Page 9 of The Traitor's Curse
I could keep you locked up in your bedchamber day and night, waiting to service my curse. Do you think anyone would fucking stop me? You and your army, perhaps?
My shiver that time had nothing at all to do with the draft. No, if Benedict meant to take the throne eventually, he had more plans for me than a quick, if painful, death.
He might hate me enough to make me wait and wonder what his move would be. But he was also the only person I could be fairly certain hadn’t made this attempt on my life—and also the only person with enough power, influence, and strength to prop up my wobbling throne. The next assassin would succeed, unless someone more diligent than my overpaid guards and servants—or guards and servants made diligent by orders from a man they actually respected and feared—protected me.
Once again, I had no choice.
With one last glance at Fabian and one last shudder, Idrew my dressing gown more tightly around me and arranged its folds of heavy black cotton-lined silk. I could at least look composed when I knocked on Benedict’s door, and no one would see me dressed so informally on the way there. Both suites were in the private ducal quarters.
Oh, gods, he might not be there. Clothurn. He’d meant to have a rendezvous with Clothurn. If he’d already gone…
Feeling as if all the assassins in the world nipped at my heels, I prayed to the gods as I’d rarely prayed before, slipping out of my rooms, shutting the door behind me, and making my way down the dim, paneled corridor and around the corner as silently as any ghost. Only a few small alchemical lights occupied tiny wrought-iron sconces along the top of the wall. Silence reigned. The dowager duchess had left a month before to make an extended visit to her sister’s estate in the south of Calatria, where the winter weather would be milder, and all of her servants and ladies had gone with her.
At the end of the passage lay Benedict’s door, looming at me like the gate to hell.
I raised my hand, meaning to tap softly and then try the door if he didn’t open for me.
I jumped a foot in the air as the door wrenched open before I could touch it, Benedict standing framed in the doorway, bare-chested and bare-footed, wearing only half-buttoned trousers and a ferocious scowl and with all of his muscles and scars on full, intimidating display.
Hell might have been the safer choice after all.
Chapter Four
Benedict raked me up and down with a scathing gaze, the power of his magic seeming to flicker in the depths of his silvery gray eyes.
“What the fuck do you want?” he said, the curl of his lip suggesting he hadn’t found much to enjoy in his full-body survey. I resisted the urge to tug the lapels of my dressing gown together like a maiden aunt.
Not a vinegary, prudish prune quite yet, thank you.
“Let me in,” I said, and my voice came out raspier and breathier than I’d hoped.
Damn it. I should’ve tested a few words out loud before I left my rooms, except that speaking to no one but Fabian’s body would have had me screaming and running away after all.
Benedict stared at me for a long moment, massive shoulders tensed up like boulders, jaw clenched tight. He’d started out his life as pale as I was—or so I assumed, given his mother’s complexion and a portrait I’d once seen of his father. But that soldier’s tan he’d had as long as I’d known him had only deepened during his unexplained absence and his long summer of fighting in the northern hills. The livid slashes and blotches of the scars he’d accumulated over the decades stood out as starkly as fresh wounds would have.
Like badges of honor. Mute declarations, to anyone who valued brute force over sleepless dedication and endless thought and study, of his greater fitness for the throne.
Benedict huffed, sneered, and stood back to let me in.
For the first time in my life, I stepped into his suite. The door from the hallway opened into a sitting room, which looked precisely as I’d have expected if I’d ever deigned to consider the matter: bare walls, several large and shabby leather armchairs, and racks of weapons, plus a bookcase that I’d have been willing to bet contained little beyond treatises on magic and dry, tactical accounts of historical battles.
Fewer lounging, scantily-clad whores than I’d have thought, though. In fact, none. Although that doorway to my left presumably led to a bedchamber, and someone could be…
“Are you alone? Don’t lie to me, Benedict. I need discretion more than you do right now.”
Benedict raised an eyebrow to echo the scornful curve of his mouth. “As if I’d let you in if I had any excuse to bar the door and tell you to go jump off the battlements. We’re alone. My appointment’s in half an hour. Make it quick, I still need to dress.”
Gods, he did, because Clothurn would probably swallow his tongue if Benedict showed up like this, all ruby earring and brawny arms and honed, rippling stomach, looking like someone’s fevered conjuration of a lusty pirate.
Certainly Benedict’s dishabille had me in a state of distraction and discomfort. How did one go about telling one’s half-naked and much-despised stepbrother that a murder scene needed staging, and he was the lucky accomplice?
Benedict had taken up a position in the middle of the room, staring at me down that big nose with his arms crossed. Oh, he knew how he looked when he did that, the theatrical son of a bitch.
Fine. I could make him uncomfortable too.
“Fabian collapsed stone-dead a few minutes ago after drinking some of my evening wine,” I said. Benedict wentutterly still, frozen mid-scoff—he’d started before I really began speaking in order to get a head start, I supposed. Oh, that was satisfying, even though saying it out loud had my heart pounding and my knees a bit shaky. “There’s blood coming out of his mouth,” I went on, wanting to horrify Benedict as thoroughly as I could. He deserved nightmares like mine. “All frothy and mixed with—”
Bile, I’d meant to say. Except that I choked on the word and on my own refluxing acids, and my scalp tingled, and that shakiness had become more of an inability to support my weight.
