The Wolf's Captive (28 page)

We should be grateful for our pains as well as our joys
, Cesare thought.
Learn from wrongs done and justice served.
But now, at least, it was time to right some of those wrongs.

“Cesare…”

“Don’t believe me, Father? Why don’t you ask Gaston Grimaldi?”

A murmur spread through out the now rapt, if terrified, audience. Cesare was certain the gossip would be on the street within the hour. He was not surprised to see that it was Rickle who stood up.

“You
admit
that it was you?”

“I admit that I caught him assaulting this young woman, and that I stopped him,” Cesare said. He waited for this admission to percolate through the wine-confused minds of J’Amel’s elite. He was almost able to pinpoint the exact moment when they connected what he’d said to the sorts of wounds they’d heard that Grimaldi had suffered, and what that could possibly mean.

The Duke waved his hand, eager to get on with it. He wouldn’t want to discuss Cesare’s apparent change in public. “And who is she, Cesare?” he said, his watery, yellow eyes coming to rest on Lucia.

Cesare felt her shrink back behind him. No doubt she was thinking of what he’d told her about his father and the whips. But it was Rickle who answered for him, Rickle who extended his fat finger, shaking with anger. “
That
is Lucia Lyselle, your Grace.”

Another ripple through the crowd, a louder one this time. The Duke looked from Rickle to Cesare and back again.

“I thought she was under arrest in the Basiglia.”

“I released her,” Cesare said.

His father blinked. He stared at his son, perhaps seeing him for the very first time. “Cesare…” he began, but Cesare did not let him finish.

Cesare was done.

He grabbed Lucia’s hand and advanced on the banquet table, bringing them both right up to the edge, right in front of his father. The beast churned inside of him, and yet, with Lucia by his side, he was in complete control of it. Cesare let it rise to the surface briefly, flashing its power just because he could, because they needed to know to take this seriously.

There was the sound of several heavy chairs scraping against stone.

“Stay!” Cesare bellowed. “All will witness this!”

The Duke cowered, seeming to shrink in his seat before his son, and Cesare saw him for the first time: small, mean, petulant, the sort of man who needed to prove his strength by beating a little boy. Not someone to be feared so much as someone to be dealt with.

Cesare slung the satchel from around his shoulder and removed the bottle. Rickle opened his mouth to speak, but Cesare silenced him with a glance.

“How much were you paid, swine?” Cesare spat at him. “It doesn’t matter. Because I am going to prove to you all—right here, right now—that the Duke’s Blend was never poisoned. It was only in your head, Father. Only in your poisoned mind.”

Cesare ripped the brown wrapping from around the bottle to reveal an ornate label covered with the unmistakable wax seal of the Duke’s Blend. He lifted it up so that everyone might get a good view. “Everyone look!” he shouted. “See the bottle! See the distinctive seals! This is the only extant bottle of this year’s Duke’s Blend, alchemically distilled by Vintner Lyselle, and all of it poisoned—allegedly—by the same man. It is said the goal was to poison us all, right here at this Feast, but all the bottles were destroyed in a suspicious fire. All except this one.”

Cesare popped the cork with his thumb, brought the bottle to his lips, and finished off half the bottle in one long gulp.

Cesare heard the gasps of shock, but mostly he felt Lucia’s hand in his own, squeezing her approval. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and bent to kiss her forcefully.

Now she would know. He believed her. He loved her. He was hers. And when he looked in her eyes, he saw: she did know. Then he felt it come racing, shimmering, rushing along the bond that they shared, where it filled him with renewed strength.

Reluctantly, he tore his gaze away from her, and leveled it at his father. The Duke licked his dry lips, his eyes darting about. “There was a letter,” he said. “A letter they found, mentioning a substance called valsace. I was told it is a poison.”

Cesare looked at Lucia. That had been her safeword.

“Valsace?” she said, surprising the entire room. “Valsace doesn’t exist. I made it up. It’s a code word for a secret ingredient we used in the Blend. We can’t just
give
our secrets away,” she said.

There was a pause in which one could almost hear the minds of the elite rearranging what they knew about life to accommodate the possibility that a half-dressed and barefoot commoner might speak to a Duke with evident, and accurate, contempt, and then live to glare at him, too.

Cesare laughed, though it was tinged with bitterness. “There!” he said. “Now all can see! There was no poison; there was never any poison. The Lyselles are vindicated. Don’t worry, Father: I’ve taken the liberty of releasing John Lyselle myself. But I’m afraid we’re not quite done here,” he continued, his eyes narrowed on a particular target.

“
Sit
, Ramora.”

Roberto Ramora sat back down. His eyes were wide and unblinking, and he kept looking to either side, perhaps to see if there were any other Ramoras who could possibly be the subject under discussion. There were not. Layabout sons did not rank invitations to such events.

Cesare stalked his way down the length of the table until he stood across from Roberto Ramora’s blanching face, and then he grabbed the fat banker and dragged him up out of his seat and across the wide table on his belly. Spilled wine and the blood of roast beef seeped into his fine white silk cravat as Cesare drew his face up to his own.

“Who did you sell the Lyselle debt to, Ramora?”

Ramora gurgled nonsense. All told, much of his business relied on discretion.

“I advise you, in the strongest terms, to tell me.”

“C-Clavel!” Ramora shrieked, his eyes shut tight. “Vintner Clavel!”

Cesare let the man drop to the table, genuinely confused. “Who?” he said.

But Lucia was already by his side, and he felt her anger, her rage, gathering together, building up into a great, crashing wave. It nearly knocked Cesare off his feet. He stood stunned for a moment, while Lucia pointed at a blond, confident looking man, one of the sort with large hands and a good handshake, who, among all of those involved, was the only one who did not look afraid. He looked irritated. The irritation of watching someone ruin a perfectly good plan. The sort of evil that had little regard for the lives of others.

“Why?” Lucia demanded of him.

“Obviously I never meant for it to go this far,” the man called Clavel said, as though this were a sufficient explanation. “It was your own fault. If you and David had just agreed to marry like normal people, or if your idiot father had agreed to sell, I wouldn’t have had to try to get your bloody amberwine processes by other means. But you had to do it the hard way,” he sneered.

Cesare stared at Clavel’s hateful face and wondered what it would look like just before death.

“Don’t go anywhere, Clavel,” he said softly.

“All right, Cesare, that’s all behind us, then,” the Duke called out, desperate to brush everything aside before things spun further out of control. “Let’s get on with the holiday. You can go change, and—”

Cesare jumped on the table and ran the length of it, back to his father’s seat. He wanted to see the man’s reaction up close, wanted him to see just how uncouth his son really was, and how much it suited him. “No, father,” Cesare said, staring down at the Duke. “You haven’t made your announcement yet.”

“My announcement?”

“The one in which you abdicate your office in favor of me.”

There was a crash, as one of the ladies in attendance seemed to faint, and fell over on her place setting. Otherwise the world waited, balanced precariously on this particular point in time.

“Father,” Cesare said, his voice marked by the sort of forced calm that sounds very dangerous, “you are an old man. And you have always been a weak man. Only weak men need to prove their strength by beating little boys in the Castel courtyard. Only weak men allow rival families to gain so much wealth and power that everyone thinks they might be a threat to the Ducal seat. Only weak men allow themselves to be so manipulated by corrupt advisors that they think there is a plot to poison their amberwine. You are an old man, and you are making mistakes.”

And now Cesare kneeled, and put his face very close to his father’s, only to find that he couldn’t hate the old man any longer. He only wished to protect his city from him.

“Abdicate to me, or consider the alternative,” Cesare said, and let the full authority of the beast carry in his voice. It wasn’t a voice that could be disobeyed.

The Duke’s neck retracted as far back into his shoulders as it could go. And then he licked his lips, and he nodded. “Perhaps it is time,” he said quietly.

Cesare jumped down from the table, pulled Lucia to him, and raised the bottle of the Duke’s Blend.

“A toast!” he shouted. “To J’Amel! To Bacchanal!” Cesare looked down at Lucia’s smiling green eyes, let himself feel the full joy of the moment, and said, “And to a wedding!”

The pride and love in her face told him all he needed to know about his future.

E
PILOGUE

The wedding procession might have actually bored Lucia, were it not for the delicately carved stone plug that Cesare ordered her to wear inside herself.

It probably should have been exciting to lead a stately, richly-adorned procession astride a magnificent white horse on a circuitous route up and down J’Amel’s broadest avenues, with what seemed like the entire citizenry lined up to get a good look at their new, future Duchess—and she was
theirs
, she was a commoner, like them—but after the first few minutes, it was, in fact, very repetitive. It’s not as though Lucia was allowed to actually interact with any of those adoring citizens. Instead, she was to sit prettily in her white and gold gown, wave until her hand ached, and smile all the while.

Cesare would have known that such passivity wasn’t in Lucia’s nature, and he wouldn’t have allowed for it, unless…

Unless he could make it part of their games.

So when Lucia was led from the bath to her new rooms, her equally new servants demurely stepped out and left her alone with a series of garments and a note from Cesare. And…the plug.

And now Lucia was bouncing gently astride an enormous white horse, feeling the plug—and Cesare’s presence—every step of the way.

Her smile was genuine.

Even more so when the procession finally turned into the Royal Plaza, where Cesare waited with his own escort, ready to receive her and formally take her back to the Castel Lupin. The crowd around Cesare was almost as noticeable for who was
not
there: the Grimaldis, absent in protest; Rickle, absent because he’d been convicted of bribery and sent to labor at a monastery in the mountains; Claudio Clavel, who had been banished, possibly to the same place as the Ramoras, his life spared at Lucia’s request; and the Duke himself, wasting away in comfort at the Lupins’ summer estate.

Lucia’s father was absent, as well, but that was because he was happily ensconced in the amberwine still that Cesare had built for him at the Castel. Crowds frightened her father, and the best way he knew to celebrate was to create something beautiful. Lucia knew he’d have a special blend for them later.

From upon the horse’s back, Lucia had an incredible view of the Plaza and the crowds, and, if she looked, her new husband, Lord Cesare Lupin. She was almost afraid to look at him, at where she knew he’d be standing, because that would be it: everything else would fall away. And she did feel, repetitive or not, that this was probably something she should try to remember. She looked for Remy, happily free on the streets, but with a comfortable bed whenever he might want it at David’s new theater, and saw that she did have a shadowy escort of street boys, always darting just out of view. She would be their Duchess, more than anyone else’s. She had plans for them: money to be spent, homes to be built, services to be offered. And she would be David’s patron, at the theater he was building with the money he’d gotten from the sale of his father’s amberwine business. Lucia had demanded that Cesare give him a good price.

All in all, this was a perfect moment, when everything, miraculously, appeared to be just right. Lucia knew it wouldn’t last; nothing did. There would be politics, and more plots, and the actual very hard work of helping to run a city. But for right now, this instant…

She looked for Cesare.

He stood, wide stanced and broad-shouldered, his fine, dark hair falling loosely to his shoulders, his scars just visible above the simple cut of his doublet, his dark eyes shining with lusty impatience. The beast was ever-present in the man.

Gods, did she love him. The familiar cord that tied them together tugged gently at her, and she licked her lips, knowing that he felt it, too.

Soon. Soon, they’d be alone.

It seemed to take her horse forever to make his stately way through the cheering crowds, and even longer for the fanfare to die out. But then it was time. Cesare came forward and slid his huge hands around her waist. For just a second he looked up at her and grinned.

And then he’d lifted her high up off the horse, as though she were weightless, and deposited her by his side, taking her hand in his and raising it to the crowd.

The roar was deafening. Lucia couldn’t help herself: she laughed, and blew kisses, winking at the delighted citizens. Cesare drew her close, and bent down to her ear.

“Impertinent,” he whispered.

Lucia only smiled. She smiled even more when the carriage drew up by their side, and Cesare held the door open for her. She noticed the curtains on the windows were pulled shut.