The Pirate Prince (15 page)

Her tears moistened his skin, giving water back to the dried flecks of blood so that they ran red again, mingling salt. He reckoned she must taste it, the blood of his killing. If she did, she gave no sign.

She raised her eyes to his, silver tears clumped on the tips of her lashes. “Please,” she said in a strangled whisper, “let them go, Lazar. Take me instead. I’ll do anything you ask. I give you my word.”

God, he wanted to yield to her.

And that he would betray his parents a second time—run away again because this duty was too hard for him—filled him with rage. He felt cruelty gathering inside him, a pitiful last defense against the crumbling of all his resolve before her.

“Anything, eh?”

She closed her eyes like an angel and nodded fervently. A low, piratical laugh bubbled up from him like molten tar. He took her chin between his thumb and fingers and glowered down into her eyes.

“And are you worth so much?”

She opened her eyes with new fear at this. She sat back on her shapely haunches in surprise.

“You have no idea what you ask.” Anger came over him in one rising gust. He released her face roughly and straightened to his full height. “Are you such a prize that you can replace what I’ve lost? My mother, my father, my home? My future? My pride?” He barked, a jackal’s laugh. Wildness was coming unleashed inside of him. “Can you get me back these things? Can you bring my father back from the dead? Take you? What are you? You know nothing of it—God damn it,” he choked out.

Pacing away on legs that quaked beneath him, he jerked the skullcap off his head and wiped the sweat from his brow with a savage pass. He gave her a burning glance. “I’ve made concessions enough for you already. They die.” He opened his arms wide in a vast, sarcastic shrug, the symbol of his existence. “
Mea culpa
.”

She did not move or speak. She merely stared at him, pale, the wind and the morning sun rippling through her long, gold-streaked hair while her dark eyes searched his. She looked exhausted and unnervingly wise.

“Then I must choose, too.” Unsteadily, she climbed to her feet and walked to her father.

Lazar slumped his shoulders and looked at the sky, letting out an exasperated exhale. He did not try to stop her.

She stood with the governor as the others knelt. She lifted her chin, seeming to gather strength from the finality of her decision. In a moment she forced a slow, cold, collected smile. She held out her hands, palms upward like a stone grotto Virgin, making a mockery of his shrug.

“Go on, Captain. It is your duty.”

He stared at her, and she stared back, flaunting her courage as if she knew his deepest secrets, and it hit him that she, a pampered slip of a girl, would stay with her kin and die, while he, a hero’s son, had fled and lived to become a curse to all who crossed his path, a curse, aye, even to himself.

He stared at her, at a loss. He could not tear his gaze away from her ruthless beauty forcing him to face the truth. The ghosts in his head howled for blood. But, for the first time, he saw that he was not here for their sake.

No, it was the killer in himself that craved revenge—the avenging monster that had sprung, phoenixlike, from the ashes of the ruined princeling, as if the wound done him was so deep there could be no mending it. There could only be equal death for death. To savor this day, he’d stayed alive at any cost, even at the cost of his soul.

But when it was done, what in the name of God would be left him?

There would be no farm, as he sometimes daydreamed, no fields of crops, no homemade wine. It would never happen, and he knew why. When he finished here and saw his men back safely to the West Indies, he meant to do it. There was a silver bullet he kept in his desk especially for the occasion.

The high winds raked at him. No one had the power to stop him now. All he had to do was say the word.

Stricken, he gazed at Allegra. For the first time in his life, he had no idea what to do next.

Her crystalline composure shattered him. She searched his eyes with soft anguish, accusing, yet ready to forgive, making him unbearably human, not an impervious angel of wrath, but a man—and helpless—for he had no defense against those trusting honey-brown eyes, and the satin tremor of those rose-petal lips.

The world wavered. Something was rising in him, a flood tide he could not stem, a cup he could not drink from, more unbearable than shame. Shame, rage, anything but this. He would drown in inconsolable grief. Everyone he’d ever loved was dead, and he was always going to be alone. He knew it.

“Lazar,” she called out softly.

He looked for her through the rising tide. The sound of her voice steadied him. She looked deeply into his eyes with a calm that calmed him, a strength that fortified him.

He drew a breath. He held it.

Then he did not look right or left. He did not want to see his men, who could only remind him of this beast, this thing he had become. He did not stop to consider. He kept his gaze and all his battered soul fixed on her, a star above his storm. Then his voice came, a strangled whisper.

“Let them go.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

His men looked around uncertainly at one another, but Lazar stared only at her. Her relatives began shoving away, and still Lazar gazed at her, looking utterly lost. Allegra stared back at him from across the sudden chaos, fresh tears in her eyes.

“What about the governor, Cap?” one of the men asked. “Him, too?”

Lazar didn’t seem to hear.

“Hold him,” the Irish captain muttered for him, gesturing.

One of her relatives tried to take her hand, but Allegra shook off the pulling grasp. She didn’t even turn her head, as if in a heartbeat all her loyalties had changed.

It did not matter who he was, in this moment. He was just a man with gentle hands, a wonderful laugh, and more pain in his midnight eyes than anyone should have to bear alone.

Steadily, she walked to him through the fleeing crowd, and when she reached him, she slipped her arms around his waist, laid her head against his chest. His arms came up around her, and he was clinging to her, his face half buried in her hair.

She could hear his heart racing as if he was terrified, could feel his big body trembling with inward pain. She spoke soft words to him as he had to her a short while earlier, telling him he had done the right thing, that everything would be all right.

“Allegra,” he breathed as he shuddered, “I cannot let you go now. I cannot be left with nothing.”

She paused, not knowing how to respond, when suddenly she felt him tense in her arms. He swiftly lifted his head.

“Stop him!” he shouted.

She turned around, but Lazar’s arms held her back when she saw Papa standing on the precipice, where the wall dropped hundreds of feet to the rocky sea below.

“You spineless bastard! Get down!” Lazar thundered, pulling out his pistol and aiming, though he didn’t shoot. “You’ll not cheat me!”

“Papa, no!” Allegra screamed when horror gave her back her voice. She began fighting to get free of Lazar’s hold, but he would not let her go.

“Fine. You win,” Monteverdi said heavily to Lazar. He ignored the men clutching at his clothing. “You’ve turned her against me, just like her mother.”

Allegra gasped. “No, Papa, never!”

Lazar’s arms tightened around her. “Easy,” he murmured to her. “He knows his crimes. It’s his decision.”

Monteverdi looked down from his pedestal there, gazing brokenly into her eyes. Tears filled his eyes. “Forgive me,” he said. He turned around slowly, facing the sea.

Allegra heard herself pleading. “Papa, don’t! No, please, Papa, I love you, please don’t do this, I can’t bear it—”

He turned away, and it seemed he only leaned.

Then he was gone.

Allegra screamed, lunged toward the place on the wall where her father was no longer standing, but Lazar held her back, grasping her by the shoulders. With a broken cry, she turned in to his arms, weeping her heart out against him, scarcely aware of his silence as he wrapped his strength around her.

Within an hour of Monteverdi’s suicide, they were under way, pouring down the road to the port, scrambling into their loaded ships, leaving columns of black smoke billowing to the sky over Little Genoa behind them. The great portion of the hot, humid day was taken up by a skirmish with a few Genovese warships that had arrived too late.

Now it was eventide. A fiery gold sunset bloomed ahead of them, spanning the western horizon, and
The Whale
wafted toward it on white clouds of sail, unscathed by her fight.

Lazar let the men relax.

They sat down on the decks and reclined in the rigging as he addressed them from the quarterdeck, raising his voice over the snapping of canvas and the soughing of wind. He praised the valiance and discipline of the whole company, noting a few individuals who had fought especially well. Nothing was said about Goliath, whom he had executed shortly before the episode on the wall, precisely as he had promised to anyone who broke the rules.

He gave no excuses for his change of heart before the Monteverdi clan nor offered any explanation for the presence of the girl. He was relieved when no one asked about it. The lads had what they wanted, which was the gold. Looking around at their sweaty faces, he supposed they figured that in the past he’d always shown good sense as their captain and therefore must know what he was doing now.

If only he did.

He had no idea what he was feeling and was not sure he wanted to know. All he could seem to think about was the tearstained, grief-stricken girl who lay, drugged and sleeping, in his bed. His consolation prize, instead of massacre. He still could not understand what had happened to him, what she had done to him up there on the wall. She moved him in a way few creatures ever had. This made her unutterably dangerous.

He knew what he had to do, and he fancied she knew it, too. He was going to go down to his cabin and exact his price for showing mercy.

She would pay with her virgin blood, and he did not intend to be particularly gentle. It was the only way he could see to regain mastery of the situation after the way he’d laid his will at her feet.

In the weeks to come, he would make good use of her. He had never taken a virgin before—he had never wanted the headache—but in Allegra’s case the idea held a certain charm. He would make her his plaything, his completely, until he tired of her. When he grew bored with her, he decided, he would present her as his sister or cousin or some such thing and marry her off to one of his acquaintances in his other life, in Fort-de-France, on Martinique.

He would see she was well taken care of, at least that she had some decent husband, not like that bastard Clemente, who would soon be finished off by Jeffers and his lads. With her Paris upbringing, the Creole gentlemen planters would go mad for her. She’d fetch him a handsome price.

But first, he thought idly,
first
he would teach her precisely how this world used beautiful creatures with noble young souls. He would ruin her innocence, because he could not afford the way it moved him.

After a few moments of congratulating the company on their fine work and telling them the totals of the booty taken and what each share amounted to, he rewarded them with the barrels of good Ascencion wine taken from the governor’s cellars, then left them to their antics.

He slipped through the hatch to the mid-deck and wandered to his cabin, opened the door, and paused for a moment to gaze at the girl curled up in a ball in his berth. She was a mess. Her hair was a tangle, her white silk dress torn, stained with black powder, her face puffy from crying. Why, then, was she the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen?

He closed the door quietly behind him, ungirded himself of his weapons, and pulled off his vest, glancing at Allegra from time to time in speculation. He went to the washstand, where he poured some tepid water from the jug into the porcelain basin, then leaned over and splashed his face and neck.

He ducked his head to look in the small round mirror, running his hand over the soft black spikes bristling up from his scalp. Just a month earlier he’d had a fine, rich, jet-black mane past his shoulders, only to be forced to hack it off when
The Whale’s
resident lice had had the audacity to jump from the lowly sailors’ heads to his.