Moonlight shone. Rats scattered. Three years. Three bloody years, and still no hope of release. Jared St. John slumped against the damp wall of the hellhole of a prison, forgotten and forsaken. Thick calluses and red bumpy scars surrounded his ankles and wrists where the iron manacles rubbed against his skin. Dirt caked his hands and feet. Inside him, rage burned like an inferno. He was innocent, by God—had been on his way to a monastery—and was not responsible for the murder of his brother, Rafe. He thrust a finger through a threadbare place in his monk’s robe. They had no proof. They had no reason to suspect him. They had nothing. Yet, here he was. Sleeping in rat piss with only moonlight for company. His mind drifted to the facts he knew: his brother, the woman they had shared, his brother’s death. He growled. This was his own doing. If he had not been sucked into Colette’s spell, he would never have been suspect to the murder. Colette was proof of the wicked entanglements of women—of the agony they caused, of how they snared a man’s mind and soul by ensnaring his body.
