughter — unhinged, gleeful, as if being undead were some private joke. That was when every instinct screamed at her to run.
To hell with the prince’s contract. This wasn’t work. This was beyond the skills of even the best assassin. She might be good at killing, but she was still human. When she died, she stayed dead.
And Evelyn, despite everything, wanted to live.
So she made her choice to drop the mission. Flee. Be hunted, maybe — but that was familiar ground.
She’d lived her whole life running from something. She’d grown used to hiding. All she had to do was get out of Brumfield territory. She could handle the rest.
With that, she jammed a black hood, tucked between silks for just such an occasion, over her unmistakable golden hair. She stepped quietly out of the manor grounds, already imagining the sound of shears shaving it all off. But then…
She got lost.
Finding your bearings by the stars, tracking the scent of water to follow the river downstream — these were the basics. The barest instincts of a fugitive with nothing but the clothes on her back. Evelyn knew them well. She had lived by them.
Under the clear sky, she walked south.
Then, somewhere along the way, the stars disappeared.
She couldn’t tell whether clouds had gathered or if her own eyes were beginning to betray her. Either way, the sky had gone dark, and the constellations she’d relied on blinked out one by one.
Somewhere ahead, she caught the sharp tang of water. That was promising. Rivers and streams always meant the possibility of a village nearby — scattered, perhaps, but still shelter of some kind.
So Evelyn kept moving south, following the scent.
She didn’t remember how long she walked like that, half-conscious, half-lost, until she finally blinked and realized the world had gone white.
Fog. Thick, clinging fog that muted every sound and swallowed the trees. If mist this dense had settled, there had to be a river or lake nearby. That much she could still reason out.
But the problem was with the sky now hidden, and the fog stinking of wet earth and river rot, she no longer knew which way was south.
She stopped walking. Something about the way the haze curled around her boots made her doubt her own instincts. Like she wasn’t walking through mist, but sinking into it.
“Gods-damned piss-stained fog…”
The vulgar expletives slipped out half under her breath, frustration prickling beneath her skin. With a huff, Evelyn yanked back her hood.
Golden hair, meticulously maintained even in exile, spilled out and shimmered faintly in the diffused light. She reached up, scratching her scalp in irritation, about to give the fog a proper glare, until—
Splish.
Footsteps, faint and rhythmic, echoed from afar.
Hilale
She was caught