Page 7 of The Traitor's Curse
Anyway, the rain had given way to a wild, gusty gale that rattled all the windows and whistled through cracks in their frames to flutter the wall hangings and the curtains around my bed. It gave me the perfect excuse to be conveniently deaf. As long as he didn’t use some kind of fish oil in my bath I could ignore him.
Fabian oozed back out of the bath chamber and muttered something else about fetching me mulled wine, and I waved him off, shutting myself into my steamy, citrus-scented cocoon. My intense dislike of Fabian softened slightly as I lowered myselfinto the bath. The hot water came up to my chin, and he seemed to have used a pleasant mix of grapefruit, lemon, and orange blossom oils that completely eradicated any (probably imaginary) stench of fish.
Heat soaked into my tired bones. I leaned my head back on the edge of the tub.
Ah, bliss. I closed my eyes, letting the roar of the wind wash through my senses, a calming erasure of everything else in the world. Even the tickle of a cold draft on my face made a lovely counterpoint to the steam billowing around me.
The wind howled, a thud and muffled crash echoed from my bedchamber, and someone cried out, trailing into a low groan.
My eyes popped open. The variegated blues of the tiled wall across from me wavered in the steam.
Silence.
The wind wailed again, then subsided.
More silence.
My limbs had gone as stiff as boards, all the tension the bath had begun to melt away returning in redoubled force.
“Fabian?” I called out. Not loudly enough, though. He couldn’t possibly have heard me.
The hair had risen on the back of my neck, the air pressing in on me. If I called out to him again, another non-response might stretch my nerves to the breaking point.
I heaved myself out of my bath, wrapped myself in a soft dressing gown hanging on a hook without bothering with a towel first, braced myself, and opened the door to the bedchamber.
Somewhat to my surprise, no one shoved a knife into my chest.
In fact, nothing happened at all. There was no one.
I slumped against the doorframe, all the air whooshing out of my lungs at once. Gods, I’d heard Fabian…stubbing histoe on the door and breaking a glass in the corridor. And my paranoia had…
My gaze snagged on something sticking out from behind my bed.
Fabian’s practical black shoes, and a hint of stockinged ankle.
Rounding the bed brought the rest of Fabian into sight. I leaned a suddenly clammy hand on the bedpost and fought the urge to retch. He lay sprawled out, a tray by his outstretched hand and a spilled cup of mulled wine staining the cream and blue carpet beneath him a muddy pink. The scents of cloves and orange peel and spirits mingled horribly with the coppery reek of the bloody froth seeping from his mouth and trickling down along his cheek.
Fixed, glazed eyes. Not the faintest sign of life.
That groan I’d heard had been the last sound Fabian would ever make.
No matter how much I’d always disliked him, if I’d thought there could be the slightest chance of resuscitating him I’d have dropped to my knees and given it my best effort, shouted for my guards stationed day and night at the end of the corridor that housed the ducal family’s apartments.
But Fabian was dead. Unmistakably, completely dead, and his symptoms looked so much like my father’s…
I did retch then, hooking my elbow around the bedpost and aiming away from Fabian’s body as best I could. The meager supper I’d gotten down while my secretary organized the fish decrees rose up burning in my esophagus and spattered to the floor.
After I’d choked, coughed, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I blinked the moisture from my eyes and forced myself to look at him again. He deserved that much from me, anyway, since I had no doubt whatsoever he’d died in my place.At least I hadn’t thrown up on his corpse.
In my place. I could’ve been right there on the floor…gods.
Several thoughts surfaced as I stared down at his body, coming in no logical succession, whirling through the frozen rictus scream that rang inside my mind.
One: Fabian had twisted into a strange shape, as if his last moments had been agonizingly painful. My spine shuddered with horror, both for him and for myself. In my place. Fuck.
Two: Fabian hadn’t been the one to poison the wine, because obviously he wouldn’t have drunk it—he’d handed off the job of preparing it to someone he trusted, wrongly, as it turned out, rather than following my strict instructions to do it himself. I’d overstaffed the kitchens so that there would always be several pairs of eyes on anything I consumed, with my hope being that at least one of them would be loyal. Which meant that I’d be looking for a conspiracy, with at least one of the perpetrators being someone Fabian knew well. Wonderful.
Three: The little bastard had probably been taking a sip of my very fine wine on the sly, and possibly—or even more probably—as a prelude to spitting in it. If all the wine I’d drunk on all the other evenings Fabian had served me hadn’t been long pissed away, I’d have thrown it up again. My regret over his death receded measurably. It occurred to me that he wouldn’t have drunk it at all if he hadn’t believed I’d been the one to murder my father, and that therefore my wine would probably be safe enough from the same poison. My regret faded completely.
