Queen of the Night (The Revanche Cycle Book 4) (10 page)

A miserable sight, were it not for the way the moon glinted off his expensive, high-laced boots. Or how, when his ambling gait shifted just right, he betrayed the telltale bulge of a blade hidden under his rags. Felix thought of swooping down and taking him, here and now, but he steeled himself and stayed his hand. He was glad he did as he crept on by; around the next bend, just below his feet, a pair of rakes leaned against a darkened shop window and passed a bottle of wine back and forth. Watching the street like hawks. Felix smiled as the upturned bottle caught the light. It was dry as a stone, phony as their feigned drunkenness.

The piazza was an open market square, and during the day it played host to auctions of livestock and bulk goods. A lectern stood on a raised wooden stage beside a couple of tall, empty cages and an animal pen strewn with dirty hay. Even by night, the rancid smell of stale piss hung in the air. In a shadowy alcove, a couple stood in a lovers’ clinch. Up a short alley, two more derelicts pretended to sleep under moth-eaten blankets. Months ago, Felix wouldn’t have given any of them a second glance. He’d taken the world for what it was, never peeling back the grimy layers beneath.

He knew a killer when he saw one now. And a trap waiting to spring shut. They’d covered every entrance to the square. No matter which way he entered the piazza, if he came in from below, Aita’s men would be on him in seconds. He had no intention of obliging them. Instead, he got down on his belly, flush to the roof, and watched.

Waiting was agony. He felt the bulge of his pouch against his hip, and his imagination ran wild thinking about what they might have done—might
be
doing, right at that moment—to Renata. He forced himself to take deep breaths and focus.

An hour drifted by in the dark. Maybe two. The wind ruffled Felix’s hair with icy fingertips. Then it carried a faint voice from the square below.

“Are we sure he got the message?”

“Had to,” answered another voice. One of the killers disguised as a beggar. “We painted the walls at every single place he might have targeted. No way he’s not showing up.”

“You see him? I don’t. I don’t think he’s coming.”

“Almost feel bad for his girl. You think Aita’s really gonna slice her face off?”

A grim chuckle drifted up from below as Felix’s hands clenched on the eave. His blood racing hot and every muscle in his body screaming for him to leap down and start the slaughter.

“It’s Aita,” the other man said. “She says she’s gonna do something, she’s gonna do it. C’mon, somebody has to send word back, and it might as well be us. I’m freezing my arse off out here.”

As the two men ambled off, heading up an alley and away from the quiet square, Felix pushed himself up, crouching like a panther, then rose. Following them from above, his slow, careful footsteps like faint whispers in the dark.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Felix’s prey followed a winding path through the city streets, angling toward the docks in the distance. Felix could taste the tang of salt rolling off the black waters. Moving above the two killers, he reached down and slid a long, horn-hilted dagger from his boot. The metal came free with a serpentine hiss.

He’d been waiting. Waiting for them to get clear of the square, isolated from their partners. Waiting for them to turn down a treacherous alley, barely wide enough for the two men to stand side by side.
Far enough
, Felix thought.

He leaped from the rooftop, clutching the dagger in both hands, and drove it down like a thunderbolt from the bleak night sky. The blade punched through the crown of his target’s head, cracking his skull, driving all the way down to the hilt. His collapsing body cushioned Felix’s fall. Felix hit the ground, rolled, and his rapier lashed from its sheath as he came up again and charged the dead man’s partner.

The assassin hit the alley wall, eyes bulging and mouth agape, with the tip of Felix’s rapier pressed to his throat.

“I only needed one of you alive,” Felix said. “This is your lucky night.”

“You’re…you’re him. Felix Rossini.”

“That’s right. And do you know what I have in my pouch, signore?”

His response was a timid headshake. Felix gave the hilt of his rapier a little shove, driving the point a fraction of an inch deeper into the tender flesh of the man’s throat. A thin trickle of blood welled up, dripping down his neck.

“My fiancée’s
finger
,” Felix said. “So you can no doubt imagine I have very little time or patience for prevarication right now. The only thing saving you from the cold of the grave is your usefulness. So be useful.
Talk
.”

The man swallowed, wincing as his throat swelled against the tip of the blade. “What do you want to know?”

“Renata. Where are they holding her?”

“Do—do you know Hammerface Celso? One of Aita’s lieutenants.”

Felix nodded. “He’s on my list.”

“His place. It’s a warehouse along the docks. No street address, but there’s a carving of a dove above the door.”

“Good. So far, you’re being very useful. Let’s see if you can keep it going. How many guards?”

He shook his head, just a twitch. “Not many. Celso’s there with two men, maybe three. You weren’t supposed to find out. You were supposed to come to the piazza. We were told to capture you alive if we could.”

“And then?” Felix asked.

“We were told to bring you straight to Aita. She’s…she’s at the warehouse right now, waiting.”

Felix’s lips curled into a grim smile. Renata. Aita, blithely waiting for him, unaware he’d slipped from the jaws of her trap. And a token retinue of guards to protect them both. He couldn’t have prayed for a better chance.

“Thank you, signore,” Felix said, “you’ve been very helpful.”

“So does that mean you’ll let me—”

Felix speared the rapier through his throat then twisted it, wrenching the blade free. He turned and strode away as the killer collapsed at his back, choking on his own blood.

The far edge of the docks was a snarled tangle of ribbon streets lined with warehouses, some barred under oaken doors and mammoth iron locks, others gone to seed and half-abandoned by owners who only came to port once in a blue moon. It didn’t take Felix long to find the spot: a squat box of chipped and dirty brick, with the crude outline of a bird chiseled above the side doorway.

He thought about knocking. Get them to open the door, then carve his way to Renata one body at a time. Then he stepped away. No, too much chance of someone putting a blade to Renata’s throat if he gave them any advance warning. He’d have to get inside as quietly as he could, at least until she was safe and in his arms.

Then, he decided, it was time for Aita to die. Time for this nightmare to finally end.

A patch of rough wall, faded by sea wind and time, looked promising. Felix jumped up and grabbed at an outcropping of broken stone. His fingers dug in, a lance of pain shooting up his back as he swung and snatched at another outcropping a few feet away. His boots scrabbled for purchase, one foot finding a crumbling dent to dig his toes into while the other dangled free. Inch by agonizing inch he hauled himself up the wall, toward a long broken window set close to the rooftop. A brick turned to powder under his fingers. Loose chunks scattered to the street below, his grip suddenly falling free. He flailed toward the window with his other hand outstretched, closing on the cold iron frame and squeezing tight with the last of his strength. A nub of jagged glass the size of a coin sliced into his palm. He bit down on his bottom lip, stifling a groan, and caught the window frame with his other hand.

From there he squirmed his way upward and over, inching through the coffin-sized window. A tall rack bearing crates and moldering sacks stood on the other side, the highest shelf just a couple of feet below the windowsill. He pulled himself in and landed on his back on the shelf, gasping for breath, blood guttering down his wrist from the cut. He took hold of the glass chip and wriggled it free from his palm. It felt like he’d been slashed with a razor, the stinging pain setting his teeth on edge. He pressed his palm to his chest and stanched the wound as best he could on the dirt-stained cloth of his vest.

Silence. Too much silence. The light of a single torch, smoldering in the gloom, was the only proof the warehouse hadn’t been totally abandoned. Felix sat up slowly. His pulse hammered against his wounded palm.

No signs of movement below. Just racks of lonely, half-empty shelves, spaced out along the grimy stone floor. Far in the back, though, a solitary door hung open just a crack.
An office
, he thought,
or more storage. Either way, that’s where I’ll find them
.

He clambered down from the shelves and dropped into a crouch on the flagstones. Wincing at every stray sound. He was close now, so close he could smell the memory of Renata’s perfume. He took the middle lane of the warehouse, a wide boulevard running between the shelves, creeping closer to the back door one careful footstep at a time.

Then, ten feet up ahead, Aita stepped out from behind a shelf. The torchlight glowed at her back and made her hair shine like molten gold.

“Felix,” she said, with a smile of feline pleasure.

“Where is she, Aita?” He rested his wounded palm on the hilt of his rapier, feeling the sting of cold metal against the cut. “Give me Renata, and I
might
let you live.”

“Neither one of us has any intention of allowing the other to live. Don’t pretend otherwise. Bluffing isn’t something you’re good at.”

Felix extended his other hand, taking in the empty room. A draft rippled through the broken windows and kicked up scattered dust.

“You don’t have any other option. I slipped your little trap at the piazza. Your men are still out there, hunting me, while I’m in here with you. So what now?”

Aita chuckled and shook her head.

“Oh, Felix. You know, everyone has a weak spot, something they want more than life itself. Some men you can lead around by their cocks like a puppy on a leash. Other men dance to the tune of jingling gold. But you? Of all the things you could squander your life on, of all the weapons you could hand to me, your downfall was
love
. Pathetic.”

Felix swallowed, his throat suddenly bone-dry. She was too confident, too pleased for a woman facing her death.

“Where is she, Aita?”

“You should feel honored,” she told him. “I finally stopped underestimating you. I realized there was a very good chance that whatever snare I set in your path, you’d wriggle right out of it. So I made sure all of my soldiers had a clever little story to pass on in case you managed to capture one of them. You know: Renata and I, in this warehouse not far away. Just
waiting
for you to swoop in and save the day. The dashing storybook prince defeating the evil villain and rescuing the damsel in distress.”

Felix felt the air shift around him. The shadows on the racks grew long, curling like clawed fingers, no longer matching the dance of the torchlight.

“I didn’t lay one trap,” she said. “I laid two.”

Felix spun, the pitter-patter of running feet his only warning before a gray shadow launched toward him. A slippered foot hit his chest like a stone sledgehammer. He felt a rib crack as the impact flung his body like a rag doll, sending him slamming against one of the storage racks. A second figure—gray, face shrouded behind a mourner’s veil—grabbed him by the throat with velvet-gloved fingers too long for any human hand. A hissing chuckle oozed from beneath the veil as the fingers squeezed, cutting off his air, his vision blossoming red.

He flexed his wrists. Short daggers dropped free from the spring-loaded sheaths under his sleeves. He missed one, fingers fumbling in his panic, and it clattered to the floor. The other fell snug in his grip and he punched it into his attacker’s belly again and again. She staggered back as she clutched at her wound. He’d barely taken a breath, getting his wind back, when the first woman came at him in a thundering charge. She spun like a cyclone, one hand battering his knife aside, the other lashing out with a brutal fist that sent him crashing to the flagstones. He tasted coppery blood in his mouth, flowing from the root of a cracked tooth.

A silken noose flipped over his head, drawing taut as the woman dropped one knee down on the small of his back and pinned him to the floor. Felix clawed at the noose, his breath escaping in an agonized wheeze. Aita sauntered toward him.

“The fairy tale is over,” she said. “Welcome to the real world. This is where the dashing prince dies and the evil queen lives happily ever after. How do you like
that
ending? If it’s any consolation, I have no idea where Renata is. Couldn’t find her. Turns out I didn’t need to. All it took to catch you was a finger from a fresh corpse and the power of suggestion.”

She crouched down in front of him. The scar on her cheek twisted as she gave him an affectionate smile.

“I liked you, Felix. Even when I decided you had to die, I still liked you. But you did embarrass me in front of my men. Reputation is everything in my world, and I need to prove I’m my father’s equal. So understand this: you are going to suffer an excruciatingly slow and grotesque death. The kind of death people will shudder to even imagine, so that for years to come, anyone
thinking
of standing against me will be warned of the horrible fate of Felix Rossini.”

On the verge of blacking out, his pulse roaring in his ears, Felix struggled to focus on Aita’s face as his vision blurred. She ran her slender fingers through his hair.

“Just remember, it’s nothing personal.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The heart of Mirenze stood behind stout curtain walls, but it took more than teeming streets to build a city. Beyond the barricaded gates lay acre after acre of rolling farmland, the fields gone black and fallow in the aftermath of the autumn harvests.

“A city’s like an army,” Gallo said. “It runs on its stomach. All the food’s buttoned up behind the walls now; they’ll be snug and fat through the winter.”