“By the Devil, you can’t truly believe?—”
“I don’t have to believe. Isaw. You.”
He stepped toward her, grabbing her arm. “Do you have any idea what I’ve done for you?” His voice raw, his face, terrible, was close to hers. She smelled blood on his breath, she smelled depravity and sweat and other darkness. And yet…she was aware ofhim.
“Yes, I have. You’ve completely destroyed me. Something even my brother wasn’t able to do, in decades.” She jerked her arm from his fingers with a sharp movement, turning away, starting back down the corridor. “Get away from me.” Her voice threatened to break, but she wouldn’t allow it.
He’d said she was strong. Oh, he had no idea how strong she was. Her hand closed over a door knob and she turned it, not caring where it led.
“By the Fates, Narcise?—”
“Go.” She stumbled through the door, closing it behind her. And bolted it against him.
* * *
He didn’t remember leavingCezar’s subterranean residence after those nights of hell.
In retrospect, a decade later, Giordan wondered that the man even allowed him to do so—but then, of course, by that time, Cezar had gotten what he wanted.
At least, for the moment.
With Narcise’s hate-filled, witch-like visage burning in his memory, her acid words screaming in his mind, Giordan found himself raging blindly through the streets. Violence pounded through him, his abused body weak and overused, his hands, his very skin a reeking reminder of the hours and days past.
He had no real memory of where he went and what he did once out of Cezar’s place: it was dark, and his world became a hot, red rampage, filled with the taste and scent of blood, the heat and suppleness of living flesh, the rhythmic pulsing against his body, the slap and thud of flesh against flesh. There might have been screams, shouts, cries, moans and groans. There were certainly deaths and injuries.
Giordan’s vision burned with red shadow. It was as if coals had been shoved beneath his lids and seared into his irises, coloring his sight.
He supposed he went mad.
Do you have any idea what I’ve done for you?His own hoarse words rolled in his brain, over and over, desperate and angry even as he sought relief.
He woke some time, some hours, perhaps days, later in one of Paris’s narrow alleys. Tucked back in a corner. Alone.
That moment was clear in his mind even today, a decade after: that moment of re-emergence, of clawing up from the depths of a heavy, dark sea. As if he’d dragged himself awake from the worst of nightmares.
But it had been no nightmare, those three nights of hell. And what he’d thought of as the light at the end of the tunnel, as the prize for his endurance and existence through hours of torture, turned only into the slap of betrayal.
Narcise. May you burn in Hell.
Giordan rubbed gritty eyes with trembling fingers that smelled of blood and semen and opium and filth. He saw that the alley was hardly wide enough for him to extend his legs, but so long that he could see only that it angled into nothingness.
The walls on either side of him loomed tall and windowless, like dark sentinels. The brick was cold against his bare back, chill and rough with dirt, sticky with unidentifiable substances. Even springy with a bit of moss. The ground below, uneven with cobbles and filtered with a random tuft of grass, seeped damply into his breeches.
All at once, Giordan became aware of the sun. It emerged from a heavy cloud as if a curtain had been drawn away. The golden light spilled into the alley next to him and would soon filter over the spot where he lay.
At first, he didn’t have even the energy to pull to his feet. Nor the desire.
His mind was stark and empty, devoid of thought, even emotion. Just…empty.
Finished.
She’d finished him.
But then, as the base need for self-preservation stirred with the shift of the sun, Giordan prepared to heave himself upright.
At that moment, he saw the cat.
She sat there, pale and blond against the shades of indigo and violet and gray that filled the alley. Her blue-gray eyes were fixed on him in that way of her race, unblinking and steady.
