Page 13 of The Captive's Curse
Chapter Five
Staring harder at the letter I clutched in my white-knuckled fingers made no difference to its contents. I read it a third time. Still the same, albeit slightly blurrier. Blinking quickly only made my cheeks wet.
I’d known Bruno didn’t always like me.
But it’d never occurred to me that he might not even love me.
“This must be some kind of joke,” I stammered. “It can’t—he must be sending the ransom separately. Or—are you sure it’s not in that chest after all?”
You can keep him, Bruno had written. And it was most certainly his handwriting.I’m not going to pay a penny for him. His behavior has been such as to make him most unwelcome at Montefime, and I might not allow him back through the gates even ifyoupaidme. I’d rather you didn’t hang him, because he is my blood, and if you do I suppose I’ll have to take vengeance at some point. But no threats in that direction will extort any silver from my coffers, so don’t waste your time.
“Nah, I don’t think so,” the messenger put in, and then let out a most unseemly cackle of laughter. I looked up to find him grinning, Enzo frowning, and Leander, who’d joined us in this small chamber off the main courtyard, raising his eyebrows and biting his lip as if to suppress laughter of his own. “That has some of your things in it, but no money. And besides, Lord Montefime was awful definite, and he said a lot more than hewrote down. ‘Tell that master of yours to keep my brother off his knees and away from other people’s husbands,’ he said, and then he went on a bit about how Lord Cyril here didn’t care how many—”
To my great relief, Enzo said, “That’s enough,” his voice low and hard, cracking like a whip.
The messenger stammered something incoherent, his face going pale. He shot me a nervous glance, as if he’d only that moment realized that a man whose family thought he was a worthless slut and didn’t much care if he lived or died might not want to hear every single word of his brother’s insults.
“Good work bringing the message so quickly in this weather,” Enzo went on, more gently. “Go get something to eat.”
The fellow nodded and fled, leaving fraught awkwardness in his wake. The little room had a single unglazed window looking out on the courtyard, no fireplace, and an empty bracket where a torch had been removed. To top it off, rain had begun pattering down again as we opened Bruno’s letter, and a gloom matching my feelings had descended on us.
Thank goodness, because perhaps Enzo and Leander wouldn’t see the tears clinging to my eyelashes.
“Don’t be so downcast, Lord Cyril,” Leander said, his tone distinctly pitying. Damn it. “Your brother’s clearly a prick. And it’s not as if we’ll keep you prisoner, anyway. If you can’t pay, then—”
“Leander,” Enzo said, and shook his head.
What the hell did that warning tone mean? For the first time since I’d woken up here, I felt a genuine twinge of fear. He wouldn’t really hang me.
Would he?
“Enzo, come on. What kind of man leaves his little brother to be hanged or held in a dungeon?” Oh, gods, he would. I fell back a step, Bruno’s letter crumpling in my sweatyhand. “Not that I’m not interested to hear more about whoever’s husband,” Leander added, with a sly grin in my direction. “But you know, if I fucked someone’s husband, you’d still ransom me, wouldn’t you?”
So LeanderwasEnzo’s brother! They weren’t lovers. Not that it mattered, of course.
Especially not when my own brother was refusing to rescue me from bandits and slandering me the while!
“He’s not anyone’s husband and we didn’t actually fuck,” I said, too loudly. Suddenly, two almost identical sets of shrewd dark eyes were fixed on my face. Enzo raised a skeptical eyebrow. “He’s not,” I protested, knowing I was only making myself sound more guilty. “He’s my not-distant-enough cousin’s fiancé.” Who’d made hanging Enzo his life’s ambition. Hopefully they wouldn’t know the Lord Constable was the fiancé in question. Moving on, quickly. “It was a masquerade ball, and he’d switched costumes with someone since I saw him earlier in the evening, and—I didn’t know until he took off his domino. Which he only did at the moment he’d—”
Under their twin judgmental stares, the wordsjust come in my mouthstuck, ironically, in my throat.
“It’s not my fault,” I said desperately. “Rivina’s a bitch who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word misunderstanding, and Bruno’s only taking her side because he’s sweet on her himself, but she has no idea because he’s never gotten up the nerve to tell her. Wouldn’t you think he’d be grateful I’d possibly ended her betrothal? But no. He’s too stupid. And my mother, um.” My forehead and cheeks got all heavy and thick, my eyes stinging. I’d have a headache from holding the tears in at this rate. “She says we have to defer to Bruno because he’s the rightful lord, and a rightful lord is always right in his own castle. Even though he’swrongand alsoan intolerable piece of excrement,” I spat, and subsided at last, chest heaving.
Enzo and Leander turned to each other, exchanging a long look. Leander grinned and reached up to tap the side of his nose. Enzo sighed, shook his head, and rubbed at his temples, his expression resigned.
I gaped at them. Were they…they were. They were trying to decide who had to deal with their crazed, weepy, unwanted, unransomed slut of a captive.
Or possibly who had to be the one to tell me they were going to hang me. Oh, gods. They’d treated me humanely, if you didn’t count the onions, because they thought I was worth money. And now…
“Stop breathing like that, you’re going to faint,” Enzo said. “Look at me. Lord Cyril!”
The shock of him using my actual name, combined with the sudden, heavy weight of his hands on my shoulders, snapped me out of the dim tunnel of terror that had started to stretch in front of me.
He leaned down, peering into my face. “Are you with me? Good. Don’t pass out again. Riding into the castle with you draped across my lap got me enough jeers and catcalls from my men. If I have to carry you to your bedroom a second time, they’ll start asking when the wedding is. And no one wants that. Right?”
For a moment, I couldn’t think about anything except the fact that I’d been wrong: he hadn’t tied me over Agnethe’s back after all, letting me slip and slide about, dangling over the abyss that marked the edge of the road. He’d held me in his arms. Or…draped me across his lap, possibly hanging down after all, with my ass inelegantly in the air.
“Was I face up in your lap or face down?” I demanded. “If I was face down, then everyone saw my ass sticking up! It probably looked huge. Were you staring at it?”
