The Pirate Prince (14 page)

Your new master
…

“I have been against this vendetta from the start,” Vicar said as they scrambled up the companionway and out over the broad decks of his warship. “I have tried to show him there is no justice in such total, massive revenge, but he refuses to listen! Maybe he will listen to you. It is primitive, uncivilized! If he does this thing, it will destroy him.”

She started down the gangplank, but Vicar clamped a hand around her arm. “Wait.”

She turned back, wild-eyed. “What is it?”

His silver eyes were cool, forceful. “If you fail, he may execute you along with them.”

She flicked the warning off impatiently. “Where are they?”

“The magazine.”

In moments, they were running down the dock. Vicar shooed the ruffians off the latest-arrived wagon, and the two of them climbed up into the driver’s seat. He drove the wagon at a breakneck pace all the way up the winding road to Little Genoa and through the gates Lazar had opened last night.

Allegra flung herself down from the wagon before it had barely stopped, running across the square, each step jarring her hurt ankle through her tattered slippers. Lazar’s pirates watched her pass. None dared make a move to stop her, all having been warned not to touch her.

Surely he wasn’t Lazar di Fiore. She knew her father was not a good man, but she couldn’t believe anything so horrible of him. Nor, surely, was the stranger capable of anything so evil as a mass execution. Even after the brutal way he had beaten Domenic, he had held her so gently, tucked her into his bed so tenderly. But as she tore past the Poseidon fountain, she gasped to see them dragging the dead body of Goliath over the flagstones toward burial somewhere, a trail of blood left by the gunshot wound in his head.

Then a bit of movement up on the eastern wall caught her eye. There was a crowd of people coming out onto the high, windy ramparts of the city wall from the side door of the formidable garrison. She saw the outlines of women and children among them.

“God, no,” she breathed.
Don’t let me be too late
.

It took forever to cross the piazza to the immense magazine, but at last she was stumbling up the three stone steps, through the open door, and into the atrium. She paused for only a heartbeat. She had never seen the inside of the magazine before. It was deserted. She did not want to wonder what had become of all the gallant blue-coated guards. Panting with exertion, she looked right and left. She spied a stone staircase at the end of the corridor on her left and ran for it.

She lost her footing on one of the steps and scraped her shin, but she kept going and at last came to a little door at the top of the steps. She opened it to the eastern rampart of the wall. She stopped in the shadow of the doorway, staring in disbelief.

Papa was there. All her relatives were being herded against the battlements that overlooked the cliffs. Across from them, a group of men with guns was milling into order.

And at the far end of this group stood a giant black silhouette, massive arms crossed, a curved blade at his side. The long ends of his silken skullcap waved slowly in the breeze behind him.

CHAPTER SIX

High on the eastern ramparts, the sun was hot, and the breeze was swift. Sully was ordering the men into firing-squad position when Lazar caught himself studying his victims.

Damn it, you idiot. Never look at the faces
.

Captain Wolfe had taught him that much when Lazar had been barely sixteen. With a low growl of anger, he turned away to look out at the sea, but already the image of a big-bosomed matron and her stout little lad in togs and strings was imprinted onto his memory forever, along with that of a skinny Monteverdi grandfather with a square white beard who was shouting, in an utter Italian fury, at his weeping kin to die with some pride.

Lazar let out a long breath that was just a trifle unsteady and reached for the flask of rum in his vest, but it was no longer there. He remembered he had used the strap to hobble Allegra.

The Monteverdis began chanting the rosary with one quavering collective voice. Lazar listened for only a moment, then turned away with a growl. It had been a long time since he’d heard the sound of prayers.

He looked at his own shadow looming black over the flagstone. His men awaited his command, their guns cocked. The Monteverdis seemed prepared to die, each on his knees, eyes cast heavenward—except for the governor, who knew the futility, Lazar supposed, of prayer in his case.

He called the order for the men to bring up their guns. Reminded himself he could bear this, he could live with this. He had done, and would undoubtedly do, worse. This was his duty, his penance, and if they hanged him for it one day, well, the truth of it was he had no business being alive anyway, did he?

He drifted a moment, unanchored, remembering the night his world ended.

Everyone waited. Somebody sobbed. The wind scored his cheeks invisibly with tiny blades of sand.

He did not like this duty, but he had lived when he should have perished. Only a river of blood could wash him clean now.

“To ready,” he said, hard and black, broken and charred, as the castle on the mountaintop.

The guns were leveled to the men’s shoulders in a spiky line.

“God curse you forevermore!” the governor uttered, shaking with his malediction like a sun-dazed Ezekiel.

Lazar met his glare evenly, felt his mouth go into a slight, cruel smile. Cursed? he thought.
If you only knew
.

But something held him back from giving the order, coward that he was. He had the vague sense that he ought to get that baby out of there, and the old woman on the end. He turned to the sea, a part of him somehow imploring the deep. He saw a dark speck on the horizon that was no doubt the Genovese flagship.

Mawkish idiot. Get on with it
.

“Cap?” he heard Sully ask from a vast distance.

He did not answer. He listened to the wind. No message came, only the howl in his head of ghosts craving blood. He wanted it to be over. He wanted peace.

Then he did not have to speak to Sully. The flick of his eyes out to sea, then down to his own blood-speckled hands, was signal enough.

“Right,” said the other captain with a nod.

It was a comfort, his men’s loyalty. How well they knew his mind. His brethren.

“
Readyyy!
” the Irishman sang out.

Lazar raised his head and looked. It was his deed, after all. He would not turn away like some tender woman who couldn’t bear to watch the death scene of an opera. Stiffly he turned.

“
Aaaim!
”

It was at that moment he saw the apparition in the doorway.

Dressed in sepulchral virgin white, long hair billowing in the draft, she stood in the gloom of the magazine’s shadow. The heavy stone doorway framed her like a sarcophagus. Her unfathomable eyes were stricken wide with horror, disbelief. Then she broke out, floating silently, swiftly, blindly before the line of guns before anyone could stop her. They would riddle her body with lead.

He roared her name and plunged down the line to meet her. Distantly he heard Sully shout, “
Guns down!
”

He reached her, the impact of her running body, slender and lithe, slammed against him. She punched him hard in the chest at once and screamed unintelligible curses. He captured her by the arms, wanted to give her a good shake to bring her to her senses but feared to break the delicate bones. He started speaking softly to her whatever nonsense came to mind, but that trick wasn’t working this time. She ripped herself out of his arms and dropped to her knees. She threw back her head, exposing the pretty white line of her throat.

“Do it if you have the courage, you skulking thief,” she snarled, a tigress cub cornered, possibly dangerous but probably not.

He looked down his nose at her, pretending scorn to hide his bafflement. He was going to thrash Vicar well. Of all the damned nuisances.

“Pray tell, do what, little fool?” he asked with far more self-possession than he felt.

“Cut my throat!” she cried savagely. “But I promise you, do not dare leave me alive if you destroy my kin.”

He felt the edges of his resolve curl slightly with nausea at her ferocity. She was pure and young, and bloody well ought to have swooned a long time ago. But, typical Ascencioner, she was born to fight.

“Do it, damn you!”

“I’ll box your ears, that’s what,” he muttered. He yanked her to her feet, dimly aware of her father wailing to her. They both ignored him.

“I will not permit you to do this, Captain—whatever you call yourself, Lazar,” she said, shaking. The light in her shining eyes was near madness.

“You can’t stop me,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Her hands balled into pretty fists. She brought them up against her rosy cheeks and pressed her knuckles in until she made white blotches. Her eyes were frantic. She refused to look at him. She looked only at her relatives.

Her voice broke. “Why? Why? What have we done? What is our crime?”

“Surely you can see this is vendetta,” Lazar said quietly.

“But the vendetta is outlawed!” she shouted, shoving uselessly at his chest, as if he were a dolt and now all was solved. “King Alphonse made that law twenty years ago!”

He shook his head at this absurd point. As if he didn’t know. Too much kindness was what had gotten Father killed. “It is my duty.”

“To kill my family?” She sobbed, a wild laugh. “What duty is that? You’ve taken everything we own! Isn’t that enough?” Her eyes, the rich color of mahogany, filled with tears as she stared up at him. “You said I should trust you!”

He gazed down at her, mute and strangled, unable to fit words to the jumbled nets of wretchedness within him. “Allegra.”

Her only reply was a blink that made the tears well over and run down her cheeks. The defenselessness of the picture she made enraged him inexplicably all at once. He reeled away, then back to her, in exasperation.

“Why don’t you ask your precious father, then? Go on! Tell her, old man! Tell her what you did. Tell her who I am! Tell her how you turned traitor and sold my father and all the Fiori to the Genovese!”

She looked over at Monteverdi, eyes round. “Papa?”

Monteverdi was turning an odd shade of greenish white as he backed against the wall.

“Papa, say something!” she said brokenly.

The governor’s eyes darted from Allegra to his staring kin, to Lazar and his men with rifles.

“Admit it,” Lazar said, “and I will let these children and these old ones go.”

“Papa?” she nearly screamed.

Before the old don said a word, Lazar already saw that Monteverdi was coming unhinged. Now that he was being asked to state the truth before witnesses, he was going to deny it.

“Daughter, I am innocent. I have never seen this outlaw before in my life!” he declared.

Lazar laughed, though his heart thumped with anger. He thrust Allegra into the Irishman’s arms. “I don’t have bloody time for this. Sullivan! Lock her in my cabin, have Vicar give her the goddamned laudanum, and see that she doesn’t harm herself.”

It was her father who shouted when she wilted out of Sully’s arms and fastened herself around Lazar’s knees. He looked down in bewilderment at her crumpled form on the flagstone. She lay nearly prostrate before him, her tender lips nigh at his boot.

“
Jesu Christi
,” he began, recoiling from her. For he, the Devil of Antigua who feared neither God nor man, felt himself beginning in the furthest reaches of his mind to panic.

“Take me instead,” she murmured over and over.

I was planning on it, obviously
, he thought acidly, but silenced with awe and nausea at her sacrifice, he could not bring himself to say the words.

“Allegra Monteverdi, get to your feet!” her father bellowed from the edge of the wall. “I’ll die a thousand deaths before I’ll see you thus!”

She did not seem to hear.

Lazar bent down to lift her away. She captured his hand, began plying it with pleading kisses, smoothing soft lips over every coarse knuckle and whispering mercy and pleas. He watched her, transfixed, staring down at the burnished streaks of gold in her coppery tresses.