Page 47 of The Traitor's Curse
Oh, fucking hell.
“I was thinking about what my father might have thought of me in the last days of his life. Not aboutyou, Benedict.”
“Of course not.” His faint smile didn’t reach his eyes at all—so bleak I’d have thought he was the one who’d been grieved by someone he loved. “I’ll try to explain what I meant—later. Or some other time. It’s not important right now. You ought to go back to your study and carry on as usual, let Tavius and anyone else involved with him think you don’t suspect him of anything. And I’ll see what he’s up to.”
Back to my study, where the trade agreement and a hundred other tasks awaited me. All the other business of ruling a duchy, none of which I could neglect no matter how many valets had been murdered or cousins had betrayed me. I pushed to my feet again, accepting the inevitable.
“He said he was going to his room to wash up,” I said. “I’m not sure what you think you’ll learn from lurking about while he bathes.”
“I doubt he’ll stay where he’s supposed to be. I’ll set someone I trust whom he won’t recognize to follow him. And if I don’t come to find you before you finish working for the day, I’ll meet you in your rooms.”
I nodded, and Benedict turned away, moving toward the door. He had his hand on the knob when the words burst out of me. “Don’t hurt him! We could be wrong about him. We could.”
Benedict hung his head down for a moment, and when he turned he had an expression I couldn’t read at all in his stormy gray eyes.
Three quick strides brought him back across the room, and then he had a hand on my hip and the other on my shoulder, and he’d bent down. My eyes closed. His mouth covered mine,warm and firm and sure, grounding me down to the soles of my boots. Gods, it wasn’t fair how quickly my body and my mind responded to him—how much I’d come to need him. In his arms, in his kiss, I was steady in my place in the universe, and all the edges of my nerves smoothed away.
Benedict lifted his head, leaving me dazed and half-hard and wishing I could simply drop my head on his shoulder and forget everything in the world but this.
“You’re too good for him,” he said, and then added, so low I almost couldn’t hear him, “and for me.”
He bent and kissed me again, fast and hard, and let me go abruptly enough that I stumbled back a step.
He’d already gone out and shut the door behind him before I could do more than open my mouth and stare.
Too good for him? I couldn’t have heard him clearly.
My little laugh sounded strange in the quiet, empty room. What next, would I be expecting him to write that poem to my lips?
I shook my head to clear away the nonsense, composed my face into the calm, authoritative mask of a duke, and followed Benedict out the door.
Chapter Sixteen
The afternoon dragged endlessly as I signed documents and dictated letters, keeping up the appearance of focusing on my work while thinking of nothing but Tavius. Who had written to him? And why? Had Tavius been spying on me all this time, or only recently?
His pale, haggard face and Fabian’s grotesque corpse reoccurred to me again and again, along with increasingly bizarre imagined scenarios: Tavius storming into my study and attacking me, Benedict and Tavius dueling and killing each other, Lord Zettine tossing their bodies into the harbor and rallying the army behind him in preparation for a violent coup. Mattia, Gerfred, and even Captain Venet all assured me that the palace was quiet, but it didn’t help—and if stoic, unconcerned Venet had made the effort to try to soothe my nerves, I probably hadn’t been doing such a good job of keeping up appearances.
Tavius. What could he possibly have to gain from any dealings with Fabian, and why would he hide what he knew about his death?
And more than that, more than any practical considerations of politics or money or aristocratic maneuvering, it gave me a sharp, breathless pain somewhere under my ribs to think about Tavius wanting to hurt me—or not caring if he did.
I’d never have hurt him. I loved him.
And he didn’t love me.
Perhaps I ought to have been used to it after my mother’sabandonment and my father’s lack of affection. But it only hurt all the more, one wound on top of another.
At last the clock ticked over to six. I stood and stretched my back and blinked my burning eyes. Benedict ought to have been here by now with a report, but he’d said he’d join me in my rooms, and if I waited for him there, at least I could take off my boots and warm my feet by the fire after hours of sitting still in a chilly room. Miserable, grief-stricken betrayal and seething anger might be slightly more bearable once I could feel my toes.
My guards fell in behind me as I left my study with Gerfred and a page as my vanguard. The palace had broad corridors, gracious architecture, hundreds of years’ worth of paintings in carved and gilt-painted frames, mosaiced arches, ceilings frescoed in rich blues and burgundies and ochres, polished tile floors. Even with night pressing in against the windows it should’ve been bright and beautiful.
But it seemed to close in on me as I made my way to my rooms, every shadow and whisper enough to make me clench my teeth and try not to jump.
Even the usual array of minor courtiers who haunted the halls to bow and scrape and attempt to attract my favorable notice were absent, and only a few servants scurried by. Logically I knew they were probably dressing for their dinners, but it felt ominous, as if the hush meant that the palace itself held its breath in anticipation of trouble.
Even the rain had stopped, at least for now.
My rooms lay in the same oppressive silence, with only the faint crackle of the fire to relieve it. Servants had come in as usual and lit candles and tidied, but there was no other sign of life. At least Fabian had been another person in the space with me in the evenings, his sullenly hostile commentary something to distract me from my other cares, and since his death I’d grown used to having Benedict to contend with. When this was over, Iwouldn’t have him around, either.
