“Stay away, sirrah,” Bourbon snaps at him. “You’ll stand at the gallows when I’m finished with you.”
Scipio stays doubled over, his face pressed into the crook of his elbow and his shoulders heaving. Swing back, I think desperately to him and hopelessly to myself. But neither of us does. Fighting back against everyone who cracks you is a luxury we both stopped believing in long ago.
Helena is on her feet now, back to the wall with her hands flat against the paneling. “What do we do?” she says, so quiet she must be speaking to herself.
Bourbon pivots to me again, the soles of his boots making a soft shush upon the rug. “Where’s the damned key, Montague?”
“I haven’t got it,” I stammer. I can feel a thin line of blood running down my chin from where I bit my lip, but I’m too stuck with fear to wipe it away.
“Then who does? Tell me. Where is it?” When I don’t reply, he shoves me backward onto the bed again and I collapse without protest.
There’s a moment of cacophonous silence. Outside the window, the revelers in the square make themselves heard, a pretty and oblivious sound. I can feel the duke staring at me, like he’s still waiting for my reply, but I’m not sending this man after Percy and Felicity—I’d rather die now at his hand with the hope they get away.
“Fine,” Bourbon snaps. Then his voice shifts as he turns. “You, pirate, stand up. Stand. Up.” I raise my head as Scipio straightens. The skin on one side of his face has been scraped raw by the encrusted rings Bourbon wears, and thin tracks of blood are beginning to rise, jewel-colored against his dark skin. “You will deliver yourself to Montague’s two companions, who are undoubtedly in your care,” Bourbon instructs. He’s speaking slowly, like Scipio’s a simpleton. “You will inform them they are to meet us on the island of Maria e Marta at dawn, alone, with the Lazarus Key and none of you pirates in accompaniment. If they fail on any of these accounts, I will shoot Mr. Montague and dump his body in the Lagoon.”
He pulls his pistol from his belt and pantomimes it for fullest effect. Bang.
I let my head fall back against the bed.
Another moment of silence, then he cocks the pistol—a sound like a snapping bone. “If you don’t get along,” Bourbon says, “I’ll shoot him now.”
A moment later, the hobnails in Scipio’s boots complain against the floorboards; then the door shuts, and I’m alone.
As soon as he’s gone, Helena cries, like she’s been holding it in, “Don’t shoot him!”
“Keep your head, Condesa.” There’s a clatter, something heavy tossed onto a wooden surface so hard it rattles everything upon it. “Christ, women are volatile.”
She’s standing between us, I realize suddenly, as though she doesn’t trust him to keep that pistol away. “No one else is dying for this.”
“And he shan’t, so long as that key of yours is in my possession tomorrow morning.”
I’m starting to drift away. My senses are each becoming unfamiliar things in turn, my vision graying, then my hearing slipping out to sea like a message tucked into a bottle. This bed is going to swallow me whole. A shadow falls across me and I push my face deeper into the mattress.
“Let him sleep until we depart,” Helena says. “He’ll be no good to us until he’s sobered up.”
Outside the windows, the sky explodes—a fireworks show is beginning. The storm clouds flush, each raindrop a colorful lantern, and the crooked finger of a moon hanging low over the palace turns blood-colored.
I want to be home.
No, not home. I want to be not here. I want to be somewhere safe. Somewhere I know.
I want to be with Percy.
“Sleep well, my lord,” I hear Helena say, and I surrender.
28
When I wake, I’m still curled up at the end of the bed, my knees aching and my shirt stuck to my back. My head throbs. I haven’t a clue what time it is—it’s too colorless to tell. Outside the window, the sky is gray and frothy, though it blushes suddenly white with a tongue of lightning. The water of the Grand Canal bounces as the rain peppers it.
“Are you going to be sick?”
I raise my head. The duke is gone, but Helena is on the window seat, twisting her necklace around her fingers. I don’t answer, because I don’t believe a prisoner owes his captors any sort report on his health. That, and if I’m going to be sick, I’d prefer to do it all over her, and I’d prefer it to be a stealth attack.
Helena retrieves a porcelain basin from the washing table and brings it over to me. I expect her to toss it onto the blankets and then go back to her sentry post, but instead she sits down at the head of the bed, one leg pulled under her and the basin between us. We examine each other for a moment—me with considerably more squinting and wincing. She’s different here, away from her father’s house and her own terrain. She seems more human, with less armor around her emotions, and for a moment I believe she simply wants this finished.
Then she says, “How did my father look?”
I hadn’t been expecting that—not the subject, nor the gentleness of her tone. “How did . . . what?”
“When you saw him in prison. Was he unwell? Did he look as though he’d been mistreated?”
“He was . . .” I’m not certain how to answer, so I choose “Emphatic.”
“Emphatic about what?”
“That his children not turn over their mother’s heart to the Duke of Bourbon or any man who would use it wrongly.”
Her face sets. “You mean a man such as you? You want to use it as well, don’t you? That’s why you stole the key once Dante told you about our father’s work.”
“We wouldn’t use it wrongly.”
“And who decides what is wrong and what is good?”
“Your father said—”
“I love my father,” she says, each word ironclad. “That is the only thing that matters to me in this world, and I don’t care what has to happen for him to be free again.” She smashes the wrinkles from her skirt with the heel of her hand, eyes away from me. “So, who was it for?”
“Percy.”
“Your friend?” She presses her fist into the mattress, her shoulders never losing their graceful slant but her head drooping in something like penitence. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just sorry.”
Before I can reply, the door bangs open and Bourbon sweeps in, the shoulders of his cloak speckled with the rain. Helena flies to her feet, so fast the porcelain basin is almost knocked to the floor. Bourbon tosses his hat upon the chaise. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Did you find a boat?” Helena asks.
“A gondola,” he replies. “We’ll get past the patrols easier in something small. Get up, Montague,” he barks at me, sweeping back the tails of his coat so I can see he’s still keeping company with that pistol the size of his forearm. I stumble to my feet, nearly pitching into one of the bedposts.