The Warlord's Demise

By Andreya Stuart and N. A. Fulton

Eleanor, suddenly the sole heir to her father's estates, must wed the brutal, battle-hardened Warrior who laid siege to her castle and killed her only brother. Even as her body is bartered, and her freedom taken, Eleanor vows her enemy will never know a moment's peace while she lives.

Fresh from the Crusades, commanding a battle-weary Army, the Duke of Trevich has been forced to wage war to seize the estates granted to him by the King in London.

To end the ceaseless raids devastating his land and people, he must marry a girl who loathes him, who he has every reason to hate. Marry, but not bed and not keep. He refuses to allow his reward for decades of service in the Holy Land to be this dangerous madwoman of a wife. She will be his prisoner until he can set her aside. He will have only a woman of honor, dignity, loyalty, and virtue to wife.

In this dark historical mystery romance, the Duke and his daring Virgin Bride fight a brutal war for their survival and the future of their people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AudioIron.com
• Release date: Jan 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201875497

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Details & Notices

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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Chapter One

Eleanor hit the table in front of her father so hard that she heard the bones in her hands crack. She swept the maps and treaty drafts covering the table onto the floor and hurled the inkpot at the wall.

I do not care what you have signed!

We have summoned the priest, and he waits with the Duke below, said her father.

Face grey, eyes staring, he might have been a stranger. Blood and mud coated his battered armor, a soiled bandage covered the stumps of two fingers. Not a young man to begin with, he looked to have aged a lifetime.

Share the demon's bed? Bear his children? she asked incredulously. I will die first!

You would prefer he kill us all? her father demanded.

The back of her father's hand came across her face hard. She dropped to the floor, head reeling, looked up to find him over her. His eyes were pits of hate in a dead white face.

Four hundred men have died defending this keep. In the last year we lost all our crops, our women have been raped, our children murdered. You planned this campaign with your brother. You insisted that we not parley when the Duke came to us for your hand. Now you will pay the price.

To such a fate, you would never surrender a man!

You are not a man! Would to God that I had remembered that a year past! Would to God that you had died in your brother's place! You are God's curse upon me and if you die in the Duke's keeping, I will dance a jig and pray you land in hell!

The world swam before Eleanor's eyes. Her father had never raised his voice to her, had coddled her since childhood. Now, he bent down, took her arm, wrenched her up on to her feet and shoved her toward the door.

Not one man more will die when we can make peace at merely the price of a woman's honor.

He pulled the door open and one of the Duke's men turned toward them, his blade drawn. Very tall, white-haired, face burned brown and lined by years in a far off desert, the guard looked as if he hadn't slept since time began.

No one had. The Duke's siege had lasted only a fortnight, but the last three days had been an unending assault.

Eleanor saw blood lust still burned in the pale man's eyes.

Her father shoved her into the hall and she fell at the guard's feet. Take her and the deed is done! May she be a curse upon your Lord as she has been one upon me.

The guard took Eleanor by the hair, jerked her to her feet, and pulled her down the hall. She heard the door to her father's counting room slam shut as the guard drove her down the wide staircase that led to the castle's courtyard.

As the guard pushed her into the midday sun, the stench of tar and scorched flesh struck her like a wall. Nausea washed over her. Head fixed in the giant's hand, as he half-shoved, half-carried her through the mud, she couldn't turn away from the broken bodies or familiar faces that littered the ground and battlements all around her.

At the main gate, its drawbridge covered in gore and lost limbs from the hard fought assault this morning, she found herself in a circle of men who towered over her. Faces grim, jaws clenched, they studied her and clearly found her wanting.

She recalled removing her dress early this morning when they brought Eric to her. It was all she'd had to tear into strips for bandages. Now she looked down to find she wore just a thin shift, and it was plastered to her body by her brother's blood. It was a fitting wedding gown for this hellish union.

She turned to find her priest, first to hear her confession, rotund and trembling before the half a hundred warriors who had gathered to hear her vows. He looked at her piteously, but made no move to cover or comfort her.

The crowd stirred and Robert de Vitot, Duke of Trevich, stepped through the circle of men to her side.

Burned gold and brown from decades in the Holy Land and broadly built from a lifetime on campaign, the Duke was taller than all but the white-haired warrior who had dragged her to the gate. Coal black hair stuck to his sweat-streaked face, and his deep brown eyes might have been holes bored into his black heart for all the humanity they revealed when they looked at her.

His hate for her was palpable. What did he see as he looked at her?

She was so fair skinned that blue veins could be seen in her hands, and her newly cropped hair was so pale as to be silver in the sun. She was so slender that she could still be taken for a youth despite her seventeen summers, and so short of stature that her head came to just above his shoulder. She was as Norman as the king, he as Saxon as a slave.

This could not be.

Without a thought, Eleanor turned to walk away from the Duke. She could not bear to look at him, would die screaming should he touch her—

The Duke's hand bit into upper arm so hard she cried out. He pulled her back to his side and held her immobile as the priest began to stumble through his office.

The Duke shook her when she failed to speak her vows and white-hot pain coursed through her arm until she made her oath to him under God. A moment later, she heard him bark his own vows, and then the deed was done.

While men spoke around her, Eleanor looked up to heaven. Surely lightning should strike them both dead for this abomination.

Above her she discovered her brother's head, hacked from its body and stuck on a spear, the butt end of which was lodged it in one of metal braces that usually held her family's standard.

Eleanor vomited the little food she had taken that day onto the ground and backed away. The Duke looked down at her in surprise, then up at what hung over them.

Let's have this misery done, he said.

He took her by the arm and dragged her, writhing, back through the men, across the bridge into the keep. Her bare feet slipped and slid in the blood and mud and tar that coated everything. Her shins struck every stair on the way up, and she swiftly lost both her shoes. Behind them, half a dozen grim men were in tow.

At the top of the stairs, the Duke shoved open the door to her room and threw her down onto her own bed.

She struggled to sit up. Three men remained in the hall and three, including the white-haired man and the Duke, followed her in.

The white-haired man put his back to the door while a darker, heavier, smaller man went around the bed behind her. All their faces were as hard as stone.

Could it be they all meant to rape her?

Her husband moved first. He pulled a square of white linen from his pocket and wrapped the cloth around his hand. Then he walked to the bed, and unsheathed his blade. As she tried to scoot away from him, the dark man, from behind, her forced her shoulders back and down until she was flat on the bed.

The Duke threw her shift up over her waist, forced her struggling legs apart and she felt his blade pierce her thigh just inches from her sex.

The Duke pulled his hand away, and she saw the linen he held was soaked with her blood. He threw her shift down over her thighs and the man behind her let her sit up, but put his hand over her mouth when she tried to speak.

The Duke dropped to his haunches so he could look into her face.

Now, we will have it clear from the start, he said. I have two men here who will say this was no true bedding. I will not be forced to wed a woman who hates me and who I have every reason to hate. You will live at my keep as my wife until I choose to set you aside. At which time you will take orders in the cloister of my choosing. Do you understand?

Eleanor could not believe her ears. She was to be spared the hell of a marriage to this monster? Would never feel him pry his way inside her again or feel his child stirring under her heart?

Understanding came a moment later, and she tried to pull the hand covering her mouth away so she could spit obscenities at him.

This was theft, pure and brutal! He had never meant to create a union of their houses. He meant to have all and leave her family with nothing. He had not made peace but connived conquest.

Say a word to anyone before we leave this place today, or before I give you leave, and I swear, he paused as if to make sure she would hear him, I will kill you, your mother, your father and every man, woman and child on these lands. Breathe just one word against me here, and your tongue will seal their fate.

She thought of his army waiting outside the castle, her dead still piled in the keep, all the villages he'd burned over the last year. There were hardly enough souls left alive to rebuild shelter for winter or enough food left to forestall famine. The Duke could easily do as he said.

The dark man behind her slowly took his hand away from her mouth.

Her lips, cut by her teeth during the struggle, felt swollen and stiff. Her mouth was dry from lack of food and water. How long since she'd eaten? It took a long moment to find her voice, but then she said, I see. You are not only a cur and a murderer, but a thief as well. As you demand, I will hide your treachery to save those I love, Duke. But God in heaven sees what you do here. You will burn in hell.

The Duke stood up. Soon shall I consign you to a convent, shrew, where you may pray, hour after hour, for God to punish me for all my sins.

He looked at his soldiers.

We leave within the hour. Bind the girl and shove her in with the luggage. Keep her from me. I would to God I could see her and the rest of these vermin dead.

As ordered, Eleanor was trundled back down the stairs. As she was thrust across the courtyard, she saw the Duke shove the bloody rag he had pulled from between her legs into the hands of the priest.

The dark-haired soldier drove her over the drawbridge, across the battle lines, to a rough-made wagon half filled with spears. Two bodies, wrapped in bloody cloaks, already lay atop them. The man bound her hand and foot, then lifted her into the cart to sit beside them.

In short order, the Duke, his army, and his new bride set off.

NIGHT FELL BEFORE THE march ended, and Eleanor's head ached with the endless jostling. The spears beneath her made it impossible for her to stay upright, so, eventually, she was all but lying beside the two bodies in the cart. Was this, she wondered, the sum total of their losses? Two men? So many of her people had been a slaughtered.

When the wagon finally rattled to a stop, she waited in vain for someone to come to her. She watched men at a distance start fires, search the area for small game, and light their evening cook fires.