Page 49 of The Traitor's Curse
Tavius could be telling the truth. Benedict could be unconscious, bleeding, beaten, broken.
Or Tavius could be lying to me, only not the way I’d thought at first. My stomach coiled into a sick, horrid knot.
Benedict could be dead already.
“What the hell do you think is wrong with me, Tavius? You broke into my room and assaulted me, you claim to have Benedict hostage, and you’re threatening more violence if Iresist you! How did you get in? And I want proof that you have him and that he’s alive. Or I swear to you, I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Tavius demanded, practically bristling. “Have me arrested? Sent to the torturer and the headsman, eh?”
Flying spittle flecked my face, and his had gone red and mottled, his eyes wild.
A frigid, paralyzing shiver trickled down my spine, leaving me stiff and wary, shaken out of my anxiety and fear by sudden, undeniable certainty: Tavius might have loved me, and somewhere in him he might still love me.
But he hated me at least as much.
And he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.
“I’m not going to do anything,” I said, lowering my voice, hoping a calm, even demeanor would calm him too, like a feral animal. “You’re my cousin, Tavius. I’d never arrest you. But you have to explain this to me. What are you doing? Why—if something’s wrong, if you have some quarrel with Benedict, you only needed to—”
Tavius burst out laughing, rubbing his hands over his face, turning away and then back again as if he could hardly contain himself.
“A quarrel with Rathenas? You could say that. The same as I have with you. Except that I hate him for his own sake, and I like you fine except for who you are.” He gestured wildly up and down. “Treviso’s legitimate fucking heir,” he spat, and his face twisted with rage. “And now you’re fucking that—son of a bitch, that’s what he is. He had him wrapped around his finger. Would’ve taken the throne if Treviso had lived long enough to give it to him. And now he’s got you fooled, too. How could you, Lucian?”
For a moment, confusion almost edged out the terror blooming in me as Tavius grew wilder and wilder.
How could he possibly be angry with me for being myown father’s legitimate heir?
The same as I have with you.
Both of us possible heirs to my father’s title, at least in some people’s view.
Could Tavius possibly thinkhehad some claim that Benedict and I were both in the way of? He couldn’t, that’d be absurd. He was my maternal cousin, with no relation at all to my father’s side.
Except that he resembled my father far more than he resembled me, really. I’d seen it before. But I’d always dismissed it as a fluke of nature and of his late father’s passing similarity to mine.
“I don’t understand. You can’t—you couldn’t,” I stammered. But the idea had taken hold, gaining shape and weight, corroborating details slotting into place in my mind in inexorable sequence.
My mother’s quarrel with my aunt, the one that left them completely estranged and after which she ended her marriage to my father. Tavius’s horror at Fabian’s death—Fabian, who’d been my father’s confidential servant long before I was born, certainly during the time I’d been conceived.
And when Tavius had been conceived. Only three months before me, and both my mother and Tavius’s had been residing at court at the time. My parents had wed during my gestation, and I’d heard my aunt had missed it, going home to the country estate for some urgent matter or other.
That urgent matter could have been the need to fuck her husband in order to cover up the fact that she’d already become pregnant with the duke’s bastard.
Tavius took a step closer to me, baring his teeth in something horribly unlike a smile, eyes glittering. “I think you do understand. I think you’re beginning to, eh? Always said you loved me like a brother, Lucian. Now’s your chance to prove it.”
“Prove it,” I repeated, mouth so dry I could hardly force the words out.
“I can see by the look on your face that you know it’s true. Our father knocked up two sisters, the randy fucker. My mother and yours, and in that order, you see? Only my mother was married. Couldn’t claim me then, could he? But he regretted it. I know he did. Fabian told me so!”
Tavius took another step, too close to me, and the faint scent of him, wine and horses and some pomade he used on his hair, wafted across. My stomach churned. Home, safety—not anymore.
“FuckingRathenasfound out Fabian knew the truth,” he snarled. “He must have. And that’s why he killed him. To hide it. To clear the way for him to bend you over and violate you and cloud your mind, take the throne with you still on it. And for all I know, Rathenas killed our father, too, for the same reason. Suspected he was going to push him out and legitimize me instead.”
“No,” I whispered, and I fell back a step, praying he wouldn’t follow.
No, I didn’t and couldn’t believe it. Benedict wouldn’t have looked me in the eyes when I ran to him, shocked and terrified, and lied to me about Fabian’s death. And then discussed it with me since, puzzling over it. Or today, when we’d tried to work out what Tavius’s involvement might have been. He simply wouldn’t have. As for killing my father… murdering him, and then watching as the council and the court accused me of patricide in not-so-quiet whispers. Bringing me the rumors the morning after, sneering at me and threatening me and knowing, all along, that he’d cold-bloodedly poisoned his own stepfather.
No.
