Page 62 of The Captive's Curse
The litany didn’t comfort me anymore.
Hans’s fingers dug in harder, and he wrenched my head up. “Open your eyes and look at me, and tell me you understand,” he said.
I understood all too well, and the roiling nausea in my belly finally reached a point beyond containment.
When I opened my eyes, and opened my mouth to try to answer him, my esophagus convulsed and I threw up everything in my stomach: a few sips of water and the remnants of that goblet of wine I’d drunk to settle my nerves before I met Enzo, a small, sour gush that soaked his wrist and spattered his sleeve.
He recoiled, cursing, and let me go—and then slapped me hard across the face, a stinging blow that knocked me back against the pillar again.
“Take him away,” Hans said. The guard. He’d stood there that whole time, the fucking prick, without batting an eyelash. How could anyone serve a man like this? “Lock him up and keep your distance. However disgusting he looks right now, he’s a dawn mage, and they can do things to a man’s mind.”
“Yes, my lord,” the guard said, and then to me, “Come on, then. Let’s go.”
I wiped my dripping chin with my own sleeve, simply not caring anymore how disgusting I might be, and let him lead me away. My face throbbed. Enzo was going to die.
For me, for me, for me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
In a horrid bit of irony, Hans’s guard chose to lock me into the same room Enzo had put me in when he first brought me to the castle. The onions, however, were no longer there.
When Enzo had put me in this room, he hadn’t locked it—and the onions had been my greatest concern. I dropped down on the bed, covered my face with my hands, and allowed myself to give in to my misery, bitterly regretting every unkind word I’d ever spoken to him, every opportunity I’d missed to kiss him, or smile at him, or tell him how much I…
A sob burst out of me, and then another. I couldn’t even think that without completely losing it.
…How much I didn’t actually despise or dislike him, no matter how often I’d called him names.
Better.
If he’d been there, safe and sound in my arms, I might have reminded him that if he’d never kidnapped me, he never would’ve been in a position to be captured by Hans, and that it was all his own fault.
But I knew it was mine.
At last my tears subsided, and I sucked in a deep, shuddering breath all the way down to the bottom of my lungs.
And as I calmed, and my mind drifted, the epiphany I’d almost had while Hans tried his best to choke and concuss me finally coalesced.
The rings. Hans’s claims of rightful inheritance.Vincenzo died without a legitimate heir.
Except that everything else I’d heard since coming to this castle contradicted that assertion. That extraordinarily self-serving assertion.
Because if there was a legitimate heir, his claim evaporated.
Two branches of a family: one stemming from Vincenzo’s sister, who’d obviously been safely married and long gone from here before the curse, having children of her own and passing down the story of how her brother had been deceived and murdered by an evil, low-born witch.
And then the witch herself, the Mad Lord’s wife: What had happened to her? Well, from what I had ascertained, she’d declined to abort her baby—who’d been conceived, according to the spectral Mad Lord’s own ravings, very much within the bonds of wedlock.
She’d given birth to a legitimate heir while the Mad Lord raved and died. What had she told that child, and what had he or she told further descendants? That their grandmother, great-grandmother, and so on, had cursed their forebear, and that someday one of them could return and claim his castle and lands? Quite possibly.
And passed down along with this legend of their line’s origin…two rings. The witch’s wedding ring, and the Mad Lord’s signet, possibly given to her as a love token before he betrayed and repudiated her.
A dozen tiny hints I hadn’t understood at the time cascaded through my mind: Enzo’s horror at the way I’d compared him to the Mad Lord, the way the ghost seemed to obey—or fear—Enzo alone. Even his fucking name, which had clearly been passed down too.
Gods, I’d been so blind.
If I’d only thought of Enzo’s possession of the castle as a clue, rather than as another mystery to solve, would I have reached the correct conclusions sooner?
Because the curse had clearly affected the castle as well as Vincenzo. Hans and I had, it seemed, both been considering possible reasons for Enzo’s ability to find it. By chance? By some other magic?
