Venom (16 page)

Cass stepped back from Falco and smoothed her skirt. “I do,” she said, reminding herself that this escapade had been her own idea.
Besides, she probably
had
just gotten herself snagged on someone heading in the opposite direction. A knife or a blade would have cut more than just the fabric of her sleeve.
Caspita.
She had made such a big deal out of nothing. She was getting as bad as Madalena.

Up close, the house was an ugly yellowish green. A man and woman sat just outside the door, their arms and legs intertwined. Cass could see the woman’s milk-white shoulder as the man tugged at her bodice. Falco slid past them without so much as a glance. Cass excused herself as she navigated her flowing skirts around the pair. Falco rapped on the door—three quick knocks followed by two slow ones—and the door was opened by a young raven-haired girl in a simple black dress. The girl curtsied and disappeared into the darkness of the house without a word.

Cass glanced questioningly at Falco.

“How did you know the secret knock?” she asked, more than a little afraid of the answer.

“These things are not as secret as you might think,” Falco said with a wink. Cass opened her mouth again but Falco pressed a finger to her lips. Heat flooded her body at his sudden touch. “Enough questions.”

He led Cass through the entrance hall to the doorway of an airy salon where groups of men sat at wooden tables, drinking from flasks and puffing on clay pipes. As they chatted, women in various stages of undress wandered among them, stopping occasionally to stroke the men on the back of the neck or whisper in their ears.

“Falco!” A tiny blonde woman wearing only her stays and a sheer underdress made her way up to them and leaned in close to kiss Falco on the cheek. Cass saw her lips graze his earlobe as she whispered a secret message to him. Falco grinned and swiped at the lip mark with
his sleeve. Was he blushing? That was a first. Cass wondered what sort of thing a woman would have to say to make
him
blush. The prostitute turned her steely blue eyes toward Cass, making no attempt to hide the fact that she was sizing her up. Cass looked away, toward the far wall. Someone had painted a mural of a naked girl with her hair on fire. The blonde sidled off and Cass wasn’t sure which upset her more, that Falco was so well known in these parts or that the woman he seemed to prefer resembled Siena rather than herself.

“Friend of yours?” she asked, proud of herself for keeping her voice steady.

“Now, now.” Falco raised an eyebrow. “It is not within a courtesan’s nature to be jealous.”

“I am not jealous,” Cass insisted.

“Good. Andriana is just a professional acquaintance of mine,” he said.

“Oh, she looked professional all right,” Cass replied. She was not sure Falco heard; if so, he pretended not to. He was already pulling her forward. She wobbled in her tall chopines as Falco shooed her into the salon. She grabbed on to the door frame to regain her balance. A pair of soldiers dressed in scarlet military garb and scuffed silver breastplates looked up from a square table in the corner of the room. Cass looked past them, to the far edge of the table where their broadswords leaned. Her eyes traced their way down the steel blades, and she couldn’t help but see the dead girl, the strange X sliced into her discolored skin.

“No more drink for that one or she won’t be able to perform,” one of the soldiers said, raising a glass of golden liquid in Falco’s and Cass’s direction.

“I find some of them do best after they fall asleep,” his companion responded. Both men broke into coarse laughter before draining their glasses and signaling for refills.

Cass realized she had pressed herself so tightly to Falco that she was starting to sweat. Slowly, she pulled away from him so that the fabric of her chemise unstuck itself from his side. Falco flashed her a dazzling smile. “That’s a good girl,” he said, making Cass feel like she was about four years old. “Wait here for me, okay? I’m going to speak to Signora Marcoletti.”

“Wait—” Cass tried to call him back, but Falco had already turned and disappeared up a short flight of stairs.

Alone in the salon, Cass’s fear started to take over again. Her eyes flicked around the room: the two soldiers throwing back pewter mugs of ale, a table of sailors betting on a game played with tiny glass stones, a small cluster of peasant boys with hats pulled low to hide their faces. And beyond them, just in front of the fire-girl mural, a clean-shaven man with shoulder-length blond hair sat alone on a divan. As he chatted sporadically with one of the girls, he folded a piece of parchment into smaller and smaller triangles. He looked vaguely familiar, although Cass couldn’t place him.

She slouched against the doorway to the salon. Carved angels and devils decorated the molding, their wings and horns digging into her back. Everyone else in the room was sitting, which made her feel gigantic, even leaning against the wall. Cass wished she could remove her chopines, but no one had offered to take them, and she couldn’t just leave them lying around in a place like this. Teetering slightly, she made her way across the chipped and broken marble floor. Despite the fact that the clusters of men all seemed engrossed in drinking or gambling, Cass sensed gazes searing into her from
whichever direction she didn’t happen to be looking. Tucking her hands into the pockets of her dress, she felt the soft fabric of a handkerchief. A lot of good it would do. She wished she had brought along the kitchen knife.

Anchoring herself against a tasseled divan with a giant rip in the upholstery, Cass counted in her head.
One, two, three.
The servant girl excused herself as she squeezed past Cass with another round of drinks for the soldiers.
Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.
A tall brunette wearing a silky veil and a scandalously sheer dress circled through the room and whispered something to the blond man on the divan in the corner. His face twisted into a grimace and his right hand clenched and unclenched until the girl walked away. Cass realized he was as uncomfortable as she was, and felt a sudden rush of sympathy for him. He had probably been dragged there by one of his friends.

The dark-haired prostitute walked from table to table, stopping to chat with each of the men.
Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five.
One of the peasant boys followed her through the room and up the staircase Falco had taken. Behind him, his friends put their heads close together to laugh and whisper.
Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine
—a heavy hand landed on her lower back. Cass whirled around to tell Falco how rude it was for him to abandon her like that, but it wasn’t Falco. It was a swarthy older man with a dark beard and eyes that were black and dead, like a doll’s.

“I like the look of you,
bella,
” he said, leering at her. He was missing several teeth, and his breath stank of stale alcohol. “Like a horse that hasn’t been broken yet.”

Cass tried to swallow her revulsion as the man’s callused hand
made its way up to the bare skin on her back and neck. She forced a smile.

“I have no need to be trained by you,” she said, trying to keep her voice from trembling.

“A fighter then, eh?” One of the sailors abandoned his pile of glass stones to make his way over to Cass. He leaned in close to her, his tan speckled face just inches from her own. “My brother and I like a girl with some fight in her.”

Cass felt trapped. She could hardly breathe. The air was thick, the sharp scent of ale melding with the overpowering aroma of cheap perfume. She wriggled her way out from between the brothers. “Excuse me,” she mumbled, again almost tripping as she clattered off in the direction that Falco had disappeared.

Gripping the handrail so forcefully that her knuckles blanched white, Cass started up toward the darkened second floor of the house. Hooting and laughter from the salon below faded into white noise as she ascended the stairs. She paused on the landing. A long hallway with doors on both sides receded into blackness. She blinked, trying to let her eyes adjust to the gloom. The hall was empty.

Cass’s pulse raced. How
dare
Falco leave her by herself. She looked back down the stairs. The dull roar of the salon seemed very far away. She peered up into the darkness, but the air above her was black and still and quiet as the dead. She moved down the dark hallway. “Falco,” she called quietly outside the first door. No answer. She tried the knob. Locked. She moved down to the second door. “Falco,” she said again, this time slightly louder.

“Not in here,” a gruff voice responded.

No one answered when Cass spoke outside the third door. She tried the knob, and it turned beneath her palm. Cass froze in the hallway, seized by the idea that the unlocked door was a bad omen. Someone was waiting for her. Not someone.

Him. The murderer. Cass could sense him behind the door, a body made completely of bone. He would reach out for her with his skeleton fingers and she would be powerless to turn away.

Cass wrenched her hand back, but the door swung open as if it had a mind of its own. The room was dark except for a row of flickering candles along the mantel of a dark fireplace. Curls of smoke wafted upward. The smell of fatty tallow mixed unpleasantly with the sharp aroma of sweat and rosewater. On the floor, two shadows were locked together in an intense struggle. Cass raised a hand to her mouth. She should run away, find someone, find Falco, get help.

Before she could move, the top figure rose up slowly from the mattress and Cass could make out the slender curves of a woman’s back. A
naked
woman’s back, her skin slick with oil or sweat. The man underneath her relaxed, his hands exploring the woman’s curves as she rocked back and forth on top of him.

This was no struggle. Cass knew she should shut the door and flee, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t take her eyes off the way the silhouettes moved in time with each other, the way their hips brought their bodies impossibly close together with each gyration.

Cass started to feel hot, as though the candles were burning inside her. The figure on the mattress moaned and the woman on top of him laughed, leaning down. Cass was mesmerized by the woman’s glistening skin, her loose black hair shaking back and forth.

A door slammed from somewhere down the hallway and Cass gasped. The raven-haired prostitute glanced over her shoulder as
Cass reeled backward. The woman winked. “Want to join us,
bella
?” she asked.

The man beneath her laughed roughly. “Plenty of room for two.”

Cass spun around and headed back down the dark hallway, practically sprinting down the stairs to the first floor. She paused at the threshold of the salon, her heart slamming in her chest.

What had she walked in on? The people were having sex, obviously, but Cass had never dreamed it could be so…naked. So animal-like. The movement. The noises. All that glistening, sweaty skin. She had heard Madalena talk about sex, but even the older girl had never actually done it, and her stories of what it would be like were nothing like what Cass had seen.

Falco still had not reappeared and the salon had gotten crowded in Cass’s absence. She accepted a glass of wine from the servant girl and loitered awkwardly in a corner, sipping her drink slowly. The room went a little hazy, brightly colored clothing and raucous laughter churning together and clouding Cass’s thoughts. She grabbed on to the edge of a wooden table to steady herself, accidentally brushing up against one of the soldiers.

“S-sorry,” she stammered, trying to back away.

The soldier nudged his friend. “Time for you to pick one. Looks like this one has chosen me.” His hand tightened around Cass’s wrist. Instinctively, she tried to pull away, but his grip was too tight. For a second she stared down at his thick muscular forearm, her eyes tracing the purple veins snaking beneath his skin.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” she started. “I’m not for sale tonight.” She twisted her wrist but couldn’t break free.

“Why is that?” The soldier leaned in close and Cass recoiled from the pungent smell of liquor on his breath.

“I—” Her lips pressed together and her brain seized up. All she could see was that room, the noises, the sweaty bodies moving together. She couldn’t bring herself to look into the soldier’s face. She opened her mouth again, but the only noise that came out was a whimper of fear.

The soldier downed his glass of ale and raked his fingertips down the side of her face. “Don’t worry. I’ll pay a fair price.” He pulled a small leather satchel from underneath his breastplate and started counting out coins.

“She’s not for sale, because I’ve already paid for her.” The lone blond man stood up from his spot on the corner divan. He had a soft lilting voice, vaguely foreign. His cloak and boots were made of lush velvet, and even the way he walked across the room marked him as a member of the upper class. She pulled free of the soldier as the man moved to her side, her eyes focused down at the bronze skin on the back of his extended hand.

And then she realized who it was. Cristian. Madalena’s friend. He had given no indication that he recognized her. The soldier glared at Cristian for a few seconds, probably debating whether Cass was worth fighting over. He fiddled with the hilt of his sword and mumbled something about foreigners under his breath. Eventually he turned his back on the two of them.

Cristian led Cass through the salon back to the entrance hall. “You should probably go,” he said. “You don’t seem to belong here.”

Mannaggia
. What if he did recognize her? If he said something to Madalena, Cass would have to face an inquisition. “I’m new,” Cass faltered, keeping her head lowered. “I guess I got a little scared.”

An unreadable look passed across Cristian’s face. He stuffed his right hand deep into the pocket of his cloak and took her hand in
his left. Briefly, he touched his lips to the skin above her fingers. His mouth was cold—too cold. The image of a vampire, its fangs wet with blood, flashed briefly into Cass’s head.

Cass pulled her hand away quickly. “Thanks for rescuing me,” she said, trying to erase the disturbing picture from her mind. “You don’t look like you belong here either.” Cristian still hadn’t admitted to knowing her, but Cass felt certain that he did. She told herself she was just being paranoid.