The Wolf's Captive (24 page)

Lucia smiled; of course Remy hadn’t let her down. Then she remembered her encounter with Claudio Clavel. “I saw your father here tonight,” she said darkly.

“That’s why I’m here,” David muttered, and for the first time that Lucia could recall, he looked genuinely uncomfortable in her presence. “Part of it, anyway. Dad told me he’d hire a lawyer for your father if I agreed to marry you, only I couldn’t find you to tell you.”

“You’d do that for me, David?” Lucia asked. She knew it was the last thing he wanted.

“Of course, Luce,” he said. “I’d do anything to help.”

“Well, listen, I think my father’s going to be just fine. It’s just a misunderstanding, and I’ve got some help.” Lucia felt quite sly about such a reference to Cesare—‘some’ help, indeed—but mostly she was touched by David’s offer. She grabbed his hand and squeezed tight. “But that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. Never thought we’d be in the Royal Theater like this, did you?”

David did not smile. Slowly, he looked around, and then took a long look at Lucia. Finally he said, “Lucia, what is it you think your father’s been accused of?”

Lucia frowned. She felt a little defensive on this point. “I’m not entirely sure, but I think it might have something to do with the Guild taxes? I might have made a mistake—”

David jerked on her arm, pulling her close. “Listen,” he whispered. “It’s
treason
. Your father’s been accused of treason. He’ll be drawn and quartered after the Finale Feast.”

And all the world slowed to a precarious, frightening stop.

The word ‘treason’ shot through Lucia’s mind like a weight in still water and settled to the bottom with a
crunch
. The other facts, the other known facts about the world began to reassemble themselves around this one core truth, and only in light of this new truth did they begin to make a dreadful kind of sense. Why else would there have been soldiers? Why else would anyone have cared so much about finding the store of the Duke’s Blend? Why else would her father have been hauled off in chains?

Lucia shook her head.
Her
father? Her gentle, absent-minded father? A man quite incapable of managing anything outside of a still? Her father was going to die?

And Cesare hadn’t told her?

“No,” she said, shaking her head continuously now, as though that added weight to her denial, “No, that’s some sort of mistake, David.”

David grabbed her by the arms and shook her so hard that she bit the inside of her cheek.

“Lucia, they say he poisoned the Duke’s Blend,” he said. “The
Duke’s Blend
. You’re wanted for it, because they can’t
find
any of it. Do you see?”

To her horror, Lucia saw.

On the one hand, the urgency of Rickle’s pursuit and Cesare’s protection began to make some sort of sense. Cesare’s changeable attitudes towards her began to make some sort of sense, as well. That wasn’t entirely true: his
suspicion
of her began to make sense. Now she was only mystified that he could harbor any affectionate feelings towards her at all, when she was suspected of treason. When her father was actually accused of poisoning the Duke’s Blend.

Cesare’s machinations with the so-called Duke’s Blend earlier that evening made a kind of sense now, too. He’d wanted to see how she’d react. He’d wanted to see how Grimaldi would react.

And they’d both passed his test. She’d passed his faithfulness test, even when he’d been lying to her since that night in the cavern beneath the Dance of the Dead. Was that all she was to him, all along? Some means to an end, to get at the nature of a traitorous plot?

She’d
trusted
him.

“Lucia, are you all right?” David’s voice dragged her back to the present. The horrible, fractured present. “You really didn’t know, did you?”

But Lucia was no longer listening. She didn’t feel capable of any more thought, any more feeling, any more
being
in this scarred city that would soon see her and her father dead. She’d been used, betrayed, and deceived, and all this time, all this time, she’d been playing at some sort of perverse pretension to love with the man who had lied to her about her father’s fate. All this time, while her father rotted in the Basiglia, wondering where she was, if she were safe, if she were coming for him.

All this time.

Her legs gave out from under her. David caught her, held her as best he could. Her world had shrunk down to this one infinitesimal point of despair, of loss compounded and folded in upon itself until it was too thick, too dense, too heavy for her to bear. She might have screamed; she might have simply curled into a ball; she might have run out into the city, delirious with the desire to find her father. She would never know, because instead she looked up and saw the shade of terror pass over David’s face.

He was looking over her shoulder.

Lucia turned. It felt very slow, like everything in the world—David, the fire jugglers, even the flaming batons, hanging in the air like ripe fruit—everything moved so slowly, just to give her time to decide what to do. Because when she turned, she saw Lord Cesare Lupin, separated from them only by the three fire jugglers, descending upon them with a look of murderous rage.

In an instant, it was clear to her how this looked: she was huddled in a dark corner, hiding, in counsel with a Grimaldi agent. It looked like conspiracy. Lucia could, theoretically, explain.

She did not want to.

Instead, she plucked one of those flaming batons from the air and set fire to everything within reach, spilling an oil lamp over the floor, lighting the fine drapery in a quick-spreading flame. It proved enough of a distraction to allow a Severille slave and a lowly Grimaldi footman to escape through the Player’s entrance.

C
HAPTER 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…

C
HAPTER 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.