Page 44 of The Traitor's Curse
Benedict nodded jerkily, eyes softening in relief despite the tension in every line of his big body. He approached, standing so close to me that I had to tip my head up to meet his gaze. Despite my irritation, his nearness warmed me more than the fire.
“Don’t trust him, there’s something off about him,” he said softly, leaning down a little, almost as if he meant to kiss me. Don’ttrusthim? How dare he! The air between us thickened and stretched, every part of me close to Benedict quivering with the need for his touch, like a flower straining to the sun—and gods, how could I react like this to him, even when he angered me the most? “I know you didn’t want me here, but I’m not leaving you alone with him. I don’t care if it annoys you.”
He reached up and quickly wrapped his hand around the goblet, out of sight of the rest of the room, flicking the surface of the liquid with the tip of his finger. And then he nodded and stepped away to the sideboard, ladling out a cup and saying something to one of the servants about the proper proportion of brandy in a wine punch, his tone easy and smooth, as unconcerned and casual as if he wasn’t considering cutting my cousin’s throat at the lunch table.
“…as long as the beef’s really hot,” Tavius was saying, and I could hear the rattle of a serving cart in the hallway, probably carrying our first course. Thank Ennolu, and the kitchen staff—even the ones who’d colluded to try to poison me. If they were efficient enough today that I could get this over with quickly, I might forgive them anything, even treason.
Benedict turned from the sideboard and held out the goblet he’d filled. “Have some punch, Lord Tavius,” he said, inmuch the same tone he’d have used to say, “Go bugger yourself and die.”
“Have it yourself,” Tavius snapped. “I don’t need you to play host, you fucking usurping parasite. I’ll pour my own.”
A fraught silence fell, Tavius glaring at Benedict, teeth bared, as if daring him to respond in kind, Benedict frozen in place with the goblet held out.
And then Benedict half-smiled, shrugged, and stepped aside with the air of a man washing his hands of a situation in which he’d done his best. He took a drink. Tavius edged around him, bristling like an angry cat, and filled his own goblet. Benedict smiled slightly and sat in the nearest chair to me, stretching his feet out toward the fire.
Oh, for…I reviewed the last few moments in my mind. Benedict had poured a glass, checked it for poison, and tried to give it to Tavius, but had not, as far as I had noticed, checked the punch bowl itself.
I opened my mouth, trying to think of what I could say, but Tavius had already knocked back half of his goblet and begun to refill it.
Too late.
My raised-eyebrow stare bounced right off the side of Benedict’s stupid smug face.
Not that I could really blame him for not trying particularly hard, after Tavius’s blatant insult…but would he simply sit there getting drunk and shrugging while Tavius dropped dead, if it came to that?
Almost certainly he would, damn him.
Tavius took up a position beside me with his back to the fire, sipping at his second glass of hopefully non-lethal punch. In the momentary lull of hostilities, I dared to take a drink of my own wine at last, letting the heat of it soothe my chest and the bite of the brandy begin to sand down some of the jagged edgesof my mood. Would I survive Tavius’s visit, dealing with both of them?
Wouldtheysurvive? Even if they didn’t fight a duel or allow the other to be murdered by a third party, I might lose my own temper and stab them both in the neck.
“Where’s Fabian?” Tavius said, and I glanced up at him sharply, startled out of my sour contemplation of the hearth rug. “Shouldn’t he be here somewhere serving you? Don’t tell me Rathenas ran him off. Are you driving away anyone who might talk some sense into him, eh? Anyone close to him? You’ll regret it if you try it on me.”
Oh, by all that was holy, he simply wouldn’t let up, would he?
But his dogged insistence on being as unpleasant as possible didn’t disturb me nearly as much as the horrible shiver that the sound of my dead valet’s name sent through me, his pain-twisted, rapidly cooling corpse flashing before my eyes.
Hang on a moment. The sound of his name…why in the world would Tavius even know his name, or remember it if he’d ever heard it in the first place? He didn’t give a damn about the names or doings of any of his servants or anyone he considered beneath him, as evidenced by his carrying on about Benedict in front of the guards and pages in the hallway a few minutes ago.
“He would be attending on me,” I replied, keeping my voice even with an effort. “But he’s dead, I’m sorry to say.”
Tavius jolted and then went as still as death himself, staring at me with his blue eyes bugging out. The pink washed out of his cheeks as if someone had taken a sponge to him. “Dead? He’s—dead?How the fuck did he die, then? Why the fuck didn’t he tell—who killed—was he killed?”
All the hair rose on the back of my neck, and Benedict leaned forward slightly, eyes fixed on Tavius, his entire demeanor that of a hunting hound on the scent.
Who killed him. No one knew he’d been murdered but me and Benedict—and presumably whoever had planned the murder in the first place. Tavius couldn’t have, he couldn’t. The room seemed to spin around me, my head going too light, I couldn’t answer him, I couldn’t—
“He fell and hit his head,” Benedict put in, and thank the gods for that. I didn’t think I could have spoken without screaming. “It was a terrible thing. Why’d you think someone killed him?”
Tavius’s open-mouthed hesitation lasted a moment too long.
Don’t trust him, there’s something off about him.
“Why do I—I don’t!” Tavius closed his mouth, opened it again, and then raised his goblet in a motion so jerky the punch sloshed and dripped onto the floor, tipping his head back and draining it. He lowered the cup, his hand so tight around it his knuckles had gone white. His face matched, still chalky under his tan, with deep grooves around his mouth. “It’s a shock, that’s all. Someone’s dead. I need to—Lucian, you’ll have to excuse me,” he went on, and he was clearly trying to sound like himself. But failing, badly. He spoke so rapidly his words almost slurred together. “I’m not as hungry as I thought. Tired, that’s what I am. Have one of these fellows take me to my room to wash up a bit, eh?”
As a cousin and a friend, I wanted nothing more than to put my hand on Tavius’s arm. Ask him what the hell was wrong, shake an explanation out of him if I had to, and offer my help—because surely he’d accept it. He cared for me. Whatever this mystery, he’d never hurt me.
As a duke and a born-and-bred courtier and a man who’d found his valet’s murdered body on his bedroom rug, I damn well knew better. What had happened to his determination to separate me from Benedict? None of his behavior made theslightest bit of sense.
