Rooks and Romanticide (26 page)

Around every corner, behind every door, it seemed there were members of his household scattering.
Hiding
. He was sick with rage. He skidded into the servants' wing, climbing the stairs there to breach the second floor unseen.

To make his family fear for their lives like this—oh, these fools were going to pay!

Cain cocked the hammer of his gun before he opened the door to the second floor, peeking between the hinges first. He nudged the door open with his toe, following the wall down the corridor. Slowly, one step at a time.

Good God, the gnawing horror that he had somehow set this up for himself was too much to swallow. The intuition was dark and bruising, ripping at his fighting instincts like the hungry wind before a very bad storm.

The silence on the air was ominous. He wasn't sure where Security was, but he was confident they were on the move somewhere. His steps were soft, padded by the long imported rug in the hallway, and his fingertips shook.

The doors to his bedroom hung open.

The air was still as Cain crossed the hall, searching the corridor opposite for any sign of life.

There was nothing.

Open doors here, open doors there—but no movement.

Cain crouched down outside his room, hidden from sight from within but able to peek through the doors to inspect at least one corner of his bedroom.

There, he could see his long mirror. How convenient. He could see the other half of the room in it, and there was the rustle of clothes, a flash of black in the mirror. It wasn't a servant; that wasn't the sound of livery. It wasn't a guest either, because nobody could have made it to this part of the house that quickly unless they knew their way around.

Cain smelled the crispness of winter air. The chill of it drifted inside, which meant his balcony was open.

In one quick and jerky motion, Cain stood and threw one of the doors open, thrusting his gun into the bedroom as he crossed the threshold and confronted the intruder within.

Levi stood at the side of his bed, and there wasn't even a glimmer of shock in his eyes. He just looked as dark and lamentable as sin itself.

Cain almost dropped his gun. He pulled the trigger, in fact, and his heart stopped and he cried out in terror because he really hadn't meant to, it had just happened—but the primer backed out, thankfully, and the gun did not fire. The wave of massive relief did not mix well with the conscious and dramatic outrage. Cain needed a direction for it.

He threw his revolver to his pillow and clambered atop the bed, grabbing Levi by the front of his militia jacket and spitting the words out inches from his pretty face.

“
Levi
? What are you doing here now! What do you have to do with this!
What the hell is going on, you bloody fool
!”

Cain seethed. His throat burned as his voice tore loose from it, his knuckles ached where he clutched Levi's collar, his knees quaked where he stood on the edge of his bed. He knew there was all the animosity of murder in his eyes by the way Levi stared back at him, blankly, unmoved as a pretense. His brown eyes were cold and unaffected, but the bitterness of his frown was enough to give him away. He gave no immediate answer. Cain shook him the best he could by the collar. His voice was hoarse with fury.

“
Answer me, God damn you
! Levi,
what is going on
?”

Levi took hold of Cain's arms, yanking his fingers from his jacket. The same hard stare pierced him, and Cain burned with the onset of irrational desperation.

He didn't understand, but he wasn't stupid. Levi was there, and he shouldn't have been, and there'd been another attack.

He thought, quite twistedly,
Well, now Levi can see me in my good clothes
.

“You
monster
,” Cain spat, hissing it into Levi's face. Levi cringed at the hot puff of breath, at the bark of the words, but he maintained his complacency, wrestling Cain down off the edge of the bed.

Cain's fingers hooked into claws, searching for something to grab as he stumbled down, snarling up at the Ruslaniv before him.

“You nasty, rotten, disgusting
fiend
, you
demon
, you downy
bastard
! You aren't even
denying
—
say something, for Christ's sake, Levi
!—you aren't even explaining yourself—you did this—you're part of this—
you filthy
traitor
!”

Levi's face changed; expression flowed into it. His eyes sharpened and he scowled. “How can I be a
traitor
?” he insisted. “I'm a Ruslaniv.”

“Me!” Cain broke one hand free for just a moment, clutching his chest emphatically. The desperation wrote itself across his face now, curdling with his hatred. He let go of his chest and threw his fists at Levi in a barrage of smacks and elbows. “You've betrayed
me
, Levi! You said you'd leave your family, and I believed you, but perhaps that was just me being love's ultimate clown, and all you wanted was to attack my family—”

Cain choked off into a startled burst of breath and voice as, with one swift kick, Levi swept his feet out and brought him down to the bed, one wrist still in his grip. Cain's eyes widened. Levi crawled forth, pinioning him.

But there was a crack in Levi's perfect indifference, a shimmer of something in his hardened eyes, and for just a moment, Cain felt a little regret for exploding so suddenly. His chest rolled. It hurt to breathe.

It wasn't that he despised himself for falling for more lies, because there hadn't been any more lies. It was that this was true betrayal of real trust, and he couldn't grasp why or how or….

“The less you fight me, the less time they'll have in your house,” Levi said in a low, cold voice, and Cain shuddered in abhorrence at the affirmation of Levi's involvement.

Levi's hand was hot on his arm. Cain thought that, maybe, he was getting a real glimpse of the part of Levi he'd been using for his own means—the dark side. The trained side. The unemotional side. The
killer
side.

“So you
are
a part of this—”

“I've betrayed myself, as well.”

“Don't get
romantic
on me now. I've walked a very fine line, trusting you, and you've just destroyed it all. I hope you're happy.”

“For the love of God, Cain,
shut up
!”

Cain fell silent, eyes widening.

“I am a member of BLACK,” Levi confessed, and somewhere down the hall in the southern wing of the house, gunshots exploded again.

Someone had clearly stood up to the abandoned challenge in the dining room. Cain felt himself sink lower into his bed as the breath left his lips in a sigh of cold consternation.

Levi went on. “I have been a member of BLACK since I was thirteen. I purposefully requested BLACK to stay under the radar once I learned you were sniffing around. After your parents were killed, the old members of BLACK who still lived were banished from New London and I was made the leader. My subordinates—no, my
fellow members
—are just doing what they feel is appropriate as loyal Ruslaniv men and women.”

Levi paused, and Cain grimaced. He could hear screaming from somewhere else in the house.

Levi shook his head. “I'll tell you everything about that later, but for now—”

“
You knew
!” Cain's jaw tightened as a new stab of betrayal ripped open his heart. Steeling himself, he focused on a part of the ceiling to the left of Levi's head, eyes wide and cold. He felt the snarl transforming his face. “So the list of names I have, Father Kelvin's men, they're my parents' killers too, then. Oberon, Wolfe, Vyncent, Red, Quinton—”

Levi's patience seemed to wear ever thinner with each name that fell from Cain's lips, but at
Quinton
, he snapped. He grabbed Cain by the chin, redirecting his stare to meet his eyes, and Cain bristled at all the vulnerability there—
panic
. Pure panic. Levi was manic with it.

“Let's make a treaty, you and I,” he demanded. Cain squirmed beneath him, loathing the way he held him down. “A pact, another
contract
. One that commands the feud come to an end under
our
conditions—yours and mine. The names on that list, you can imprison them all if any of them are still alive. And this contract, we'll both sign it and mark it with our blood, and the rest of our families will
have
to agree to it after that, as well as the rest of the House of Lords. It'll work. It will have to work.”

Cain had confirmation now.

As he'd suspected, his kidnappers were the murderers of his parents. Three years of searching for the bastards without telling anyone exactly why—three years of injustice and secrets—three years of the fire of revenge burning in his chest, forever unquenched. Levi confirmed it all for him, and for one luscious breath, it was brilliant.

To have the answers was
brilliant
.

A pact, Levi had said. A pact wasn't exactly a new set of peace laws, but more like a petition—with both their blood on it, ending the feud under
their conditions
. That sounded brilliant too. That sounded like such a logical solution. Why hadn't they thought of it before?

Maybe it was the way Levi's voice was—level, and convincing, and confidential. Cain wanted it. He didn't want to hate him. He didn't have enough hatred in him for it, surprisingly. He pressed his cheek to Levi's arm, closing his eyes tight.

Surely if Levi was behind the attack, he wouldn't be going to such lengths to appease Cain, to quell the wrath, the hostility, the need for revenge. Right?

Cain turned his eyes up, meeting Levi's—and there must have been something in his stare, because Levi visibly softened.

A pact with the Ruslaniv who'd known the secrets all along, but who wanted the end of the feud too.

Cain wondered if his father would be proud of such a decision. He wondered if it would even last for very long.

It had been hardly five minutes since Cain had noticed his open bedroom doors, and in those five minutes, the standoff in the dining room had broken. Suddenly, there was commotion in the hallway—banging doors, loud voices, the bustle of a group—and as the sound of Aunt Ophelia's voice cut through the tense silence, Cain struggled to free himself from Levi's grip lest he be found in the arms of the enemy.

Less than five minutes. And in the next sixty seconds, the world became a blur.

A blur of time, relentless and fast, but seeming to stretch forever, as time always did in such vital moments.

The seconds ticked by….

Cain kicked Levi away. Levi complied. He moved to the side as Cain grabbed for his Rapier, scrambling off the bed and into the hallway. The red-haired attacker was there, the one who'd danced around a spray of bullets on the roof back in October, the one whom Cain had seen Levi talking to in Dmitri's Pavilion.

BLACK
. To think he'd been lying with the leader of the wretched gang, the culprits who'd inherited the crimes. To think he'd been
so close to them
and yet so very far.

A blood-sealed pact to end the fighting….

Would it satisfy him?

In an opposite wing, Dietrich Security collided with intruders, it seemed. Voices and chaos sounded down the opulent halls.

The red-haired one was squaring off with Aunt Ophelia in the hall outside Cain's room, and he told her how someone named “the Rook” had told them how to get in. How the Earl had practically invited everyone, how this ignominy of the Dietrichs was going to go down in history with all the other embarrassments, how this was what happened when the Dietrichs went snooping around in Ruslaniv history. And Aunt Ophelia aimed her gun and told him that if he didn't give up by the count of three, he was dead and so were his pals. It became painfully clear to Cain then that there was some sort of misunderstanding between Levi and his despicable men.

Fifteen seconds passed.

Cain decided that if they were trying to pull another stunt like killing his parents, they would have shot people down already.

Levi touched his shoulder. Cain shook him off, thinking about how Aunt Ophelia shouldn't be there because she'd had four drinks already, and talented or not, her reactions were going to be dulled. Gunshots were all he heard, maybe only ringing in his ears, maybe far away in the house and ruining the walls and expensive furniture.

The red-haired gunslinger wasn't buying Aunt Ophelia's threat. He pointed his gun right back at Aunt Ophelia and told her that in the last few months, the Earl and the Rook had gotten so close, there'd never been a single hitch in the plan. Aunt Ophelia saw Cain by his doorway, and the dread on her face, the betrayal, the confusion, the disappointment—none of it could measure up to the crushed sound of her voice, sobered and defeated, as she husked:

“Cain…. What he's saying…. Can't be true, right?”

Twenty-two seconds now, and Cain opened his mouth, searching for the words. He stared. His heartbeat was too loud in his ears. What was he to say? Everything was being thrown into the light now—his own secrets, his own guilt. How was he supposed to mend this now, in this moment of conflict? How was he to convince her that what he had with Levi, the Ruslaniv heir, was good and true and worth the disloyalty?

The staccato of gunshots and shouts echoed from across the house. Footsteps pounded down the hallway, and yes, the rest of Security was coming, he hoped. They'd come and get this red-haired gunslinger, and Cain shook his head, brow knotting, opening and closing his mouth dumbly.

How did he tell her? What did he tell her? This was his fault. He'd let this happen.

Around the corner, the footsteps scraped to a halt. There was laughter—laughter dancing to the ceiling from below the full-face mask of a blond man. Cain recognized him almost immediately from Brackham's, and again he felt rather idiotic.