by Chloe Cox
CHAPTER 14
Things were going so well just before they went up in flames.
Cesare had never been more nervous than in the run up to the Player’s Feast. Nervousness, he’d always felt, was not a worthy emotion. It was like watered-down cowardice. His pride would not allow it.
And yet, there it was, buzzing around his head like a cloud of wasps. It wouldn’t leave him alone, no matter how many times he ran through the possibilities in his head: if Grimaldi refused the wine, Cesare would assume Grimaldi believed it to be poisoned, and thus would accuse that profit-whoring snake of masterminding the entire plot. Cesare could then use this leverage to clear the Lyselle name, even if the vintner John Lyselle had, in truth, helped a little in muddying it. If Grimaldi drank the wine, well, he’d have to find some other way to free the Lyselles. He wouldn’t rule out a one-man invasion of the Basiglia, followed by either a coup d’état or a mad break for the mountains with Lucia slung over his shoulder. Possibly both, if the coup were not entirely successful. Cesare had considered each of these possibilities, and was at peace with them.
But if Lucia refused to drink…
Cesare hadn’t gotten that far. His mind had indulged in the slightly stronger form of cowardice known as avoidance: every time he tried to think about Lucia refusing to drink, it instinctively shied away. This was the whole point though, wasn’t it? To see if what she hid from him was treason? To see if she were plotting to kill him?
Why was he such a mess?
By the time Lucia had returned with the first bottle of wine, before the Feast proper had even begun, Cesare had located the source of his unease. Besides the rather obvious worry that the love of his life might want him dead, it was that it wouldn’t matter if she wanted him dead. He’d still be chained to her. He had no real choice— either she loved him and was true, and he lived as a man and a Duke, or she didn’t, and he’d have to find a way to kill himself as a beast and an abomination.
It was only made worse by the fact that Cesare suspected that he would continue to love her either way. Nothing in his life had prepared him for such a perilous loss of self-control. Childhood in his father’s house had taught him something about maintaining a core of pride when everything else was taken from you. But Lucia had taken even his pride, and so he was at a loss.
The whole thing put him in a dark, dark mood.
And so, to watch Lucia bring the glass to her lips under the warm lantern light and drink—to see her drink, even though she looked uncertain, even though it was a crime, to watch her drink and commit that crime for him—had been the single happiest moment of his life.
He’d immediately known exactly how he would reward her.
It was only a little while later, when Lucia sat cradled in his arms, and the veritable orgy of Bacchanalian lust that she’d unleashed upon the Player’s Feast raged around them, that he wondered whether Lucia Lyselle, amateur distiller, who had undoubtedly worked on her father’s greatest contract, would have been able to identify the true Duke’s Blend by sight or smell alone. Because what he’d had them all drink was not, in any way, the Duke’s Blend; no one had been able to find a bottle of the supposedly poisoned wine, not in all the searches of the Lyselle home. Cesare had only cleverly disguised the oldest bottle of amberwine that Avignon could find.
She might easily have seen through his ruse.
That was the first seed of doubt.
And yet, Cesare was able to push it aside. It was nothing, he told himself, compared to the strength of the bond he felt with Lucia now. That, he felt he could trust: the beast was well caged. And it was unquestionably Lucia who’d caged it, even if she didn’t know it.
And so he’d actually allowed happiness, true happiness, to creep into his heart. For the first time, he felt like maybe he even deserved it.
He’d kissed her head, buried his face in her hair. She was a miracle.
He’d been thinking about what people deserved—what, say, his father deserved, what Rickle and Grimaldi deserved, what Lucia deserved, what even he himself deserved—when he at long last brushed off Rickle’s rude inquisition, and went looking for Lucia. Because he felt, for the first time, that he, Cesare Lupin, deserved that happiness. He deserved her. He would make certain that he deserved her by stopping the execution of her father, come hell or high water.
And then he saw them, through the flying fire of the jugglers. Lucia, and a man in the Grimaldi livery, huddled away together, in a corner. In secret.
Sharing secrets.
And he felt he deserved it. The humiliation blossomed from some deep, dark corner of his psyche, some place he kept hidden away and tried very hard never to visit, a place that his father built for him. It bloomed ferociously, hideously, and spread quickly, little tendrils of shame sprouting and burrowing into every last crevice, until it began to rot him from the inside out. And what Cesare felt then was small. He had always been big, he’d always been the beast, uncouth, too large and brutish, but at least that had let him feel safe. Those afternoons in the courtyard of the Castel, when his father would brandish the whip and invite various members of court to watch, to criticize, to witness: that was the only time he’d felt small.
And now he felt it again. He felt like an insignificant fool. He watched the Grimaldi man put his hands on Lucia, watched them embrace.
And he saw nothing else.
Anger was what he acted on first, the sort of anger that had become a saving grace for him in his younger days, the sort of anger that had allowed him to survive. Cesare had fought constantly to keep it at bay since the mountain raid, and he couldn’t be sure what would happen if he let it have free rein. Now it snapped. Everything he’d been holding back began to spill forward, the force of it propelling him toward Lucia in a looming rage.
The Grimaldi boy looked up, saw him, knew terror. Cesare didn’t care. He bore down upon them, and when Lucia turned to look at him, he saw it in her eyes: hate.
The beast was already half-free when she tried to set him on fire.
Traditionally destroyed with fire…
It was the last proof that Cesare’s conscious mind, quickly disappearing into the maw of the Wolfenvask, actually needed: his true mate wanted him dead. As the Player’s Feast descended into screaming, writhing chaos, as ribbons of flame snaked around him, as Cesare finally, finally gave in to the beast that had so patiently awaited this opportunity, the last thing he remembered was the sound of his own horrible laughter. Of course his mate wanted him dead. Who could love such a beast…
CHAPTER 15
Lucia ran barefoot and desperate down the shining wet cobblestone streets of J’Amel. She couldn’t run in the shoes Cesare had made her wear, and she couldn’t hide in them, either, click-clacking her way over all the fine stone. She wouldn’t have outrun David, after pushing him into a pile of trash and darting down an alley, ditching him for his own safety. So the first thing she’d done was get rid of the shoes.
And now her feet ached and bled, and even the wet air of the humid, ruined night burned in her throat, and still, she kept running. Running made sense. It made her feel as though she were doing something.
As though there were something that could be done.
But even desperation and fear had their limits, and even righteous anger didn’t last forever. Lucia collapsed against the dark side door of a bakery, the grit on the wood turning to slime in the humidity, the sounds of vermin rustling away in protest amplified in the wet air. Her legs cramped so violently while she struggled to breathe that she did not immediately realize that she was crying, too.
It seemed like the final insult.
Be practical, she admonished herself, and silently begged her grandmother for guidance. This was no time to dwell on all the ways that she’d failed. There were very real, immediate concerns beyond Lucia’s wild and broken heart. Her father was being held for treason. He was going to be executed because they believed he’d poisoned the Duke’s Blend. And they believed that she�
��d helped.
That still didn’t seem quite real to her. But she had the image of Cesare striding toward her, scars blazing in the firelight, eyes deadly and full of rage, to remind her. It was real.
But they’d never found it, had they? They’d never actually found the Duke’s Blend. That’s what Remy had told her, what David had said. They’d never uncovered the secret storeroom that her father, in his infinite strangeness, had seen fit to build beneath the still. The only other bottle was the one that she’d stolen and hidden in that cavern after her father’s arrest. How could they know?
Inspiration gave her strength. She wasn’t far from her home; she’d run towards it without thinking, even though it was probably the stupidest place for her to go. Very likely there might be soldiers watching it. Or neighbors. It couldn’t possibly be safe.
So it was time to be brave.
Lucia stretched out her long limbs, still weak with fatigue. Gingerly she felt for the mask on her face. Her first instinct was to throw it away as just another remnant of Cesare’s hold on her. She did strip the red band of the Severille from her arm and throw it as far into the dirty street as she could, but the mask could protect her. The mask kept her from being Lucia Lyselle for just a little while longer.
She swallowed her pride and pushed off the bakery door, grasping at what remained of her momentum and forcing herself into a run. There was no way to know how much damage she’d done at the Player’s Feast, or how much time she would have before men came looking for her. She would need to hurry.
~ ~ ~
The thing about hot, humid spring nights in J’Amel, a city perched right on the edge of the sea, straddling the mouth of the great River Ebedi, was that the air could become its own sticky medium. A whispered word might swim on the gentle currents of a breeze and find itself still audible all the way on the other end of a long street. To a young woman, nearly naked, barefoot, and masked, creeping about alone in the darkened, empty streets of a residential district that had no Bacchanalian attractions to bring in revelers, the sounds of an abandoned night could pick away at one’s nerves one by one. First, the scuttling of something larger than a rat over there; the creaking of a shutter over here. Always the sense that someone might be near, but never a person in sight.
But worse even than the sounds were the smells.
Spilled amberwine, souring in the sticky heat, competed with the refuse that ran along the city’s gutters, overflowing at the end of another Bacchanal, the separate smells rising together in a chorus of scent that flowed easily, freely, and fully on the thick night air. Lucia braved it all, hurrying her way through the city, keeping hidden in the darkness of alleys and side streets whenever she could, sticking close to the hulking houses when she couldn’t. Everything glowed blue in the moonlight. She was almost there.
And it was the smell that first warned her.
Such a distinct smell: smoke, on a night when no one would build a fire, in a neighborhood where no one seemed to be home.
Lucia tried to tell herself that she was worrying needlessly, that there was no reason to think it had to be the worst case scenario; she was only anxious, only fretting because this was her only chance to save her father and herself. But her battered feet moved a little faster, and her lungs began to gasp at the air, tasting the burning, acrid smoke, gulping it down as if she required ever more proof, until she was close enough that it was certain: there was a fire.
Lucia stopped right at the edge of the narrow alley that opened at the end of her street. The smoke was thick now, chokingly thick, and oily, laden with chemicals. There was the flickering red glare, reflected back in an orange sheen on the glistening blue-black walls of the alley. And there was the frenzied, crackling roar of it.
She closed her eyes and stepped out from the alley.
It was her home, her house, her father’s still: on fire, blazing up to the moon in a column of flame and ash, destroying any and all hope that Lucia might have had left.
She stood dumbly, watching it, feeling her skin tighten from the heat, smelling her hair begin to singe. She no longer cared who saw her, even though there was no one, no one, out in the street, watching her life burn away. She knew that was not quite right, either, but there wasn’t energy left to devote to that. What little she had left was devoted to thinking about the bottles of the Duke’s Blend, hidden below the house, now surely exploding one by one in the heat of the fire.
That had been her one hope, her one idea: to get a bottle of the Duke’s Blend. Show it to them. Drink it in front of anyone who would watch, in front of Captain Rickle, in front of the Duke, especially in front of Cesare—lying, lying Cesare. She would drink it and sacrifice herself to show that it was not poisoned. The Basiglia didn’t frighten her now. It didn’t seem like she had anything left to lose. She would gladly go to prison for violating the Duke’s contract if it meant she could keep her pride and win her father’s freedom.
But all of that required a bottle of this year’s Blend. And all the bottles of the Duke’s Blend were currently beneath a towering wall of flame.
In a strange way, it was almost beautiful. A hauntingly eerie sight: one single house, burning alone in the night with no one to watch it. Set apart from all the others, just as Lucia had always felt set apart, just as her father was certainly always set apart, always strange and alone, just as she felt now. Truthfully, though, this was incredible: no one came out to gawk? No one was a witness? As though her small neighborhood was just a hollow husk of a community.
Or as though the community somehow knew better…
The hissing pop of an exploding bottle jerked Lucia back to reality. This was a problem. Without a bottle of the Duke’s Blend, she had no way of proving her father’s innocence. No one would have any proof one way or the other, and all of those bottles…
Another bottle exploded. This time shards of glass grazed her arm, leaving a trail of warm blood. Lucia wiped at it, thinking, I went through all the trouble of throwing away the Severille band…
The Severille! The cavern! How stupid she’d been; of course there was one more bottle, hidden away in that little hole in the wall in the cavern where she’d first truly met Cesare, behind several ancient locked doors and underneath a rotting old crypt. Lucia had no idea how she would find her way, but she would. She had to. She turned, invigorated, and ran back toward the alley.
Where a pair of cold, rough hands grabbed her and threw her against the wall.
“You,” a male voice sneered. Lucia kicked off from the wall, but iron fingers dug into her arms and forced her back. Her attacker leaned his weight against her body, bringing his face into the reflected firelight.
It was Gaston Grimaldi.
“I’d recognize that mask anywhere,” he sneered, his eyes traversing her body. “You’re the Wolf’s whore.”
“I’m no one’s whore,” Lucia snapped back.
Grimaldi gathered her wrists in one wiry hand and held them above her head. “Let’s see what you look like under there,” he said, and ripped her mask away.
Lucia spat at him. Grimaldi only smiled. It was a thin, cold smile.
“Let me guess at what you were doing here, whore,” he said, his tone calm, almost conversational. There were the pops of more bottles exploding around the corner; they were coming faster now, the heat was more intense. Grimaldi looked her in the eye and said, “You were setting fire to this house. You were destroying the only evidence that might clear me of these rumored charges. And you were doing it at the Wolf’s bidding.”
“What?” Lucia sputtered.
“Don’t lie to me,” Grimaldi hissed, and kicked her legs apart, grabbing her chin in his free hand. “I know what that farce with the fake wine was about. He expected me to refuse it? He’s an idiot. I have my own spies. You set this fire, didn’t you? You are helping him set me up for treason. Confess, and I promise,” he said, his breath coming hot on her cheek, “I promise it will go easier for you.”
Lucia wince
d as his manicured fingernails dug into her chin. “You’re the idiot if you think I’d set fire to my own house,” she said.
Grimaldi’s flat snake eyes flashed in the firelight. He tilted his head, first to one side, then the other, studying her face while her home burned just around the corner. There was a great crash, what could only be the roof caving in. Grimaldi didn’t flinch.
“You’re the Lyselle girl,” he said at last. “The one no one could find. The other conspirator. You’ve been the Wolf’s whore all along.” His voice sounded distant, as if he were working out some complex problem, unperturbed by the chaos behind him or the girl struggling in his grip.
“I told you,” Lucia said, getting angry, “I’m no one’s whore. Let me go!”
“Shut up,” he said absently, and smacked her across the mouth. Lucia tasted blood. “You’ve helped him—that’s obvious. And now you’re going to help me clear the Grimaldi name.”
He grabbed her chin again, forcing her to look into his soulless eyes, and he smiled as he raised his knee between her legs, spreading them farther apart. “I’ll interrogate you myself before I hand you over to Rickle,” he murmured. “We’ll have a very good time.”
The horror of his promise fell down around her like a heavy cloak, covering the world with dread. Lucia fought back a scream.
“You’ll regret this,” she said. “I promise you.”
“I very much doubt that, Miss Lyselle.” Grimaldi grinned at her. His hand left her face and traveled down her neck to grab a handful of her breast. “Will you come for me the way you came for him?” he murmured. “Will you scream so prettily if I make you bleed?”
Lucia closed her eyes. It was all she could do, as she was locked in his grip, unable to move, with no one to help her. All she had was the ability to fold in upon herself, to hide herself deep inside, where no one could reach her. Silently she thanked her grandmother for this skill, thanked even Cesare for showing her how dangerous it was to let people in. And so Lucia closed her eyes.