The Pirate Prince (10 page)

He nodded.

She stared.

Then she laughed in his face.

CHAPTER FOUR

It was not exactly the reaction he’d been hoping for.

His hopes fell and splintered into a thousand pieces. He should have known.

“Never mind,” he growled as he moved away from her. Wrapping his lacerated arm tight in the length of satin that bore his family’s colors, he returned to fight with the crankshaft.

“The lost prince, eh?” she said gaily behind him, a bitter note in her laughter. “Humberto, your lies just keep getting better.”

“I don’t lie.”

“You are not Lazar di Fiore,” she said after a moment. “Look at you.”

“Why don’t you just use a dagger, Miss Monteverdi?” he muttered, sweat streaming down his face from his exertion.

Behind him, she hopped off the table and walked by tiny steps, her ankles hobbled, toward the window. He eyed her darkly as he worked. If she was going to call for rescue, she was out of luck. In moments, the raid on Little Genoa would begin.

At that thought, he decided to keep her locked in the tower until he was through with her father and ready to set sail. She’d be safe in here, and the less she knew about the morning’s events, the better.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m getting out of here, away from you—Your Majesty!” she said furiously. “You are not Lazar di Fiore, you are
not
!” She lost her balance and tripped but caught herself against the stone windowsill. She stopped abruptly, staring down at the road where, he presumed, his men were now visible.

She whirled around, wide-eyed. “What’s going on?” she demanded in a whisper. “Who are you?”

“I told you,” he said wearily. Halfway done, he locked the crankshaft into place to give his arm a break and joined her, pointing to the bay and the road. “The day of judgment has arrived, Miss Monteverdi. You see?”

The first ranks of his men were but a quarter mile away. He could just make them out. He felt a surge of pride at their silence as they approached, in spite of all their numbers. Carried not a single torch among them. Good lads.

There were two hundred in the first wave, handpicked for their skill in close combat. These were the veterans who could be trusted to stick to his instructions even in the heat of battle.

There would be no repeat of the Antigua horror this time, he assured himself. The men would not go berserk. Not on Ascencion, by God. He trusted he’d made it sufficiently clear to even the most dim-witted of his men that whosoever committed any infraction of the rules would be shot.

Order was everything.

Antigua had taught him that.

After the first force swelled into Little Genoa, the rest of his men would follow shortly in three successive waves of two hundred each, with two hundred kept behind in skeleton crews to man the guns and mind the lookout. Genoa was only fifty miles across the bay and had a powerful fleet with well-trained men. He calculated it would take the ships six hours to cross the bay in response to the first boom of cannon fire over Ascencion—but he and his horde would be long gone by the time the navy arrived to find the Governor’s administrative compound up in smoke.

“Oh, my God, it’s an uprising,” she whispered in dread, then looked at him. “You’re leading the peasants to overthrow my father. You’ve brought them here to murder us in our beds, and you’re using the legend of the lost prince to make them follow you!”

“Wrong.” He scooped her up off her feet and carried her back to the table, setting her on it. She seemed too stunned to object. “What’s this legend everyone keeps yammering about?” he asked as he went back to the crankshaft. He figured if he could keep her talking, she might stay out of mischief.

Her face was white, her dark eyes glazed with shock. “You know perfectly well,” she said in a toneless voice. “The wish of these poor, brokenhearted people, that Prince Lazar didn’t die. That somehow he survived when the highwaymen cornered him at the cliffside and made him leap into the sea. That he has grown up in hiding somewhere and one day will return to take Ascencion back from the Genovese and restore the reign of the great Fiori.”

For a long moment, Lazar stared at her, incredulous.

“That is pathetic,” he spat.

Angrily he hauled upon the crankshaft, and, inch by inch, the huge eastern gate swung open.

“That poor boy’s murder was a tragedy,” she declared, impassioned. “If you were a true patriot, you and your petty factions would never exploit his death and our people’s hope just to seize power for yourself!”

“I have no interest in power,” he muttered.

His arms were shaking with exertion by the time he locked the great wooden handle into place, his left arm burning and bleeding afresh through the satin, but his heart leaped.

Right on time, Little Genoa was open, vulnerable.

Monteverdi was in his hands.

“You’re a fraud,” Allegra was whispering. “You’re not my Lazar.”

He looked over. “
Your
Lazar?”

“Nobody’s ever going to believe in you. You’re no prince.”

“How do you think I knew about the tunnels?”

“You just
found
them somehow, just another trick, like when you stopped me from calling for the guards by acting charming! Oh, you’re clever enough, but you have no conscience, none at all, and no respect for the Fiori or Ascencion or me or anyone—”

“Silence,” he said curtly.

“—not even for yourself. You’re a fraud.”

He stalked over, half tempted to slap her, but she shut her mouth, glaring up at him in mutiny.

“You’re right. I am no bloody prince. I never said I was, if you recall.” He climbed up onto the rough, large table and slowly pushed her onto her back as he straddled her. “I only told you my name, since you were so bloody curious about me, Miss Monteverdi. And since you are so
very
curious, my clever Miss Monteverdi, let me tell you just what I am,” he snarled, inches from her face. “A sea captain. An exile. A pirate, Miss Monteverdi. And your new master.”

At that moment, the cry that rent the air as his men poured through the gates was like nothing Allegra had ever heard.

The pirate was atop her on the table, staring down at her like a ravenous wolf, as the wave of sound rose around them. She thought the demons of the underworld must have broken down the black portals of Hell and come whirling out to ravage the mortal earth. Thunder rolled down from the sky and exploded on the rocks outside the city walls, shattering the dawn.

She stared up at him, aghast. “What have you done?”

“No time for talk.” Swiftly he removed himself from her and picked her up again. Carrying her in his arms, he went quickly down the circling stairs. In the room below, he set her in the corner, her ankles still tightly bound together, one slightly sprained.

“You have nothing to fear,” he told her, looking evenly into her eyes. “You will not come to harm. I swear it on my mother’s grave. But I charge you, Allegra, do not open this door for
anyone
but me. My men make your father’s soldiers look like schoolboys. Do you understand?”

She nodded, wide-eyed, tempted to throw herself into his arms and beg for his protection. Fortunately for her pride, she remembered in time that she loathed him.

He gazed at her for a minute, then gave a sigh and brushed her hair behind her shoulder. He leaned close and kissed her on the forehead, his lips warm and firm.

“You look terrified. There is nothing to fear,
chérie
. This tower has a good, fortified wall. You’ll be safe. Mind you, stay here on the lower floor. Don’t go upstairs. That roof won’t hold if it’s hit. I’ll come for you when we’re done shelling the city, sometime after daybreak.”

“Come…for me?” She stared at him. “You mean to take me prisoner, don’t you?”

His narrow smile was smug. “My dear Miss Monteverdi, I already have.”

With an arrogant laugh for her angry huff, he stole a kiss from her lips, then drew his dreadful curved knife and charged up the steps to leave, she supposed, by way of the window. The gate was high enough so that he could probably jump onto its wide top and climb down from there, where the soldiers would not be expecting him.

For a long moment, she sat there in the dark corner, simply stunned.

Then her daze of astonishment cleared in a sudden firing of pure survival instinct.

Your new master?

“Not bloody likely,” she muttered under her breath. She stared about angrily at the stone walls of her prison. She had to get out of this tower.

If she hurried, she could still get back into the palazzo before Papa’s men sealed it against the enemy, but with her ankles bound in the inscrutable sailor’s knot, she was all but helpless. She had already tried untying the knot, to no avail, while Lazar had worked at the crankshaft. Now every minute was precious. She scanned the room, trying to spy any object she could use to cut the soft leather thong while her bones rattled with each exploding shell.

“God, I despise that man,” she whispered to the room, knowing even as she said it that dislike was not the only thing she felt toward him, especially after that drugging, claiming kiss. There was also exhilaration, anger, exasperation.
Passion
. This so-called Lazar was the most intensely alive person she had ever met, but if he continued at this rate, he wouldn’t be for long.

She did not know if she believed his story of piracy. She still felt it was a peasant uprising, but at least it was better than his claiming to be the lost prince. He could not know what a tender nerve he’d struck in her when he’d said that. People could not come back from the dead. She knew that all too well.

She wanted, needed, her perfect Prince to stay safely where he belonged, inside her head, where he could never hurt her or leave her or die. But how had he known about the tunnels?

No, impossible! She refused to believe it.

He could have found them as a boy playing in the woods. He was a fraud—look at what he’d done to Domenic! The man was an animal.

For one thing, the real Lazar was dead, but even if he wasn’t, her Prince would not take his kingdom back this way—stealing in like a thief in the night, putting guns to women’s heads. He would come home to a fanfare of trumpets, clouds of rose petals strewn in his path. He would come in a golden ship, dressed in richest finery, with the pope and all the crowned heads of Europe to give him their backing.

That pirate rogue was—why, he was a barbarian, that’s what he was.

Her searching gaze homed in on an apple one of the soldiers had been eating. Sticking out of it was a small paring knife. She hobbled over to get it and, after sawing at the knot, freed herself with a cry of victory, though the cords were still wound about her legs in two leather anklets. She jumped up, not wasting another moment.

Grasping her weapon in her right hand, she raced up the steps to view the situation and to pick out the safest path to the palazzo. She couldn’t believe what she saw when she looked down upon the square. The artillery fire burst over the city in flashes of wild color, reds, yellows, and vivid blues against the black sky, while the shock of the cannons rocked the earth. She stared with one hand over her mouth in disbelief.

The city square was in chaos, each man for himself, everyone running for cover amid the parti-colored clutter of yesterday’s festival. She could see people getting trampled and reserve soldiers ill from last night’s drink scrambling out of the magazine in hectic disorder, trying to organize themselves against the barbaric invaders. She couldn’t see Lazar anywhere.

She shrieked when the lantern crashed from the iron hook to the pounding floor beside her, then she clamped her jaw shut. Her nerves felt stretched as tightly as violin strings, near snapping if they hadn’t already. On shaking legs, she crossed the garret to look out the window on the other side.

Down in the bay, seven ships barraged the city. She could not be sure, but by the flashing light of artillery, those appeared to be black flags flying from their masts. Orange light flashed amid the hazy white clouds all along the ships’ wooden flanks as they fired again and again.