Venom (38 page)

“Cass!” Her name echoed through the open space.

She reeled backward, terror drumming through her. She had fallen into hell, into a nightmare. She ran, sobbing, choking back more screams. Her foot landed in a soft patch of dirt and her ankle twisted. She stumbled but didn’t fall. As she passed through the open gate, she hitched up her dress with both hands and pushed herself to run faster than she ever had before. The wet grass tugged at her ankles. Cass could sense the boys behind her; she could feel them pursuing her.

Twice she tripped and went sprawling across the campo. The cracked marble cut into her hands. She climbed to her feet without looking back, not thinking of anything but home, and light, and safety, and the heavy locks on her doors, which she would bolt now and forever against the man—the madman—she had fallen in love with.

Racing through the dark alley, Cass cursed herself for lying to
the gondolier. If she had been truthful—well, more truthful—he might have agreed to ferry her back to San Domenico. Instead, Cass raced along the side of the canal until she found the same fisherman who had taken her home the night she and Falco had discovered Sophia’s body in the canal.

Her footsteps had awakened the boy, and he sat up sleepily in his
sandolo.
A slow smile spread across his face as he recognized her.

“Go, go, go.” Cass hopped into the boat, emptying her purse in the boy’s direction. Silver coins spilled out onto the damp baseboards. Way too much for the fare, but Cass was not worried about the money.

The boy laughed, not understanding the urgency, but he freed his little fishing skiff with a sharp tug on the rope. Grabbing the oar, he turned the boat out into the center of the canal. Cass looked back as they pulled away from the bridge. Falco stood at the water’s edge, watching her leave. His hair snapped and twisted in the wind; the faint moonlight distorted his features so that he looked more monstrous than human.

Or maybe he had always looked like that, and Cass had been too blind to see it.

She turned her back on him, sliding down in the boat. She wished she could die, that the bottom of the sandolo would just split open and let the frigid water of the lagoon suck her down to its muddy depths.

Cass barely registered the ride back to San Domenico. When the sandolo pulled close to Agnese’s dock, Cass hurled herself over the edge, not even waiting for the boy to anchor the boat. She no longer cared about the cold or water or being caught. She just wanted to get inside and begin forgetting everything she had seen.

Shivering, she slipped through the back door and into the darkened kitchen. The house was quiet. No one else had woken.

Cass made her way upstairs to her room. She pulled her shutters closed with a bang, triple checking the latch to make sure it was secure. Then she went from candle to candle, lighting them all, as though she could burn away the horrible images in her head. She had had enough of the dark.

She writhed inside her torn and soggy dress, yanking at laces and buttons until the garment fell from her body to the floor of her bedroom. Cass stared at the shredded fabric. Destroyed. Like her life. Like everything. She sank into bed, pulling the covers up to her neck. She couldn’t stop shaking. Cass fought the urge to vomit. She had fallen in love with a monster. He could have killed her.

She glanced up at the portrait of the Virgin Mary. The woman looked back from her frame without judgment, but also without answers. Tears came, hot and fast. Cass curled onto her side, pressing her chin to her knees. She began to sob. Her insides felt like they were being crushed from all directions. Bones breaking. Her heart, squeezed to dust.

I
n the morning, thin beams of light filtered through cracks in the shutters. The candles had long ago burned to useless nubs.

As Cass sat up slowly, memories of the previous night assaulted her, one after the next. Horrible scratching sounds. Bodies sprawled on a cart, like disfigured lovers. Falco embracing a corpse. Had it all been a dream? It must have been.

Of course. A bad dream. A terrible, terrible nightmare.

Cass gasped as Slipper bounded up on the bed. “You scared me halfway to the grave,” she told the cat. The words niggled at the edge of her consciousness. Had she heard them in her dream?

Slipper mewed softly and Cass reached out to pet his gray and white head. Her hand stung. She pulled it away from the cat. For several seconds she couldn’t bring herself to look at it. She listened to her heart slam-bang in her chest. She remembered tumbling to the hard ground of the campo, falling forward onto her palms, sharp edges of stone cutting into her flesh.
Please please please.
Cass willed her skin to be intact.
Please let it all have been a dream.

Slowly, Cass lifted her hand to her face. Her palm was marred by
several long red scratches. Bile rose to the back of her throat. Blanks in her memory filled themselves in rapidly. Cass tricking Narissa. The note for Falco. The trip home with the fisherman. It was real. All of it.
Falco embracing a corpse…

Cass fought back tears. Were the artists witches? Satanists? Were they involved with whatever Angelo de Gradi was doing in the old Castello building? Bodies. Body parts. Cass shuddered. Were they simply stealing the dead, or could Falco and his friends be murderers too?

She glanced around the darkened room. The shadowy outlines of her armoire and dressing table reminded her of sentries standing guard. They were solid, sturdy. The whole house was sturdy. Yesterday the villa had been her prison. Today it was her fortress. Surely, she would be safe as long as she remained hidden inside. She had asked Falco to meet her in the garden that very evening. That was one engagement she wouldn’t be keeping.

She spent most of the day tucked away in the library, leaving just long enough to pick at her dinner while Agnese watched, frowning. Cass had been finishing up Dante Alghieri’s
La Divinia Commedia,
but the scribe’s loopy handwriting was giving her a headache. Some of the wealthier nobles turned their noses up at printed books, but Cass thought the invention of the printing press was nothing short of magic. She tossed the hand-copied book down and wandered over to the shelf where her aunt kept her newest printed volumes. She scanned the spines, hoping for a new collection of de Montaigne essays, but she didn’t find one. Absentmindedly, she selected a book with a dyed-green leather binding. She snuggled down in the chair by the fireplace with Slipper on her lap.

The book was by a little-known English playwright named
Shakespeare, and the story was about a pair of young lovers kept apart by a family feud. Cass knew love was probably the last thing she should be reading about right now, but she liked the way Shakespeare wrote, with vivid language and long flowing lines. It was more like poetry than story. Cass flipped the pages rapidly, eager to find out what happened to the star-crossed pair. But the book ended only part of the way through the story. She’d have to search the shelf and see if her aunt had purchased the next volume.

Slipper opened his eyes and yawned at Cass as she set the green book on the table next to her chair. “You’ll never disappoint me, will you?” Cass murmured, nuzzling her nose against the white spot on Slipper’s forehead.

The cat flexed one paw in response, his tiny needlelike claws catching in the fabric of Cass’s dress. She petted him while she looked up at the library’s elaborately painted ceiling. A local artist had done a mural of a traditional vision of heaven. Flocks of winged angels played in ponds and flower gardens while a bearded God looked directly down on Cass.

“Signorina Cass.” Narissa poked her head into the library. “You have a gentleman caller. I told him you were reading, but he was quite adamant.”

Cass’s throat went dry. Falco. She shook her head. Her hands unconsciously tightened around Slipper, and the cat wriggled in her grasp. “Tell him I’m ill,” she croaked out.

Narissa left the library, and a few minutes later Cass heard muffled voices coming from the front of the villa.

She couldn’t make out what Narissa was saying, but she did hear that the voices were getting louder, as if Falco were arguing with her.

Cass leapt to her feet. Slipper squirmed out of her arms and
landed hard on the floor. Terror and rage pulled at Cass, freezing her to her spot. She couldn’t decide whether to hide away or launch herself at Falco and drag him forcefully from the villa. Clearly he was depraved, but was he violent? Were she and Narissa in danger?

Cass’s anger won out, and she stalked from the library down the hallway to the portego. She couldn’t believe Falco’s nerve. He had no right to raise his voice to Narissa. He had no right to be there, to be anywhere, to show his face in public ever again. Not after what Cass had seen. How had he even contrived admittance to the villa? Probably he was dressed up in some stupid costume again. Cass remembered his poorly fitting aristocrat’s clothing from the night of the masked ball. He had never told Cass where he got the outfit, but now she knew. The same way he got Liviana’s necklace, by stripping it from a rotting corpse. Her stomach churned. Once again she saw Falco cradling that dead body against his chest.

She turned the corner, ready to yank Falco outside and tell him to leave and never come back. But when she hit the threshold to the portego, she froze. The man arguing with Narissa wasn’t Falco.

“Hello, Cassandra,” the man said. His brown eyes lit up and he smiled.

“Luca,” Cass gasped.