by Chloe Cox
What would happen to her father?
It was all too much, and all Lucia wanted was to be alone somewhere, to think things through and come back to herself and begin to feel steady and sure in her own skin again. Her panicked mind went into overdrive just as Lord Cesare raised himself up to look into her eyes. It seemed to Lucia that he didn’t like what he saw. His eyes narrowed and his brows came together, and he framed the sides of her face with his large, rough hands, and looked more deeply.
“What are you?” he asked, and she turned away, ashamed and unable to explain why. She closed her eyes against hot tears, but to little effect. They spilled out and ran down her temples onto the fine tablecloth. She only opened them when Lord Cesare began to shake against her, his body racked with something terrible.
Lord Cesare threw himself back from the table, his hand clutching at his sternum, his eyes desperate.
“What are you?” he shouted, and stumbled backwards, away from her. For one horrible instant Lucia wondered what she had done—what he had seen—and whether it meant that she and her family had to die. Before she could ask, Lord Cesare disappeared into the tunnel that had hidden his entrance to the chamber.
Lucia heard a door fly open, heard it bang shut. And heard the lock fall into place.
CHAPTER 7
As a rule, Lord Cesare Lupin was not one to run away. Not from the barbarian Berkari tribes way up in the middle of some godsforsaken mountain range, not from assassins, and absolutely not from naked, vulnerable young women who had just given him the privilege of a life-altering orgasm. In fact, under normal circumstances, he might have been expected to run toward the naked, vulnerable young woman with the life-altering powers.
But nothing had been normal since the disaster of that last mountain raid. Since all those men had died, and Cesare had woken up changed.
He’d been fighting it, he realized now, in a constant struggle, even more so than he’d let himself believe. His only reprieve had been when Lucia had seemed to want him. Truthfully, it was when she had opened up to him, naked with her desire and her want of him. She had been a palliative. While he was inside her, it no longer felt like there was a terrible beast trying to claw its way out of his chest. Instead he could feel its strength coursing through him, its senses melding with his own, its desires sublimating to his. Everything had made sense.
And then she had pulled away, so suddenly, and for no reason that he could discern. And as she pulled away, it had felt like she was pulling the beast right out of him.
So he ran. That part Cesare wasn’t entirely ashamed of, since it had seemed the better part of valor to make sure that he didn’t kill them both. He was ashamed, now that he’d had some time to relive it all over again, of the words that he’d thrown in her face: “What are you?” He could have meant it about himself. Maybe he had.
After he’d torn himself away, he’d sat huddled in an old, dark catacomb, shaking and miserable, and fought tooth and nail until he felt like he had it back under control. It had taken him too long. Too long until he had been able to find a servant he could trust, too long until he had been able to arrange help for Lucia, to clothe her and feed her and bring her, in secret, to one Cesare’s own townhouses. And it had taken him too damn long to find his way down to his father’s dungeons, deep in the bowels of the Basiglia, where the most important prisoners were kept.
Much too long, because Vintner Lyselle was apparently already gone.
“Tell me again,” Cesare said. The jailer apparently didn’t spend much time above ground. He hadn’t recognized Cesare in the dull light, and, as such, hadn’t been inclined to be particularly helpful until Cesare had lifted him to his feet and reminded him of his oath of office.
“Well, my Lord, strictly speaking, he’s not here,” the little man said, jutting his chin out. He was used to being a virtual god here, in his own little wretched domain. Being outranked didn’t agree with him.
Cesare said, “Tell me who took him.”
The jailer sucked angrily on his teeth.
“I was told not to tell anyone, my Lord.”
It was one of the more paradoxical truths about ruling a city: the higher your rank, the less direct influence you had over the daily life of the average citizen. Cesare had no doubt that whomever had threatened the jailer would be back tomorrow, and that the jailer had every reason to believe that Cesare would never come back at all. Of course, in this particular situation, the jailer was very, very wrong.
“If you do not want to spend the rest of your life in this jail as an occupant, you will tell me what I want to know.” Cesare took another step forward, crowding the jailer into the rotted, seeping corner of his miserable office. He took another deep breath, and felt the beast building inside him. It was starting to feel very good, and that worried him. “You will tell me now.”
The little man cowered from him, as Cesare had expected. But behind the cowering was something else.
“My Lord,” the jailer said. “It was Rickle, my Lord. The Captain of the Duke’s Guard.”
Rickle, Cesare thought. Always Rickle. It had been Rickle who’d arranged for a new company of riders for the last raid.
“I just do as I’m told,” the jailer continued, spitting those last words out. They disgusted him. Cesare saw that now, and he saw something else: the little jailer hated him. Pure hatred, distilled through a lifetime of being a small man in the power of others.
Cesare looked harder: he wasn’t just a small man—he was impeccably dressed in the fine clothing of the class-conscious, even in this filthy jail. Velvet doublet, shiny brass buttons. He had pretensions. He might describe them as ambitions, but it didn’t matter, in the end. He was a man who lived on pride more than bread or water. Pride of office, pride of power, pride of pedigree. Cesare knew all too well how cruel that could make a man.
He had a sickening thought.
“How many prisoners are under your guard, now that Vintner Lyselle is gone?” he asked.
“Just one on my level,” the jailer mumbled. He seemed to take it as another humiliation. Which did not bode well at all for that one prisoner.
I provoked this beast, Cesare thought grimly. It is my responsibility to make sure it doesn’t attack. Tracking down Lyselle—assuming he was still alive—would have to wait a few moments.
“Take me to see that prisoner, please.”
The ‘please’ seemed to help. The jailer grunted, his lower lip still jutting out, but he rose and bowed his head before fumbling with his keys.
The heavy iron door creaked painfully, and the tunnel ahead was lit only by a single torch at the far end. Everything ahead was darkness. Wet, dark, and with the suggestion of little things scurrying about the edges of the dilapidated cells. Drops of liquid—not anything that could be called water, he was sure—fell onto the back of Cesare’s neck as he stepped through the threshold and into the Duke’s Dungeon proper.
The famed Basiglia prison was really a warren of different prisons, different sorts of Hells, each with their own master. It was the sort of place where men and women could be lost forever because of a bureaucratic oversight or a casual cruelty. The ancient, soot-black stone of the Basiglia rose high over the poorer sections of J’Amel as a constant sort of threat. Cesare hated it. He especially hated that the Duke had his own special corner of Hell to play in.
The jailer had turned to study Cesare’s reaction as he entered. He grunted again, apparently unsatisfied, and spat into an empty cell.
“He’s down near the end,” the little man said, and walked forward, dragging his keys across the bars of each passing cell in a clanging chorus. Cesare was appalled to hear him humming.
The dungeon only got darker and damper, and the skittering sounds of fleeing vermin only louder and lazier, as they walked farther down the dirty passageway. There were cells off to either side, small stone boxes, only a few with small, grated openings to the outside world, high up near the ceiling. Once they passed an opening to another
tunnel, one that led to someplace even darker and fouler than this one. That was where the permanent prisoners were kept, Cesare knew, though there weren’t many. His father favored executions.
The jailer stopped, and pointed into the gaping maw of darkness.
“That’s it,” he said. “He’s in there.”
Cesare could hardly see anything. The weak light from the ill-fed torch cut a dim triangle across the bars of the cell; a foot farther in, and it was pitch black. Something scurried in the dark. It was too big to be a rat.
“Leave us,” Cesare said. “I’d like to speak to him alone.”
“Is that right?” The jailer couldn’t hold back his contempt. The mixture of anger and fear was palpable.
“Please,” Cesare added.
The jailer grunted again, and averted his eyes downward. “I’ll be back at the front, then.”
Cesare watched the little man walk away, clanging the bars of the cells as he walked back to his post. Too late he considered who really paid the jailer—or who paid the jailer the most—and if it was someone who’d pay even more to have Lord Cesare Lupin locked up in the dungeon until he was unrecognizable, or dead. No one knew he’d come here, after all. The thought should have frightened him, but Cesare had the odd feeling that if he were kept away from Lucia Lyselle, there would come a point when the jailer’s door would not prove much of an obstacle. Of course, at that point, he might not even be recognizable to himself.
So he would take care of this obligation quickly. And then he would find a way to keep Lucia.
“Prisoner,” Cesare said, as gently as he could.
There was a dry cackle, ending in a cough. Something scrambled from one side of the cell to the other.
“Do you have a name?” Cesare asked.
A voice from the dark said, “‘Course I got a name. Not givin’ it to you.”
Cesare started. The voice had spoken with an accent he’d heard before, in the mountains. This was not a man from J’Amel.
“Why don’t you come forward into the light?” he asked. “I came to make sure you aren’t being mistreated.”
Again, that dry, hacking laughter. “‘Course I’m bein’ mistreated. It’s a dungeon. That’s the point.”
“I’d like to make sure it doesn’t get much worse.”
The silence was filled only by dripping water.
“You upset ‘im, did you?” the voice finally said.
“Not intentionally.”
“Well, t’wouldn’t be very hard.”
There was a sigh, and Cesare heard the sound of something being dragged across the rough stone floor of the cell. Slowly, the prisoner pulled himself into the light and then up to the bars. It was his leg he dragged behind him, limp at the end and useless. It would have made him easy to catch, although Cesare knew the mountain tribes wouldn’t want to have much to do with a cripple, either. More likely this man had been a forager, a scrounger, either living off scraps or some sort of skill that made him tolerable to the villages under J’Amel’s control and protection.
For the man was undoubtedly a Berkari barbarian.
The telltale tattoos on his face were incomplete, probably only half-finished before his injury. He must not have any family. Or one of the patrols had picked him out as an easy catch and brought him in for a bounty.
That is, if he’d been injured before he’d met the jailer.
Cesare cleared his throat. “Is that your only injury?”
But the Berkari prisoner was staring at him with narrowed eyes. “You’re the heir, ain’t you? I saw you once, riding out of J’Amel. The great scourge, Cesare Lupin. That’s what we called you.”
Cesare remained silent. He was the scourge of the Berkari. It wasn’t often one of them lived to call him that.
“And now the scourge wants to know if I’m injured! They tell children stories about you, to make ‘em act good, and now you want to know if I’m injured!”
The dry laughter shook his thin body until tears streamed down his dirty cheeks. Cesare’s jaw began to work back and forth, and he felt the rage begin to build within him, like a heated column of wrath rising inexorably from his belly to his mind. There was the new feeling, the beast, scraping away at his insides, howling for release, but not all of it was new. He had felt that wrath plenty of times before, hunting down Berkari raiding parties, and he’d made his reputation by unleashing it on any he found in his path.
That wasn’t the only place he’d felt it. It had a longer history than that.
The prisoner’s laughter stabbed at him, a furious series of pinpricks, all because here was the great, lumbering monster, trying to play at human decency. He had heard laughter like that a million times before. As a child, he couldn’t defend himself, but he was no longer a child.
Cesare lunged forward, his huge hands rattling the bars in their ancient settings.
“I am not a monster,” he shouted.
The Berkari didn’t move. Perhaps there was nothing left in the world that could scare him. The laughter stopped, only to be replaced by an alert curiosity. Instead of stepping back in fear, the prisoner leaned forward, putting his face as close to Cesare’s as he could.
Cesare himself was frozen, holding back the beast. It was getting harder and harder.
“You’re the heir?” the Berkari prisoner whispered. “You? But do they know what you are?”
Cesare gripped the bars until his knuckles drained white.
“Oh, high and mighty J’Amel!” The prisoner was laughing again, with wide-eyed wonder this time. He examined Cesare like one might look at an exotic exhibit. “It’s almost upon you now, ain’t it? Good thing there’s these bars here, hm? Still, can’t make you angry, can I? You just breathe real slow, my Lord Scourge. That’s right. Real slow.”
Cesare exhaled violently, spittle flying into the face of the unflinching prisoner. He was winning against…it. Slowly.
“Have you found her yet?” the prisoner asked. “You’ll know her if you do. You’ll know. If you’re lucky, she’ll love you back. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise what?” Cesare croaked.
The Berkari prisoner backed away from the bars, dragging his mangled foot back towards the dark, shaking his head the whole time.
“Poor bastard,” he muttered from the darkness. “Poor J’Amel.”
CHAPTER 8
What are you?
The words had twisted themselves around Lucia’s mind like a poison weed. Lord Cesare’s final—and, she presumed, horrified—question had reverberated through out her whole being ever since he’d uttered it. Even as nameless servants had arrived to clothe her, even as she was led, blind, through ancient catacombs, even as she was bundled into the most luxurious coach she’d ever seen and taken to a giant townhouse in the heart of J’Amel, she thought: What did he see? What am I?
Can I be so horrible?
And yet, she had been treated like a queen. Well, she assumed that she had; she had no real knowledge of what queens did. And she was not, if she were being honest, treated precisely like someone who was perfectly free to come and go as she chose. Avignon, Lord Cesare’s valet and the only one to introduce himself, made sure there was always someone close by. She hadn’t even had a chance to smuggle the bottle of the Duke’s Blend somewhere safe. She’d been sitting at the table, the tablecloth wrapped around her, trying to figure out how she would get it out of the locked room when Lord Cesare’s servants had come for her. She couldn’t risk anyone actually looking in the bag, so she’d left it where it was, buried in that crevice.
And now she was here, in a high-ceilinged library of ancient, dark wood, surrounded by endless walls of books. After being gently bathed by more silent, helpful servants, she’d been dressed in some sort of silken wrap that only increased her sense of unreality; she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that there were people who wore things like this all the time. They’d even remembered to feed her a very pleasant, rich meal of duck flavored with oranges.
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No one except Avignon had answered her questions, or even acknowledged that she’d asked them. It was the strangest thing, as though she were only a doll, afflicted with the delusion that she could speak.
And it had all been Lord Cesare’s doing—she was sure of it. Avignon had been in the background at the Dance of Seasons; he was undoubtedly a trusted confidant. So the man who’d run away from her after seeing her laid bare had provided for all this care and comfort.
It didn’t make sense.
Neither did it make sense that thoughts of Lord Cesare would make her wet between her legs again. She should be furious. She was furious. And crushed. And ashamed that she’d allowed herself to be so open, and that the result had been exactly what her grandmother had always said it would be. And yet, despite all that…
She shifted on the settee, her thighs brushing together. It reminded her of where Lord Cesare had touched her. She wasn’t nearly as sore as she thought she would be, and already her body was coming alive at the thought of him, just as it had every time she’d thought of him since the Dance of the Seasons, when he’d saved her from Paolo Ramora.
Paolo, who she couldn’t even bring herself to hate anymore, since he had been the reason she’d ended up bent over a table with Lord Cesare inside her.
Paolo…
With a start, Lucia realized she’d been set up.
Paolo had led her to Lord Cesare. Lord Cesare, the Lord Cesare, heir to the Ducal seat, had arranged for someone she knew to lure her to that cavern, where he’d then trapped her and had his way with her. With her eager encouragement, yes, but how could he have known? How could he know she would follow Paolo?
Why bother? Why arrange the abduction of a poor vintner’s daughter?
None of it made sense, but Lucia was quickly becoming accustomed to the hard reality that life was under even less obligation to be sensible than it was to be fair. And if Paolo Ramora were no longer a realistic prospect, she would need Lord Cesare’s help more than ever. She would have to make Lord Cesare love her, or at least want her, if she wanted to be sure of his aid, and her family’s future. She had to do whatever she could to get her poor father out of prison, at the very least. And that meant being whatever Lord Cesare wanted. It meant hiding whatever part of herself had caused him to run.