Congress of Secrets

by Stephanie Burgis

  When he opened his eyes, he saw Peter Riesenbeck, the actor, staring directly at him through the bakery’s clear glass window.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Peter had been walking since dawn. Anything to escape.

  The night before, he’d lain down with the blissful expectation of a long, deep, healing sleep. Instead, nightmares had swept him staringly wide awake well before the sun rose. He could have fallen back to sleep if they’d been mere fantasies of his imagination, but they had been far worse. They had been unvarnished memories.

  And every time he’d closed his eyes, he’d felt the walls of his cell close back around him.

  At first light, he gave up. He slipped out of the silent guesthouse and begun to walk, desperately and relentlessly, ignoring his aching, still-weakened limbs.

  He’d walked through the fashionable center of Vienna on his first night here, dreaming of future successes at the Burgtheater itself. Now that he was scheduled for an actual performance there, he couldn’t even force his steps back to the city center. That would have meant walking too close to the Hofburg palace and the hidden rooms inside.

  The rooms, and the monsters that lurked within.

  Peter struck out in a different direction this time, through the outskirts of the walled city. As the sun rose, and he shut his mind to the thoughts that wanted to bombard him, he turned his attention instead to the theater around him, forcing himself to become an audience instead of an actor, for once.

  He watched street cleaners set off from their own filthy, narrow streets for their work in the wealthier parts of town. As the hours passed, he watched immigrants from all over Europe and the Ottoman Empire start their days. Limping through the streets without pause, he passed Russians and Turks, Poles and Croats, many of them dressed in colorful native dress and all of them talking in a stream of different languages that passed meaninglessly through his ears.

  Perhaps he ought to have been taking notes for future roles, stage sets, and costumes. But the future felt too amorphous and threatening to let himself imagine. Instead, Peter focused his eyes on the images around him and forced his feet forward, letting the effort and the images take the place of any rational thought.

  His fate was coming for him soon enough. He wouldn’t waste what freedom he had left.

  He was in the fifteenth district when he glimpsed a familiar gesture in the corner of his eye.

  Peter lurched to a halt, blinking. He didn’t even know, at first, what had caught his attention so strongly. Something to his right …

  He turned slowly, focusing his bleary eyes. A bakery stood on his right, the glass windows transparent for the sake of temptation. The baker himself stood behind the counter, a massive figure. A group of small boys hurried out the door, scattering past Peter, as he frowned at the two customers left inside.

  A woman stood at the counter now, ordering with quick, irritable gestures. Before her, stepping away from the counter, was an aristocrat in full morning-dress, tall and lean, with silvering brown hair, looking as out of place as an exotic animal in this humble neighborhood. His face was turned away from Peter, but even so, Peter was instantly certain that this couldn’t be any of the noblemen he had known in Prague. Yet something about the way this man stood …

  The man turned, half-smiling, and lifted his pastry to his mouth.

  Peter staggered. He knew that rueful smile and that easy bearing.

  Michael.

  The clothes and the hair color had changed, but the mobile, intelligent face was exactly the same.

  Peter’s breath battered his aching chest. He’d barely believed in any chance of success for his own mad, desperate scheme. But now …

  He glanced quickly up and down the street. There were no visible policemen here on the immigrants’ side of town. If he were to run back to the Hofburg, by the time he convinced anyone of his credibility Michael would be gone. Peter couldn’t summon official help or even hope to overpower Michael himself in his current state.

  But if he hid and followed Michael back to his hiding place …

  He looked back into the bakery just as Michael looked up and met his gaze.

  Recognition flashed in the other man’s face.

  “Hellfire!” Peter muttered.

  No choice.

  He turned to run.

  Michael cursed and dropped his half-eaten Krapfen. It fell to the bakery floor in a puff of powdered sugar, scattering against his polished boots as he leaped for the door.

  It jingled as he threw it open. Outside, the street was nearly full of people by now, with boys selling newspapers and street cooks hawking savory Turkish Böreks, sweet ViennesePalatschinken, and roasted almonds to passersby. The grating noise of a knife grinder buzzed through the sounds of the crowd as Michael scanned the colorful, moving groups of people. Finally, he caught a flash of Peter Riesenbeck’s blond hair—just as it disappeared around the closest street corner.

  There was no good reason for Riesenbeck to turn tail and run at the sight of his old traveling companion. No reason at all, if Riesenbeck still believed the story Michael had spun him.

  If he thought Michael such a horror-inducing danger that he would run to avoid meeting him again, then Michael could think of only one explanation that fit: Vienna’s secret police had found the actor.

  Michael’s heartbeat thudded in his ears as he gave up discretion and leapt forward, pushing past paper boys and ignoring the loud protests of the street cook whose ingredients he knocked over on his way. Elbows caught him in his side, knocking the breath out of him, but he didn’t stop running. He didn’t dare.

  The other man might be heavier built than Michael, but he was also more than ten years younger and fitter …

  And yet, oddly, he seemed no faster. Michael thudded onto the side street in time to see Riesenbeck less than a block ahead of him, far closer than he’d anticipated.

  Michael didn’t stop to savor his luck. Instead, he put on a burst of speed. Riesenbeck swerved into an alley, cutting past a veiled woman and six children who formed a happy, noisy family group that effectively blocked the alleyway for a full twenty seconds. Michael could have snarled in his frustration, but any further commotion would be fatal. He waited, cursing inwardly, for them to pass, then finally lunged behind the last bouncing child to skid into the narrow alleyway.

  … Which was empty.

  Damn, damn, damn!

  Michael thudded to a halt at the other end, his chest burning with effort. The narrow alleyway ended in a side street lined with taverns of the lowest sort. This early in the day, only a few men wandered down the street, already staggering from too much liquor. The actor was nowhere to be seen.

  Michael tipped his head back against the closest stone wall, reeling with disappointment.

  He could walk up and down the street, peering into every tavern he passed, but in this neighborhood, every tavern would have half a dozen secret exits. The search would be every bit as bitterly futile as a hunt for any of the “lost” inheritances of the French Revolution that Michael had sold to gullible magnates across Eastern Europe in the past twenty years.

  Worse yet, by the time he had searched four or five of the closest taverns, Riesenbeck might well have returned to this street with a policeman in tow. All that Michael could do now was turn around and make his own way, as secretly and swiftly as he possibly could, back to Caroline’s apartment to pack.

  Heaviness sagged through him.

  There was no other choice. Wealth, luck, a guaranteed future … they might all beckon to him with a siren song, but Michael had been a professional gambler for nearly all of his life. That was more than long enough to recognize the change in the wind that signaled oncoming disaster. He knew when to stay in the game and when to cut his losses before it was too late.

  He would have to leave Vienna.

  Peter slipped out of the tavern’s back entrance after five minutes of skulking in the darkest corner of the room. The back entrance led into another al
leyway, filthy and deserted except for the busy chittering of rats rooting through the tavern’s discarded chamber pot slops and rubbish.

  His panting breath shuddered through his weakened body, and his one chance at capturing Michael this morning was gone … but even as he breathed in the stench of the alleyway around him, he savored the sudden, glimmering shard of hope that cut through his chest, sharp and bright and painful.

  A single glimpse of the other man’s attire had been more than enough to confirm everything he’d claimed to Grünemann.

  He would find Michael again at the Hofburg tonight, just as he had promised.

  And then Peter would never have to play the role of victim again.

  Caroline followed Charles down the stairs, her breath coming faster with every step closer to his apartment … closer to the ritual that awaited her.

  This is a mistake, her mind whispered, even as she forced her feet forward. They turned the curve in the stairs, and perspiration broke out on her forehead. The muscles in her chest felt as tight as if she were running rather than walking forward at an even, ladylike pace.

  Nothing could be a mistake if it brought her father back to her. Not after twenty-four years of misery, guilt, and loss.

  She couldn’t turn back now.

  Charles bent over the door to his apartment, jingling the keys.

  “Your Ladyship.” He opened the door and gestured her forward.

  Caroline nodded graciously and swept through the doorway, careful not to brush against him on the way.

  She’d never stepped inside her secretary’s apartment before. Michael’s apartment, too, now. She found herself glancing inquisitively for the door that might lead to Michael’s own chamber. It was a foolish impulse, of course—he would keep nothing there of value; nothing that meant anything about the man himself, hidden underneath his many layers of disguise.

  If anyone ever found out that she’d stepped, unchaperoned, into the apartment of two bachelors, her reputation would be besmirched beyond repair.

  If … But, of course, it was far more than a mere possibility. The emperor’s spies would certainly report today’s expedition to him. Never mind. She was past worrying about that now.

  She couldn’t dismiss all of her servants from her own apartment at a moment’s notice. Thatwould cry out suspicion to anyone who cared to look, including—especially—the spy already placed in her household by the emperor. There would be no servants left in Charles’s apartment, though, after Michael’s breakfast had been attended to, the apartment cleaned, and Michael himself safely departed for the day.

  Caroline and Charles had waited a full half hour after the last of the maids had finally finished their duties in the apartment below. There would be no one to witness what happened next. And if any rumors did spread that she had lowered herself so far as to have a liaison with her own secretary …

  Caroline imagined Marie Rothmere’s poisonous satisfaction and winced.

  Well, she had never cared for the opinion of high society before, so why should she begin to care now?

  “This is my bedroom,” Charles said. He hesitated in front of a gold-colored door, flushing. “I … that is, it might be wise …”

  “I understand.” Caroline’s lips twisted in a humorless smile. “We will certainly be safest in your own room, without fear of interruption.”

  “Quite.” He coughed and turned away quickly. “So.” He opened the door and let her step inside before him.

  Charles’s room was high-ceilinged, if not large, and it might have felt spacious if it hadn’t been so filled with clutter. Books, magazines, newspapers, and even—surprising Caroline—scattered shirts, jackets, and cravats covered the floor, the zebra-wood secretaire, and the cabinets, all of the clothing tossed aside with far less care than she would have expected from her efficient secretary.

  “Goodness,” Caroline said lightly. “I must keep you busier than I’d realized.”

  Charles hurried ahead of her to clear a space. “Nothing secret is visible,” he said, “but I thought it might be just as well to deter any spies from looking too closely underneath.”

  “So you’ve filled your room with distractions for them. Very sensible.”

  Caroline gazed politely out the window as Charles conducted his own search through the rubble that he’d created. The sky was clear and bright—it must be a sunny day outside.

  On sunny days when she’d been a girl, her father had sometimes taken pity on her restlessness and released Michael from his other duties to take her to the Prater. They would wander through the public paths hand-in-hand, and she would eat warm Palatschinken bought fresh from a street cook, with sweet apricot jam dribbling down her chin …

  “Now,” Charles said, and drew a curtain across the window.

  Enough sunlight still trickled through the dark curtain to let her see Charles’s silhouette as he sat down on the cleared patch of floor before her. He struck a tinder, and light flared to life on a squat candle. He set it before him and looked up, shadows flickering across his spectacles.

  “Your Ladyship?”

  On the floor beside him, Caroline glimpsed the glint of a silver knife.

  She took a deep breath and sat down across from him, smoothing down her skirts.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  Michael trudged up the stairs to his apartment. Plans swarmed through his head, but his feet felt too heavy and slow to keep up with them. He had to pack and leave, that much was certain … but now, in daylight, or after nightfall?

  He didn’t know. For the first time in years, he couldn’t see his way forward.

  His instincts should all be leaping into top form now to carry him safely out of the city and into his next adventure. They had done so a dozen times in the past five years alone. But now …

  Michael imagined Caroline’s face when she realized that he was gone.

  … And that he had abandoned her again, leaving chaos and disaster in his wake.

  Again.

  He straightened his shoulders with an irritable jerk. He could only protect her by leaving now. With luck, even if any policemen tracked him here and arrived to question her, they would assume she’d been taken in as completely as the rest of them. He should leave now, for her sake as much as his own—perhaps even leave her a note that would act as protection, for her to show any accusers and prove her own aggrieved innocence. And yet …

  That was the difference, he realized, between this and every other quick escape he’d made over the last two decades. Before this, he’d never cared whom he’d left behind. Not since the first time, when Karolina’s screams had haunted his nightmares. After that, he’d taken care never to let himself grow too attached to anyone he met in his schemes.

  Oh, he’d had pleasant affairs along the way, with women he’d respected and liked who’d enjoyed the game as well as he did—but he’d never left behind anyone whose absence would truly pain him.

  Until now. Again.

  Karolina’s old loyal, unquestioning adoration of him was long gone—Michael almost laughed at the understatement—along with the innocence that he’d once associated with her. But something else had taken their place in the adult Caroline—a strength of character that resonated irresistibly within him.

  Perhaps it was the fact that she’d spent so much of her life effectively alone, just as he had. Perhaps it was the raw truth of their shared past, which cut through all the layers of illusion they’d both cultivated over the years—or the twin spirit that he could sense buried underneath her disguise, despite all her horrified denials. The passionate intelligence that had led her to play her own staggeringly successful gamble against the British aristocracy for so many years.

  Or the fact that, after all of that, she still cared. She might try to hide it beneath her polished demeanor, but her sheer intensity of feeling cut through all his polished shields, straight to the boy he thought he’d buried long ago.

  Whatever the reason, he�
�d been a fool. Now he remembered why he’d held himself so carefully apart from his companions all these years. Leaving Caroline today would feel like ripping out the last honest feeling inside him and leaving himself maimed and hollow.

  Michael had just enough self-possession left to be silent as he opened the door to his apartment. For all he knew, Charles Weston would be inside, and there was no one he wanted less to observe his actions than Caroline’s disapproving English secretary.

  Michael stepped softly into the front room and slid the door closed behind him. He crossed the room and stepped into the passage that led to both bedrooms. Holding his breath, he listened for any rustle of papers or cough that might signal Weston’s presence.

  Instead, he heard something he had not expected.

  Through Weston’s door, too soft to be understood, but instantly familiar, he heard Caroline’s voice.

  Shock froze Michael into immobility. He heard Weston murmur something in return, followed by an unmistakable gasp from Caroline.

  So. Michael realized his hands had clenched themselves into fists. He loosened his fingers and drew a silent breath to release the knotted muscles in his back.

  So. He had wondered what special value Weston had for her, that she would spend a fortune on renting him a first-district apartment so intimately close to her own.

  Now he knew the answer.

  Michael’s clenched jaw throbbed as he slipped open his own door and closed it behind him. He glanced unseeingly around the impeccably neat room—the room of a man who had never truly existed.

  How long …?

  No. Caroline’s affairs were her own concern.

  He ripped open the chest of drawers and tossed his few garments into his gleaming new satchel. He needed nothing else. His own secret stash of money and last-minute resources (a forged will of inheritance, a “diamond” ring made of glinting crystal, a deed of signatory to a nonexistent plot of land in the south of France) was kept in a secret purse next to his own skin, always.