The Corrupt Comte (21 page)

Pushing open the hidden door that led into Évoque’s study, Gaspard blinked against the bright light filtering through the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the private garden. The duke sat behind his desk, head bent as his pen whipped out scrawling words onto a thick sheaf of papers, but at the sound of the latch catching behind Gaspard, he looked up.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he snapped under his breath, gaze darting around the room, glare ferocious.

“I’m done.” Gaspard leaned back against the door and shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers. Still and watchful, he kept his voice equally quiet. “I’m done with this life.”

With a shake of his head, the duke returned his attention to the papers in front of him. “Go home, Toussaint.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Gaspard said softly. Dangerously. A strange calm settled over him, a sheer veil that made the world seem a little hazy, a little surreal. “I won’t do this anymore. I will not be this man.”

“And what man is that?”

“Your terrier.” His lips twitched as though they wanted to smile, but there was no humor to be found here. “No more fetching. No more attacking.”

The pen in Évoque’s hand stilled momentarily. “Don’t fool yourself. I have mastiffs for that.” Evidently realizing Gaspard wasn’t about to leave, he dropped the writing implement atop his correspondence and leaned back in his chair, a picture of casual boredom with his fingers laced over his stomach. “You’re only done when I say you’re done. And you, my dear Brutus, are far from done.”

The veil constricted, and he couldn’t breathe. “You said—”

“Have you heard the rumormongers this morning, Toussaint? Supposedly, when interrogators demanded who set him on his murderous task, Louvel answered, ‘The most cruel enemies of France.’” The duke paused, a flush of excitement lighting his aquiline features. “It’s perfect. He’s perfect.”

Gaspard’s tongue tasted like ash in his mouth. “Did he know?”

“Did he know what?”

“How you planned to use him?” Anger lurked low in his gut, tickling unpleasantly along his innards as if to say,
Don’t forget. Don’t forget me.
“Did you feed him his lines, instruct him in his role beforehand?” His hands fisted inside his trouser pockets, knuckles sore and bruised beneath his skin, aching as they hadn’t in five years. “Does the poor bastard know he’s about to die for you?”

“I’ve never met the man.” Évoque spoke coolly, carefully. “But don’t assume Louvel is dying for my cause. He wanted this—he simply needed a bit of divine intervention.”

“Playing God, Your Grace?” Gaspard couldn’t keep the disgust from his voice.

“No, merely His chess-master.”

Lifting his weight from the door, Gaspard strolled across the room to the desk. He was crushingly aware of his breath rattling in his chest and of the off-kilter echo of his pulse in his ears. Withdrawing one hand from his pocket, he touched a finger to the desk’s surface, studying the ragged edge of his short nail. More than likely he’d torn it last night in the deadly scuffle outside the opera house.

Or perhaps it had ripped in his haste to yank off his clothing, right before he’d thrust into Claudia’s willing body.

That torn nail held his attention as the thin scars striping the back of his hand drew the duke’s notice. Évoque’s stare was a visceral thing, lashing ice against his wrecked flesh, but Gaspard liked that the duke finally saw what lurked beneath the lace cuffs.

Those scars, so at odds with the façade he’d perfected, were the most honest part of him. “I came to collect what you owe me.”

The duke scoffed, but his gaze never left Gaspard’s scarred hand. “I owe you nothing.”

“Not even my wage?” The fingertip tapped against the glossy wood. “I’m beginning to think you always intended for me to lose the lands, and the title with them.” It was an epiphany that hit him the split second the words left his mouth, because of course. Of course that was what Évoque wanted—Gaspard stripped of the tenuous power he now held and unable to threaten Évoque with the secrets he carried. “Are you going to beggar me, Your Grace?” The words were mocking, and he glanced up, forcing the duke to look him in the eye.

“The thought may have crossed my mind.”

The veil’s chokehold relaxed, and that chilling calm returned. One hand still tucked in his pocket, Gaspard reached out, slowly, and picked up the duke’s discarded pen. Weary joints forgotten, the pen slid through his fingers, then flipped back over his knuckles with nimble dexterity. He repeated the pattern, again and again, and with each pass, the blanket shielding his emotions grew heavier.

He welcomed the numbness, afraid he would turn into a sputtering mass of rage without these invisible chains reining him in. Betrayed. He’d been betrayed, and it was no one’s fault but his, fool enough to believe Évoque would behave honorably. Gaspard knew better.

There existed no honor in espionage.

Acknowledging that fact, Gaspard gripped the pen in his fist. The scarred skin stretched taut, whitened, and he watched the duke shift in his chair to lean farther away from where Gaspard stood at the corner of his desk.

Good. The duke ought to find him intimidating. The duke ought to think him a threat. No lack of money, lands or title would leverage him less of one.

Gaspard wondered if he should be flattered, that Évoque had been uneasy enough by his existence to sketch the plot of his downfall.

He decided he wasn’t. “Do you remember Marcel de Courreaux, Your Grace?”

The duke’s mouth curled in distaste. “I remember what you did to him.”

“Do you really? It’s one of the best-kept secrets in all of France.”

A muscle leapt in Évoque’s jaw. “Courreaux was my friend, you bastard,” he hissed.

The pen’s nub bit sharply into Gaspard’s palm. “I know.” When the duke’s face paled, Gaspard arched an eyebrow. “Did you think I didn’t know? Do you think he didn’t tell me all about the neighbor boy, the someday duke who kept quietly advancing his career?” His mouth had gone dry, and the veil shuddered, but there was no stopping when the words demanded daylight after so many years in the dark. “You watched him fly up the military’s ranks, marry his superior’s daughter and then sodomize every boy he could dig his claws into.”

“I—” The duke blanched. “I didn’t.”

“Would you like to know what else I know, François?” he queried quietly, almost purring his nemesis’s intimate name, though the charade made him sick.

The duke sat, silent and pale.

“I know you liked to play right alongside him. The neighbor boy, the someday duke.” Nausea churned. Damn it, where had the numbness gone? He settled both fists on the desk, leaning toward Évoque as the fire in him roared hotter, meaner. The pen creaked ominously. “No manacles on me now, lover. Did you think I wouldn’t remember you?”

—shoved to his knees with his skinny wrists bound like a criminal’s, and he lost his balance, falling forward onto the hard-packed earth of the tent floor. The impact jarred his shoulder, scraped along his cheek as he spat out a mouthful of dirt. He struggled upright again, only to be pushed down by a forceful hand between his bony shoulder blades. Unlike the hands of the man sprawled to Gaspard’s right on a pile of pillows like a gluttonous sultan, these lacked calluses, obviously not belonging to a lifelong soldier.

This was the captain’s friend, the one from his childhood. The one who liked to brand his sex partners with his initials.

Gaspard choked back a whimper as his forehead met the ground. Please, he begged, screamed, silent in his mind. Please don’t do it. Not another set of scars.

Hands on his lower back, stroking too softly over his raw skin. “Beautiful work, Marcel.” A cultured voice, glee shaping the cruel compliment.

“He’s mine, Frankie. You don’t get to mark this one.”

As those aristocratic hands spread him, Gaspard squeezed his eyes shut and sobbed his relief into the cold dirt—

The pen trapped in his fist snapped, and Gaspard straightened to drop the pieces on the desk in front of him. “I should kill you.”

“You won’t.”

“I could. I want to.” God, it would be so easy. The blade strapped to his uninjured arm sang to the yearning violence within him. Clean, precise—a flick of his wrist, a lunge across the expanse of desk and the knife buried to the hilt in Évoque’s chest. Gaspard could have this all sorted in the space of a breath, and no one would be the wiser. No one knew he was here…except Claudia.

A shaft of pain, high in his rib cage.
Claudia
. “Pay what you owe, and I’ll leave.” He sure as hell couldn’t stay.

“That’s all you want? Your
wages
?” The duke’s voice was hoarse but haughty, color beginning to return to his cheeks. “No blackmail in a foolish attempt to save your estate?”

Piss-poor blackmail, and Gaspard was indeed a fool to have ever thought it the trump card up his sleeve. The word of a homosexual, even a titled homosexual, against that of a duke was all he had, and no cry of abuse would ever earn him a sum large enough to cover the debts on the Lorraine-Mâche lands.

“I’ve had my fill of evil, Your Grace,” he said wearily, stepping away from the desk and out of the spill of sunlight that fell across it from one of the overlarge windows. “What you owe for my deeds last night, and I’ll be gone.”

“Evil.” Évoque stood, bracing his hands on the paper-covered desk. “I’m supposed to believe one small incident on the steps of the opera is suddenly too much for you to stomach, is that it? You’re a goddamn
spy
, Toussaint.”

“I
was
a spy—a good one.” Every breath was a rusted nail raking furrows into his lungs. “You recruited me when I possessed no morals or scruples or self-respect. Courreaux saw to that, and because I was so damn grateful to be free of him, I fucked every mark you set before me. I allowed myself to wallow in depravity because I was too simple and too broken to realize I could have just told you no when you tried to thrust that title into my hands.”

The duke snorted derisively. “And what else would a man in your position do?”

“A man in my position?”

“A penniless, powerless bum boy. I opened doors a deviant like you could never open for yourself.” Smugness in those aristocratic tones.

Helpless rage—the only kind of rage he could feel about his past—washed over him. “It’s easier to accept that a man’s preferences run to buggery, rather than that he’s been unwillingly stripped of masculinity.”

“Unwillingly—”

“Four long, torturous years, and no one stopped him.” Red crowded his vision as he rushed forward, slamming both fists onto the desk with a harsh
crack
of impact. “
No one stopped him!
” Papers flew as he whipped away, smarting hands dragging in his wake and clearing the surface of everything not bolted down or trapped beneath Évoque’s palms. He stalked toward the hidden door, ready to storm out and leave this whole, heinous world behind, the nightmare nothing more than a buzz in his tortured brain. “In case you were wondering, Your Grace, it wasn’t easier for me.”

“Are you saying you’re not…?”

Gaspard couldn’t say anything, much less that. He’d reached his limit on words, the buzzing between his ears growing louder with each heave of his chest. His body felt loose but tight, like that fractured moment of silence when a lock clicked open with a fraught-yet-satisfying
snick
. His insides were being pried open, but whether by the intended key or a thief’s tool kit, he couldn’t tell.

God, he wanted out of his skin. Out of Paris.

As he closed the distance to the door in the wall, Évoque grunted in frustration. “You want your money for last night? Here.” The sound of a drawer sliding open, wood against wood, then a rustle before the melodic clinking of a coin purse landed on the desk with a delightfully heavy thump. “For last night.”

His hand froze over the disguised doorknob. “Last night. Last night.” Claudia. Claudia had been last night.

Claudia, who was about to become this man’s
wife
, another pawn in the duke’s never-ending game of political prowess, just like Gaspard had been for so many years. The duke hadn’t even married her yet, and she was already a part of this hell.

Gaspard turned on his heel, fixing Évoque with a stare. “Last night,” he repeated. “Announcing your engagement, that was brilliant. No one would ever suspect you of plotting Berry’s assassination down to the last detail, because, obviously, you were far too enamored of your young fiancée to be involved in such barbaric machinations.”

Wariness lived in the duke’s narrowed gaze. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

“No, I’m not.” And that was Évoque’s first—and last—mistake, when it came to him. Gaspard fought to control his breathing, but Mother of God, it was difficult when he suffocated beneath the writhing mass of those horrifying memories. “Why do you want her?”

“What?”

“Claudia Pascale. Why her?” He shook his head, but the buzzing only intensified. “It’s not the money.” It couldn’t be. Even if her dowry were triple the current figure, there were no incentives for Évoque. None. Not sex, not status—nothing. Though stabbed by a surprising spike of disloyalty, he had to admit she was no beauty, and that stutter…

The world thought her broken, and only Gaspard knew better.