“I need to . . . I can’t . . .”
I’m breathing too fast, and he must notice it, for he steps closer to me. “What’s the matter?” I press my hands into my cheeks, regret rancid inside me, and I want to cry so badly, like that might flush it all out. Scipio steps behind me and puts his hands upon my shoulders. “You need to sleep. See how you feel in the morning.”
“Percy doesn’t want me anymore,” I murmur.
Scipio’s hand flexes, and I’m not certain if he knows what I mean and ignores it, or simply interprets that sentence in the holiest way. “He’ll come around.”
He starts to push me forward, and I let myself be pushed, but someone plants himself in our path. My feet aren’t as quick as my brain, though that isn’t performing at top speed either, and I crash into him. Scipio toes the back of my boot and I step out of it.
“Scusi.” Scipio keeps ahold of me as he tries to go around the man, who I realize is dressed in the livery of the Doge’s soldiers. The man steps into Scipio’s path again, a deliberate move this time, and Scipio halts. I’m still standing on one foot, trying to get my boot back on, and he nearly pulls me over.
The soldier asks us something in Venetian, and we both stare back blankly. Scipio answers in French, “Excuse us.”
The soldier steps in his path again. Scipio’s grip on my arm goes tighter. “Do you speak English?” the soldier asks, the words fumbled like he doesn’t understand the phrase, just the sounds individually.
Scipio’s still sizing him up, then says, in English as well, “Yes.”
“You English?” The soldier says it more to me, and I nod before I realize I am.
Someone grabs me from behind and I’m wrenched away from Scipio. My muscles seize up. It’s another soldier, this one square-jawed and hugely tall, with missing front teeth and the same livery. I’m starting to catch up to what it is that’s happening, panic hot on its heels, and I try to yank away from him but I’m too tipsy and he’s a good deal bigger than me, and he takes my feeble resistance as a reason to twist my arms behind my back like they’re made of cloth. I yelp in pain. Scipio is putting up a much more successful fight than I am, enough that two more soldiers are called over from where they were lurking unnoticed in the shadow of the cathedral.
The soldiers are speaking to each other in Venetian, and Scipio is trying to argue with them, first in French, then English, which none of them seem to understand. I don’t know what anyone is saying, so I try to get free again, this time taking the boneless approach in the hope that a sudden collapse will twist my arms free. But the officer hauls me up by the back of my shirt, saying something right in my ear, and I’m flailing to get away when Scipio suddenly says, “Monty, stop!”
The fear in his voice stills me, and when I look over, one of the soldiers has drawn his knife, the blade so thin it’s almost invisible until the moonlight catches it. He has the tip of it held to Scipio’s throat. I stop fighting and the soldier wrenches my hands behind me again; then the four of them begin to march us across the square, a soldier on either side and the fourth bringing up the rear with that wicked dagger drawn.
They don’t take us far. We shove through the crowd—pressed from all sides by feathers and crinoline and baize, strings of pearls whacking at us as they’re tossed over shoulders—until we’re before the Doge’s Palace on the edge of the canal. The soldiers at the door, same uniforms as our escorts, let us pass without a question, and we’re prodded across a courtyard rimmed in white stone colonnades, then up two flights of stairs and through a set of large ebony doors.
The room beyond is dominated by a massive four-posted bed. Dark wood panels fringed in gold scrollwork run all the way to the ceiling, where the winged Lion of Saint Mark looks down from the frescoes. A white-glass chandelier drips wax onto the carpeting. The light of it nearly blinds me and I throw my hands up, face curling in protest. I hear the door shut behind us.
The soldier holding me finally lets go and says in French, his words whistling from his missing front teeth, “Are these the gentlemen you were looking for, my lord?”
“One of them,” a sickeningly familiar voice replies. “I’ve no notion who that cove is.”
I lower my hands. The Duke of Bourbon is rising from an emerald chaise, Helena with him, perched forward on a window seat across the room. Her plaited hair swings over her shoulder as she squints at Scipio. “Who the devil is that?”
“One of the corsairs that brought them into port, I’d wager,” Bourbon replies. “I was informed of their arrival this morning by the dock officials. Was there anyone else with them?” he asks the soldiers.
“No, my lord. Just the pair.”
“Where are your friends, Montague?” Bourbon calls to me. “I was hoping you would all be in attendance this evening.”
My heart is really going now. Sober up, I think. Sober up, sober up, get your head on straight and sober up and get out of here. The soldier has sheathed his knife, so I try to make a break for the door but misjudge where I’m standing and slam shoulders with Scipio. One of the soldiers grabs me by the collar and shoves me into the bed. The backs of my legs hit the footboard and I topple over it, landing on the mattress with a dusty flump. The metallic tang of blood bursts in my mouth.
“What have you done to him?” Helena asks.
“He’s drunk,” the duke replies, nose wrinkling. Then, to the soldiers again, he says, “Thank you, gentlemen, you may leave us. The fee will be arranged through your patron.”
As soon as the Doge’s men are gone, Bourbon seizes me by the arm. He’s got a massive pistol with an engraved barrel jammed into his belt, and the grip rams me in the stomach as he drags me back to my feet. “Hand it over, Montague,” he says, one hand resting upon his belt, perchance I failed to notice what is essentially a small cannon beneath his coat.
When I speak, my words run together, partly from the drinking but more from the fear. “I haven’t got it.”
“What do you mean, you haven’t got it?” The duke paws at the pockets of my coat, overturning them, then ringing them between his hands like I might have sewn the key into the lining.
“He has it, I know he does,” Helena says from behind him.
“Keep quiet,” he growls at her.
“They took it from the house.”
“I said keep quiet.” Bourbon grabs me by the chin, jerking my face close to his so that a thin mist of spittle freckles my cheeks. “Where’s the key?” He shakes me hard, and my head slams backward into one of the bedposts. “Where. Is. It.”
“Let him alone.” Scipio grabs the duke by the arm and tries to pull him off me, but Bourbon takes a swipe in his direction. The blow lands with a wet crack, and Scipio stumbles backward, trips over a footstool, then slams into the wall.