Page 59 of The Captive's Curse
We rode out of Montefime that way, with all of Hans’s men in a column behind us and me sitting up stiff as a board—in all the bad ways, none of the good—and clinging to the pommel of his saddle so as not to lean back against him even slightly.
Enzo rode to our left, his hands bound behind him and a hobble connecting his ankles under his horse’s belly, with one of Hans’s men leading it by the reins.
I prayed that he wasn’t looking at me, because I’d never been so humiliated in my life. Having Hans’s thighs to either side of mine, his groin snugged up to my ass, with the jouncing, rocking motion of the horse…well, I hadn’t thrown up yet—but it gave me another good reason, besides Hans’s threats, to keep my mouth shut. I was on the verge of it every moment, so queasy and trembly and miserable that I wished I’d simply pass out.
“Tell me where it is,” Hans demanded abruptly as we reached the first fork in the road. “Time to keep your word.”
I dared to glance over at Enzo. He didn’t show any signs of throwing up or passing out, but if he grew any more rigid with tension, he’d break in half. The air around him practically shimmered.
“Bear to the left,” Enzo said tersely.
A faint grinding sound reached me. Hans’s teeth, I thought.
“Not good enough,” he said, this time with impatience that almost verged on hysteria. The hand clutching the reins and resting on my right thigh had white knuckles and tendons standing out like mountain ridges. “What’s your secret? What’s your secret, eh? You know, we could stop for a rest. Maybe it’d loosen your tongue if I put Cyril on his knees while you watch.”
I’d bite it off and spit it in your face.
I snapped my mouth shut an instant before the words tumbled out. He’d mutilate Enzo, torture him, if I didn’t hold my tongue.
As if he knew what I’d been thinking, Hans’s fingers dug in painfully where his left hand rested on my waist, and I couldn’t help a small cry, choked back as quickly as I could. Fuck. If Enzo thought Hans was hurting me…
But, “Go ahead,” Enzo said, sounding only a little bit strained, and that could easily be because of the circumstances in general. “He’s a casual fuck. No man with honor would allow an innocent bystander to be killed on his behalf, and that’s why I’m here at all. But I don’t care whose cock he sucks, and it’s not like he hasn’t already sucked yours, anyway.”
“Horseshit,” Hans said flatly. “You care.”
He didn’t sound entirely confident, though, and another sidelong glance showed me an Enzo apparently unmoved by the idea of Hans using me. And no one should be graceful enough to shrug such broad shoulders with such insouciance with his hands bound behind his back.
Doubt crept in, itchy and unsettling beneath my skin. Could he really just be too honorable and decent a man to let me die for him? It didn’t need to be more than that.
“Waste all of our time fucking his mouth if you want. I’m not the one in any hurry to get there,” Enzo replied, his tone unnaturally even.
I knew that tone.
Gods. Wewouldget out of this, and when we did…even if I forbore turning Hans into a charred and misshapen haunch of goat meat, the things Enzo would do to him made my blood run cold. Hanging him by his toes from the battlements wouldn’t be hyperbole so much as the overture to a symphony.
Perhaps the charred goat meat could be part of the final movement.
Hans pulled back on the reins nearly imperceptibly, and for one horrible moment I thought he might call Enzo’s bluff.
But no. A moment later he dug in his heels and we were speeding up again. He was the one bluffing, as I’d suspected. He might actually slit my throat, but he’d never use my body in front of so many witnesses. He’d probably get away with either, given his position as the queen’s Lord Constable, but the first one might endear him to his estranged fiancée, while the other would ruin any future chances he might have with her.
We rode on in silence without any further open hostilities.
But the tension didn’t lessen. If anything, it continued to build, Hans’s presence behind me more and more disturbing in its seething aura of anger.
I couldn’t stop thinking about his reaction to the rings. From the very beginning of my knowing him, whenever Hans had expressed himself unguardedly, he’d been more focused on the castle itself than on ending Enzo’s reign of not-really-terror over the mountain pass and the merchant caravans that traversed it. The castle and its legends certainly interestedmemuch more than the profits of a passel of poxy Calatrian tradesmen, but that was one of many damn good reasons why no one had ever appointed me a Lord Constable. Shouldn’t the queen’s lawman take more of an interest in trade relations and in ending criminal activity than in solving the mystery of the Mad Lord’s curse?
And yet Hans had asked Enzo precisely no questions at all about the strength of his band, or the best way to surprise and capture them, or about any loot they might have stolen. Instead, he seemed to care about nothing but finding the castle itself, even if it was empty when we got there.
And I prayed that it would be, that one of Enzo’s scouts would give them advance warning. Certainly all these dampwoods and boulder-strewn ravines could hold at least one. I’d been trying to push away thoughts of what would happen when we reached our destination. But the closer we came, the less I could ignore the fact that we were leading a sizable party of hostile soldiers into a place with women, children, unarmed men—not to mention Enzo’s men-at-arms, who’d be about equally matched in regards to numbers, but on foot and not nearly as well equipped.
Beatrice. Benito. Imagining either of them in Hans’s hands made my flesh crawl. If it came to that, I knew I wouldn’t hesitate; there was nothing Hans could do to me, or to Enzo in front of me, that could keep me from using every scrap of my strength to protect them.
I didn’t even need to ask myself if Enzo would do the same. The calm, measured way he’d thrown down his weapons from the top of the wall at Montefime played in my mind over and over again. If he’d been willing to do that for me, he’d sacrifice for the people under his command even more readily.
But that had been only for me. For me, for me, for me, and I tried to time my breaths to that reassuring rhythm, to make it the backbone of a melody that would eventually carry a ballad about this day into every tavern in Rabbion.
Once we survived, and won—which we would, dammit.
