By the afternoon, he sucked in a final, labored, gasping breath and then slipped into the next world. Shortly thereafter, the funeral furnisher employed by Palmer in anticipation of the viscount’s passing, arrived to set the formal burial plans into motion.With the day gone, ushered in by the black of night, Lucien sat numbly in the quiet of the Blue Parlor now somberly draped with black baize. The candles placed about the room cast eerie shadows. For the lives he’d taken down in the field of battle and the loss he’d known of his wife and child, he’d imagined himself immune to any further pain. Staring at his father’s unmoving, lifeless form—he realized one never truly became accustomed to the eternal permanence of death.Since he’d set himself up as vigil, shutting himself in with his father until tomorrow when the viscount would be formally buried in the family burial grounds, his own life had played out before him in the silence of the room.He could place his life neatly into two categories.
