Princess (34 page)

They surged to their feet in wild cheering at her entrance, yelling outrageous compliments, stamping their feet, whistling. She looked around her, frightened.

“Stop it!” she cried, but there was too much noise for them to hear her.

They ignored her.

She saw her brother standing on the table in the center of the huge room, several of his closest friends seated around him. Lieutenant Alec was there, too. She walked toward them. The young men cleared a path before her in their midst.

Their spontaneous cheers for her went on and on. She stared at the crown prince beseechingly but he paid no attention, flushed with the heady thrill of leading this volatile mob, relishing his first taste of power.

“Stop it!” she finally shouted at the top of her lungs, her face reddened with anger.

“We will fight for you, Principessa!” a young man cried near her right.

“No, that’s not what I want!” she cried, but her blood ran cold as the others took up his vow. Stricken, she looked around at them. As her gaze moved over the young, unsuspecting faces, some handsome, some plain, her stare came to rest on her brother.

He was beckoning her over, his dimple flashing, his grin so like Papa’s.

He will be killed. He has no concept of what he is doing. He
is starting a war here.

Cold with dread, she walked to the billiard table.

There, two grinning members of the Royal Guard went down on one knee, offering their bent thighs for her to use as a stepping ladder. Rafael offered his hand from the table. She took it and carefully stepped up on the officers, then onto the billiard table. While the men around the two officers congratulated them and slapped them on the back like fools, she turned to Rafe.

“Rafael, disperse this crowd immediately. Don’t you see you are stirring them to rise up against Papa?”

“Father is not always right,” he said angrily, then he checked his temper and took her hand affectionately between both of his. He gave her a condescending smile. “Sister, this is men’s business. You don’t have to marry Tyurinov, and we will get revenge on the French for killing Darius!”

She flinched at the words. “Rafe, you have no business in this. Papa makes the policies—”

“He’s gone soft, Cricket! He should never have agreed to sell you!
We will fight!
” he shouted to the fire-eating crowd.

They roared back at him, drowning out her protest.

“But I was the one who agreed!”

It was useless. She jumped down off the billiard table and fled, ignoring the cheers and adulation as they cleared back to let her pass, all exaggerated gallantry.

“You fools! You’re all hotheaded, swaggering fools, and I won’t let you die for me!” She ran, heedless of everything, fleeing to her garden. Outside, it was dark, the warmth of the night perforated by needling rain. As she stood there in despair, the rain cleared her head.

Yes.
There was only one solution. She switched direction.

She began to run. The grass was slippery and wet under her satin slippers. She didn’t stop running until she reached the stables. She shouted to have her mare saddled, but the grooms only stared at her, as if sensing her intention.

As she went to Diamante’s stall, one of the older stable boys stepped in front of her. “It’s late for a ride, Your Highness, and the weather is foul.”

She gritted her teeth. “I love the rain. Get out of my way.”

“Principessa, shouldn’t you at least have a footman with you?” another asked gingerly.

“Stop trying to protect me! I’m sick of it!” With a wordless cry of impatience, she marched past them to Jihad’s stall. She took the stallion’s bridle down off the peg beside the stall. Jihad was as restless as she and accepted the bit more easily than she would have thought.

The worried boys came to the edge of the stall.

“Your Highness does not intend to ride that beast, surely!”

“He’s dangerous!”

“You can’t stop me!” she flung at them.

She hauled the stall door open, threw Jihad’s reins over his midnight neck, then by sheer willpower climbed up onto the stallion’s back, riding astride. She gathered the reins and urged the horse out of the stall.

“Get out of the way or be trampled,” she ordered the boys.

They fell back. She ducked her head leaving the stall. Jihad tossed his head in excitement.

“Your Highness, where are you going?” the eldest boy demanded.

She urged Jihad crashing out of the stall, then they were galloping out into the night, heading for the promontory over the sea.

She would be with Darius forever.

Jihad’s gallop was like the wind. Her head reeled with speed and recklessness.

Bareheaded and dripping with rain, she stood at the edge of the promontory, the night wind whipping her ruined dress around her, jagged rocks and the endless sea two hundred feet below her.

She had waited here for countless hours in the past, searching the horizons for his ship, always waiting for him to return to her.

But this time he wasn’t coming back.

She dropped to her knees.

If she died, no one could fight a war over her.

If she died, she could be with Darius forever.

And if she took her life, his sacrifice would have been all in vain.

He had died to save her; her willful death would be a betrayal of everything he had stood for. He had abandoned her, cursed her with the burden of a life that would never know joy or love again.

“You heartless Gypsy thief,” she whispered at the sea.

She crumpled down onto the rocky ledge and wept until there were no tears left in her.

The three Genoese fishermen were terrified of him. Darius shot them brooding, intimidating glances now and then to send them back to work and to dispel their curiosity about him—the wild-eyed madman who had commandeered their small boat and threatened to slit their throats if they didn’t sail him immediately to Ascencion.

He sat against the bulkhead on deck, drowning in humiliation, his knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them. It was only hours now before he would see his Serafina. Knowing that helped him manage his fear and his terrible craving for her.

He had a lot to think about to pass the time. His experience in Milan had changed him, knocked the illusory ideals of honor right out of him, dissolved all those air castles and lies he had fed from for so many years. He was no knight; he could no longer pretend that he was. No, he was ruined again, a creature of instinct and survival, as he had once been on the streets of Sevilla, and he knew what he needed.

He didn’t care anymore if it was wrong.

He was going to take her for himself. Just take her. No one else could have her, he thought, the edge of instinct bristling inside him. She was his.

Even though he had failed and would never deserve her. Even though Lazar was going to disown him. Even though he did not know how to be anybody’s husband and was terrified he would be like his father, possessive of her, controlling. She was his and nothing else mattered.

His.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

On the eve of her wedding, Serafina was an empty shell of her former self.

There was no point in hoping anymore. If Napoleon were dead, the whole world would have heard about it by now. If Darius were alive, he’d have sent some kind of news.

She was to marry Anatole in the morning. None of it felt real. Had Darius died alone? Had he suffered much? Had his last thoughts been of her? The questions had no answers. Not knowing what had become of him was worse than just hearing the awful truth once and for all.

She sought an opiate in slumber. Little hothouse flower who could not stand her pain, with contempt she watched herself progressing, as the days passed, from wine to whiskey to laudanum. Her doctor prescribed it.

The stable boys had told the head groom what she had done, taking Jihad out for a gallop in the rain. That excellent servant had, in turn, felt compelled to warn her parents of her dangerous behavior. They had come to try to have a talk with her. The sight of them made her sick, so in love. In the tragedy of Darius’s self-sacrifice, they had turned to each other. Her loss, her devastation was the same event that somehow brought the two of them closer together—as had their new baby, to whom Serafina was coldly indifferent.

It was a boy and they were calling him Lorenzo. She didn’t care. Why should her mother be the one giving birth to what was obviously a love child, unplanned, an accident? It was scandalous. The woman was nearly forty. For two decades, her mother had had the devotion of one of the two best men in the whole world. Would
she
never get her chance at happiness? Embittered by life at the age of twenty, she had turned away from her parents’ attempt to reach out to her and include her in their perfect little world. She observed herself acting just like Darius, evading all their concerned questions by saying merely that she was not feeling herself. They had despaired of cracking her open and had sent the physician to examine her.

She had not stood for his prying, either. She could have given him her diagnosis in three words:
Darius is dead.
She was dead inside, comatose. But laudanum was her angel of mercy.

Sweet dreams brought Darius back to her, the feel of his honey-gold skin, the sound of his scoffing laughter, his bittersweet, molasses smile—and then he would vanish again.

Cruel, she thought. Cruel.

She lay now in her canopied bed. Two candles had burned down to stumps on the twin night tables, the wax pooled and sculpted into bizarre shapes.

She had not meant to fall asleep so early again tonight. It had been barely nine-thirty when she crawled into bed. She had meant to read for a while, but she couldn’t concentrate and the book weighed too much to hold up. Her arms were too weak, her body so heavy, her eyelids almost too weighty to lift. Laudanum made her so tired, though the dose was mild. If she gave in to the urge to sleep, perhaps she could conjure him again to come to her in her dreams, her demon lover.

Her last thought before drifting off had been that she could sleep her life away under the white, pristine snowfalls of Anatole’s homeland.

Oblivion. Blackness. No pain.

Hours passed.

The soft click at the wall did not altogether pierce her sleep. Very distantly, she was aware of her pet monkey chirruping to himself, but that was not unusual. She dreamed she was at the bottom of a great, black crypt, sleeping, with a mile of earth between her and the light.

Princesa.

Ah, she understood what this blackness was. She was in Darius’s tomb with him. Her dreaming brain wound the thread of a story for her. She followed it like Ariadne, the princess in the Minotaur’s labyrinth. He was here somewhere in the dark, if only she could find him. He was lost in this maze and she had to save him. He was waiting.

She called to him in her dream and the three musical syllables of his name echoed down the long black corridor like a singsong whisper, a sigh,
Daaariusss
.

He answered her call in his soft, lulling voice.
“Princesa,
awake. I am here.”

No, I do not want to wake,
she thought in anguish, for she could feel that she was getting closer to him. She had to glimpse his face one last time, even if it was horrible, even if he were the Minotaur in the maze and would kill her when she found him.

Soft notes rose around her as a hand brushed guitar strings, like a breeze over a moonlit lake. She opened her eyes and saw a tall, shadowy silhouette through the gauzy white netting of her bed.

She stared, not sure if she was awake or dreaming. She didn’t dare breathe for fear that the beloved apparition would vanish.

As if the netting formed a magic circle into which he could not cross, he walked around the foot of her bed, lean and graceful, never taking his luminous eyes off her.

“You are so beautiful, I ache,” he whispered, “here.” He laid his hand on his heart, staring at her as he slowly glided nearer.

She clutched the sheets, pulling them higher over her chest, her eyes round as she stared at the ghostly revenant. From the netherworld, he had come to take her with him. They would be together for all eternity. She need only give him her soul. As if he did not already possess it.

“Don’t be afraid.”

“Are you real?” she breathed, her heart pounding.

Sauntering around to her right, he came to stand at the head of her wide bed. She stared in amazement as his sun-browned hand parted the mosquito netting.

When he placed his knee on the bed, the mattress bowed under his quite solid weight.

“You tell me,” he breathed, and leaning down, he kissed her mouth, a satin caress, his warm, living breath blowing gently against her lips.

She gave a strangled cry and threw her arms around his neck. He pulled her to him in a crushing embrace as he stood beside the bed. His arms were hard and real and warm around her, the chafe of his dark, scruffy day-beard rough against her neck. Shaking uncontrollably, she barely knew what she was saying, squeezing his arms, clutching at his flesh, willing him not to disappear.

“Oh, God, Darius, Darius, tell me you’re real, my God, tell me you’re alive!”

He stroked her hair, his hands trembling. “Shh, angel, I’m here. I’m real.”

“Oh, tell me you are alive!” she cried, still only half able to believe it. She was laughing, crying, sobbing all at once. “Are you hurt? Let me see you.”

Hands shaking, she pushed back and grasped his shoulders, holding him at arm’s length, her gaze traveling swiftly over him. He was bruised, a little gaunt, and his clothes were in tatters.

“Serafina, I’m back. I’m all right,” he said forcefully.

She looked into his eyes, holding his gaze for a moment as the reality of it sank in. Her eyes filled with tears. Without a word, she flung her arms around him and held him with all her strength, squeezing her eyes shut.

She breathed him, filling her nostrils with the musky, male scent of him; the feel of him in her arms was ecstasy, so warm and strong and sure. Alive. Miraculously alive.