Page 60 of The Traitor's Curse
My shirt could go on inside out, and I’d carry my tunic and shoes. It wasn’t like any guards who might look down the corridor wouldn’t know what Benedict and I had been doing, but the thought of sauntering between our rooms completely in the nude made me shudder with embarrassment. A duke had to have some standards, even if he’d just climbed off of his stepbrother’s cock after learning he’d murdered his father.
Benedict sighed heavily, but he didn’t argue.
As I went through the doorway to the sitting room, he said, “Lucian.”
I turned and looked over my shoulder to find him gazing at me with such intensity in his silvery eyes that it had me breathless. He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Shook his head, expression shuttering.
“I’ll clean up too and meet you in your rooms in a few minutes,” he said at last. “And if you send for something to eat, I’ll intercept it and make sure it’s safe. Although I don’t know if poison is such a risk now that we’re fairly sure that wine was meant for Fabian.”
That wasn’t at all what he’d intended to say, I had no doubt.
But I simply nodded and left, too close to a complete loss of control to trust my voice.
When I shut the door of my own bedroom behind me, I leaned back against it and slid down to the floor, resting my forehead on my knees.
The quiet rang in my ears.
Five minutes. I could give myself that long to be a man rather than a duke.
I let myself weep until I knew I didn’t have time for more, and then wearily rose and made my way to the bath.
Chapter Twenty
The very thought of food made me gag, and so I simply bathed as quickly as possible, dressed in a simple black tunic and trousers, and added a heavy silver chain that bore the falcon emblem of my house. Hopefully its austere ducal authority would be a good distraction from my puffy eyelids and pale cheeks.
While I went through all the little motions of becoming presentable, every moment I’d spent with Tavius as a child crowded into my mind in unstoppable succession: his red-faced, doubled-over laughter when the string of my bow had snapped me on the nose, and his proprietary pride when it turned out that arrow had struck the very center of the target despite that. He’d been the one to explain to me, awkwardly but thoroughly, what it meant that I didn’t have the same interest in girls that he did. And he’d roared with more laughter when I described my first even more awkward encounter with another lad. That had been a few months after I’d done the deed, when Tavius and I were both seventeen.
He’d laughed until I blushed and threw things at him, and then he’d patted me on the shoulder and told me he had no doubt I’d left the fellow lovesick, and that I’d have better luck next time. There had also been his ten-minute tangent telling me how well he’d fucked the woman he’d lain with first, but he’d had me laughing with him, anyway.
And then he’d decided that getting his due in the eyes ofthe world mattered more than any of it. Taking what he should have had from our father, who hadn’t loved or trusted him enough to tell him the truth, meant everything to him. Enjoying what he already had with a brother who’d loved and trusted him all his life meant nothing.
The suffocating weight of my loss and his betrayal rested so heavily on my chest I could hardly breathe.
And then it occurred to me with startling, terrifying force that Tavius might also have lied about the potion’s ultimate effects, and that it might be killing Benedict after all. He should have been here by now. He always managed to be ready long before me through some combination of clever magic and a soldier’s efficiency.
I burst out of my rooms, wild-eyed and almost frantic—and I found him in the corridor, leaning against the wall with his thumbs hooked in his sword belt, in a posture that suggested he’d been there for a while.
He looked up from his frowning contemplation of the floor as I stopped abruptly and blew out a long, shaky breath of relief.
Aside from his own slight pallor, no one would’ve known what he’d endured this evening. His plain black doublet and trousers and his soldier’s cloak were all perfectly neat, and he’d replaced the sword I’d made him leave behind in the gatehouse earlier.
The one he’d stuck through Tavius’s guts. Probably the same one he’d been wearing when he killed my father.
No wonder he didn’t think he’d be welcome in my bedroom and had chosen to wait in the hall.
But his distance hurt nearly as much as everything else. The effort of remaining upright and lordly might prove too much for my fortitude, and who else did I have to support me?
He’d killed two of my closest relatives. I had to rememberthat, and I certainly shouldn’t forgive it. That would be wrong, wouldn’t it?
Even though he’d done it to save my life, at least in part. Hadn’t he?To keep himself off the throne at any cost, whispered the part of my mind that had been trained for years to suspect everyone in general and Benedict in particular.
His broad chest still looked like the precise place to nestle into as I suffered another bout of tears.
Benedict’s eyes met mine. The sympathy and grief and unhappiness in their gray depths didn’t help in the slightest with my effort to be practical and efficient.
“We’ll speak to Clothurn first and get it over with,” I said, in lieu of attempting to express the impossible. “Venet can question the others for now. Hopefully we can get it over with quickly, at least for tonight. I could sleep for a week.”
I began to walk down the corridor, and Benedict fell into step beside me. How did he do that, with those incredibly long legs? He must’ve been modifying his stride for me every single time we walked together.
