The Wolf's Captive (26 page)

“I don’t know, sir, I swear.” The tether was strong, pulling on her desperately, and she could see in Rickle’s face that she was nearly free. He had too many other things on his mind. “I’m afraid,” she said, and, once again, she didn’t have to lie.

She came so close.

“Sir!” The shout came from down the avenue, where the two soldiers were carrying something out of the next alley. “Sir, you’d better have a look!”

“Your customer?” Rickle asked, and his hand tightened around Lucia’s bruised arm.

“
Sir
,”
one of the soldiers pleaded. He looked like a man out of his depth, and as they neared, it became clear why.

“Oh, gods,” Rickle whispered. “Is that Gaston Grimaldi?”

It was indeed the man who, not a few minutes before, had pushed Lucia against a wall, revealing himself to be a monster under all his velvet finery. Now that velvet finery was soaked in blood—where it wasn’t torn against gaping, ripped holes in his flesh. He barely stood, his arms around a soldier on either side, his eyes half-closed and matted with more blood. It was incredible that he stood at all. Incredible that he could raise his head, could open his eyes, could look squarely into Lucia’s face.

“Her,” Grimaldi croaked, his lips only forming half a sneer. “The Lyselle woman. That’s her. She did it.”

C
HAPTER 16

Cesare slowly rose up to consciousness and opened his eyes. It was daytime. Morning, possibly. It was hot, and humid still; the weather had not broken. He was on his back, looking up at the hazy sky through a thin tunnel of sooty brick buildings. His eyesight seemed…flat. Worse. Not bad, but somehow lacking. It had been better the night before.

More noticeable were the smells—or the lack of them. He breathed deeply, trying to get a handle on where he was and what was going on, but they were all flat, dull, single note: smoke and garbage.

He was lying naked in a pile of garbage.

It felt like his mind was not quite fully formed, like he’d caught it in transition, unable to decide between two kinds of minds and doing a poor job of mimicking both. He wanted to smell everything, and yet knew it would yield nothing.

“Uggh…” he said.

“Put this on,” someone said, and a pair of workmen’s pants landed on his chest. Cesare looked around for the voice: a boy. A small, skinny boy with a cowlick, standing warily in the shadows. No threat. Then he looked down at his body, and saw that it was covered in blood.

He ran his hands down his scarred chest, but felt no pain. He was covered in blood, but with no wounds. But that wasn’t right; he remembered,
remembered
being stabbed in the gut by Gaston Grimaldi, who’d struggled below him…

There was a jeweled dagger lying on the cobblestones, still sticky with drying blood.

“What happened?” he said, surprised to find his voice in working order.

“I was going to ask you,” said the boy. “To me, it looked like a great, big hairy beast fought the bastard that was going to hurt Lucia, and then got stabbed. And then this morning there was you, lying right where the beast was last night.”

“The beast…?”

The boy nodded. “Looked like a giant wolf, only standin’ upright.”

Cesare put his head in his hands, as though he could squeeze the memories out of it. The longer he was awake, the further away any memory of the previous night felt. Not as though it had been a dream, but as though it had happened in a different language. It was hard to think. He remembered the Player’s Feast. He remembered the amberwine test. He remembered that Grimaldi had passed, and then that Lucia had passed, only later…

“Lucia?” he looked up, suddenly desperate. “Grimaldi hurt Lucia?”

“You got him ‘fore he could,” the boy said, the first note of approval in his voice. “I would’ve done something, I was just trying to think up how. But you got him.”

Cesare frowned. Lucia. There had been fire…

Suddenly it broke in upon his mind, his last human memory: Lucia’s eyes across a wall of flame, full of hate. That’s when the change had happened. She’d set fire to…everything. In his memory, the flame was everywhere, drawing out his strength, weakening him. He’d felt nearly dead when he’d made it to the street, and then he’d caught Lucia’s scent, and it hadn’t mattered how weak he was. He remembered that most of all: the rush of it, being pulled along by that scent like a dumb animal on a lead. It was all there was to him: the essence of Lucia, and where she’d been.

And then there’d been more flames…and then Lucia, pressed up against a wall…

“Where is she?” Cesare demanded. She had been in danger; she was not here. Cesare remembered the betrayal, the anger of the previous night, and they felt alien and wrong. It no longer mattered. Now what rose in his memory was the feel of her skin against his, her flesh around his, the way she’d held him after the Dance of Lights.

Without her, he was the Wolfenvask. She made him whole, made him human. Even if she never wanted to see him again, he would make her safe before he banished himself.

He had been a
fool
.

“Where is she?” he said again, jumping up. The boy dodged down the alley and watched Cesare wobble unsteadily on his feet.

“You’re lucky I saw you help her,” the boy said. His voice was calm, more calm than any adult’s would have been. Cesare staggered towards him, and put a hand on the wall.

“Tell me,” he said.

“You’re lucky I saw that, otherwise I would’ve killed you while you slept for hurting her. For putting her dad in jail.” The boy stepped out of the shadow and made sure that Cesare could see his face. “I know who you are. And I know what she’s been accused of doin’. She wouldn’t do it. Neither would her dad.”

At that moment, Cesare wouldn’t have objected if the boy had wanted to kick at him for a while. He was fairly certain he deserved it. And if Lucia was innocent, and so was her father, it was still his job to prove it.

The fire reared in his mind again. Why the fire? Where had it…

Lucia’s house.
The still. No one had found the Duke’s Blend, and now no one ever would. But why had Grimaldi been there? Vaguely he remembered fragments of half-understood words, badly translated by his Wolfenvask mind—Grimaldi, accusing
Lucia
of setting him up, accusing Cesare himself of being behind it. It made no sense. If Grimaldi were not behind the plot, why would anyone want to destroy the cache of the Duke’s Blend?

Cesare sprung off the wall, his eyes wide open with the realization: because no one could prove it was poisoned, either way. If it wasn’t—and it wasn’t, he knew it now, he
knew
it—it would prove the Lyselles’ innocence.

And it was all gone.

But Lucia…Lucia had been racing off somewhere when Grimaldi got her. Surely the same thing would have occurred to her?

“You all right?” the boy asked. Cesare realized he was groaning with the effort of thought, with being human once again. It was the worst hangover he’d ever experienced, and he didn’t have time for it, because today was the day of the Finale Feast. Today was the day John Lyselle would be dragged from those hellish caverns beneath the Basiglia and brutally murdered in the Royal Plaza.

The cavern
, Cesare thought, and the memories poured into his aching head: Lucia, that first night, before she knew she was being watched, hurriedly hiding a satchel; something she had brought for the Ramora boy, something she had been clutching to her chest like it was important—or as though it were dangerous. The exact sort of thing that she might feel that she had to hide from him, the kind of thing that, when hidden, might lead a paranoid, damaged man to think that she was hiding something far worse.

It had to have been a bottle of the Duke’s Blend. It had to have been, or else Cesare had nothing.

He shot out his hand and grabbed the boy’s arm, finally recovered enough to be quicker than a street urchin. “Tell me where she is,” he said.

For the first time, the boy looked worried.

“The soldiers took her,” he said.

C
HAPTER 17

The jailer had deliberately left the pitcher of water just out of reach.

Whether it was his own pitcher or just something he’d conjured up for the sake of torment, Lucia didn’t know. But he was an uncanny judge of just how far her arm would reach through the narrow bars of her cell. Stretched as far as she could, until the bars bit into her naked shoulder and her tendons burned, she could just barely brush the wet sides with the tips of her fingers.

Meanwhile, her father lay dying.

The first thing she’d heard, after her heart had slowed to a less deafening beat, had been ragged, shallow breathing. It hadn’t occurred to her that they’d put her in a cell with someone else, but instantly the memories of years of tending to her father after he’d passed out at his workbench came back to her, and she was certain it was him. Her father was in this cell.

She’d felt her away across the slimy stone, ignoring the things that crawled over her hands and scuttled away to wait patiently in the corners, until she found him, lying motionless against the cool wall. He didn’t speak, didn’t answer when she said his name. It was only after her eyes had begun to adjust to the black gloom that she saw how very close to death he was. It had only been a few days, but she doubted he’d been given any water at all. He’d been beaten. There were burns.

Crying solves nothing
, she told herself.
Do not cry. Think
.

But her mind failed her. Her grandmother had no advice for such a situation. And when she gingerly took her father’s hand in her own and felt his dry, wrinkled fingers press weakly against hers, the tears came, whether she wanted them to or not.

“I will think of something,” she whispered. “It will all be fine. I promise, Dad.”

And then came the rattle of the jailer’s keys.

A slow, steady rhythm,
clang clang, clang clang
, as he raked them across the bars of the empty cells on his way down the corridor.
Clang clang, clang clang
. From what Lucia could tell, they were the only prisoners in this black basement.

So they were the jailer’s only entertainment.

He’d asked her if they were in need of water, and she’d naïvely thanked him, ready to believe that even in this place, someone might be kind, and decent, and compassionate. Then he’d chuckled and put the pitcher on the ground.

“Well, it’s right here, if you want it,” he’d said, and he’d walked back out the way he’d come, laughing softly to himself the whole while.

Even with everything she’d experienced in the past week, it had taken Lucia more than a moment to comprehend that this was deliberate cruelty. Cruelty for pleasure. It hardened her heart more.

But not so much that her gut didn’t cramp in fear when she heard it again.
Clang clang, clang clang
.

Clang clang
.

This time the jailer stood leaning against the far wall of the corridor, watching her. Only his legs were caught in the narrow beam of sunlight from the street-level grating at the top of their cell, his face only dimly lit from below. Even in that dull light, his eyes danced, and his tongue worried his teeth, like he was anticipating a great meal.

“It occurred to me,” the jailer said, “that
you
might’ve been the reason Lord Cesare was so worked up, that time he came by to find your dad. You know anything about that?”

Lucia closed her eyes. She had been trying very hard not to think about Cesare. She had been trying very, very hard not to think about all the things she didn’t know about Cesare, about all the things he’d made her feel, about the way he’d lied to her. She couldn’t make sense of her current situation and continue to think that Cesare cared about her at all, and she couldn’t afford to nurse a broken heart at the moment. And here was this jailer, telling her that Cesare had been here, looking for her father. Had made trouble on her behalf.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

The jailer spat. “It’s not good to lie to me, girl.”

“I don’t know anything,” Lucia said, and heard the truth in her own voice.

Because she didn’t know, really, what had happened. Whether Cesare actually cared, or if his interest in her had just been a ruse to investigate her father. She didn’t know who he was.

What
he was.

There was a frightened knot at the back of her mind surrounding what little she’d seen of whatever it was that had attacked Grimaldi, the very inhuman thing that had saved her, and which she’d felt connected to in a way that she’d only ever felt connected to Cesare. But this was something else that she could not afford to dwell on. Because now it didn’t matter, really. Lucia had failed.

They were going to die.

The sudden weight of that fact must have fallen on her face, because the jailer smiled. “You know,” he said conversationally, “sometimes he pardons people, our Duke does.”

Lucia closed her eyes. This was too much.

“Sometimes he pardons people, but there’s been a lot of fuss about you—oh yes. Lots of fuss, I can tell you that. Normally,” the jailer continued, pushing himself off the wall, “normally, of course, traitors are killed right out in public, right there in the Plaza. You ever seen it?”

Lucia didn’t answer.

“Well, lots of people go to the executions,” the jailer went on. “Lots of people bring their families. And traitors are the favorite, right, because they go and get the horses and the chains, right after the hangman’s done, with everyone watching. They don’t draw and quarter women, of course. Not civilized.”

The jailer came closer again, grinning, watching Lucia’s face.