Page 43 of The Traitor's Curse
Tavius kept his grip on me, striding quickly enough I had to trot to keep up, and the guards fell in behind us.
“…fine to eat our lunch here, but tonight we’ll be going down to the city, damme, somewhere with music and dancing and no bloody mages…”
Tavius’s voice washed over me as my mind raced in frantic circles. Benedict would arrive at my study soon expecting to find me and be furious that I’d gone off somewhere without him, Mattia would return from the chancellery and be confused, none of my work would be done, and worst of all, Tavius would pour me a glass of something strong from the sideboard decanters the moment we reached the parlor, and I’d have to refuse to drink it (because if I disobeyed Benedict and drank something he hadn’t approved twice in the same twenty-four hours, I probably ought to hope it killed me before he caught up with me), and then Tavius would explode with even more questions, and then…
“—somewhere we can have a proper revel,” Tavius was bellowing as we approached the intersection of this corridor with the one that would lead to the dining parlor.
He paused for breath, and I interjected, “I can’t drink thewhole night away, Tavius! I need some sleep, and besides—”
“We’ll sleep when we’re dead! Besides, you don’t need sleep, you can spend the night on a cock that isn’t that fucking son of a bitch’s—oh, buggering fuck, where’d you come from, eh?”
My heart skipped a beat, a shock jolting me all the way down to my toes as Benedict strode around the corner and came to a sudden halt. Tavius skidded to a stop and me with him, my feet sliding out from under me for a moment. I had to cling to his side to stay upright.
Benedict’s gaze flicked from Tavius, to me—lingering, with a hard intensity that had me trembling with the desire to run away—and then to the guards, finally settling back on Tavius. Benedict’s eyes narrowed and his jaw went tight.
He’d heard every word. Did he think that was what I wanted? To spend the night on a cock that wasn’t his?
“I came from the barracks,” he said slowly, each word deliberate, as if he were biting them off one by one, “where I command. In this palace, where I live. With Duke Lucian, whom I protect. What about you, Lord Tavius? I didn’t know you’d been invited.”
Behind me, a slight jingle and rustle suggested the guards were bracing themselves for a fight. So was I. Tavius had stiffened against my side, his arm heavier around my shoulders, and I could hear his teeth gritting—and practically hear the fizzing of his blood as it bubbled in his veins. Benedict’s hand had moved to rest on the hilt of a long, curved knife at his belt, his fingers flexing.
All at once, I lost my patience with their posturing. What did they even have to fight over, really? At twenty-eight, I had the right to choose my own bedmates, even if I chose poorly. (Very poorly.) Tavius might feel that the proprietary authority over me he’d taken on as my slightly older cousin when we werechildren still applied, but—it didn’t.
And Benedict didn’t need to protect me from my own cousin. He didn’t have the right to dictate which of my relatives I invited, or welcomed without an invitation.
He certainly didn’t have the right to be offended that I might want to take someone else to bed. Especially since I didn’t even intend to bed anyone else, tonight, anyway. And would I even be able to find a cock in the lower town that Benedict hadn’t already seen? For fuck’s sake.
No, they were simply using me as an excuse to establish which of them was the biggest man in the room, like a pair of cockerels who’d strayed into the same barnyard.
My body ached from Benedict’s use of me, my eyes ached from weeping in the middle of the night like a fool, my ears ached from Tavius’s tactless shouting, and I’d spent the morning buried in heaps of paper. No, I had no more patience left.
And unfortunately for them, while they might be taller, broader men with bigger swords and hasty tempers, I was their ruling duke. Perhaps all I had to do to reassert control was…reassert it. They could come and have a civilized lunch with me, or they could go fuck themselves, or each other, or stab one another, or whatever else they wanted to do, somewhere else very fucking far away from me.
I straightened my spine, both literally and figuratively, and shrugged off Tavius’s arm.
“Lord Benedict, if you’re here to join us for luncheon, you’re very welcome,” I said crisply, and completely insincerely, in the same tone I typically used when instructing the clerks and secretaries and solicitors who really kept the duchy running smoothly while men like Tavius and Benedict swaggered about glaring at one another.
To be fair, the duchy would have ceased to exist during the past decade without Benedict’s military talents, but thatdidn’t make his current behavior less childish. Perhaps he’d decline and save me the misery of dealing with the two of them in tandem.
“Neither the Dowager Duchess’s son nor my cousin need an invitation,” I went on. “But both of you will be eating elsewhere if you delay me on my way to my own luncheon, because I’ve been working all morning with only a single pot of coffee that went cold hours ago, and I’m famished. And Tavius, I’m not going to listen to a lot of shouting over my meal. Save your arguments for later or don’t come at all.”
Without waiting for either of them to agree or not, I set off around the corner toward the dining room, lengthening my stride and smiling sourly to myself as Benedict’s guards fell in smartly behind me and left both their commander and Tavius to follow if they chose.
Or perhaps they’d do me a favor and fall into a pit instead, damn them. Family, lovers, and lovers who were also some definition of family were all so very, very bloody overrated.
Chapter Fifteen
The parlor lay at the end of a short branching corridor, overlooking the gardens, with a broad set of doors leading out onto a terrace. My page had clearly run quickly and executed his orders with aplomb. When I entered, the drapes had already been drawn back to let in the gloomy gray daylight, a cheerful blaze had been lit in the fireplace, and several servants paused, bowed, and went back to their hasty work of laying the table for a full meal when they’d expected to be bringing a more casual lunch for two into my study.
“Beg pardon for the delay, Your Grace,” said the butler. “There’s hot punch ready by the fire, if you please to have it while you wait.”
One of the cooks was a witch, and while her powers weren’t extensive she could get things hot much more quickly than the stove could manage. Hot punch in five minutes was one of her specialties, one reason why I’d been reluctant to replace the kitchen staff. If she’d been responsible for the poisoning, I might cry. And then shrug and accept my doom, because I’d never sack her.
I took the goblet the butler handed me, warming my hands on it while both Benedict and Tavius followed me in at last, greatly to my disappointment. Their stiff postures suggested they’d probably been snarling at one another in the corridor.
Benedict made a beeline for me, frowning gaze fixed onmy wine.
“I haven’t had any yet, it’s a bit too hot,” I said, understanding what he hadn’t said. “Careful with yours, gentlemen.”
