Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(59)

“Leave me alone,” he said in a hoarse voice.

The memories continued to slice at him.

Try as he might, he couldn’t gain an audience with the wealthy family. They had closed themselves off from the public and were surrounded with a small private army.

“I can’t,” Mary said. “I’m worried about you. Talk to me.”

“Go away,” he managed to say.

So he had to break in to their citadel. He felt the cold stone beneath his hands as he scaled their walls, night shrouding him in a purple gauze of shadows. Combing patiently through the halls and apartments, and hiding when necessary, he eventually found her sickroom.

The guard at the door had been one of the Deceiver’s tools. He killed the man easily enough, but he knew that the Deceiver had sensed his presence. He entered the room and barred the door, but it was only a delay. Death rushed in a rage to snatch back its prey. They did not have much time.

Inside, the room held a scent like violets and putrefaction, and the air was tainted with the twist of her suffering spirit.

He walked over to the bed and lit a lamp.

The images. After being buried for so long the images assaulted him, as vivid as if they had happened yesterday.

The black fan of her long hair on the silk cushion. The haggard beauty of her face, carved with the graciousness of her spirit. The gorgeous, dark eyes that opened, immense with pain and dilated with opium.

The smell. It came from her body.

“Do I know you?” she asked. She could only manage a mere thread of sound.

He stroked her hair. She was so lovely. She was a treasure beyond the price of all princes. “We’ve known each other for a very long time,” he told her in a tender whisper. “I’ve come to help you.”

Her gaze lit with the fragile luminosity of wonder. She breathed, “I’ve been looking for you.”

He caressed her cheek, her dry lips. He whispered, “I’ve been looking for you.”

When she smiled at him, it lit the entire world. “Where have you been?”

Where have you been? Not, where are you from? Because even in those first few moments of reconnection, it was clear that they both knew where they were from.

“Florence,” he said. He smiled back at her. How could he not? His was an old, savage soul, and she had, in an instant, become the single, shining jewel that lived inside of him. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.”

“Have you found any of the others?” Cold, delicate fingers like twigs touched at his weathered face.

He shook his head. “No, only you.” Time winged away from them. He wanted to lunge after it and capture it in both desperate hands. He closed his eyes, touched his lips to the tips of her fingers, and with every ounce of passion inside of him, he willed everything to be different. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Maryam,” she murmured. “You?”

“Michel.”

No matter how desperately he tried to capture it, time would not halt its precipitous flight. Guards shouted outside in the hall, and the pounding began at the door.

He had still hoped against hope at that point. He entertained wild thoughts of tying her arms around his neck and scaling the outside wall, until he peeled back the covers and saw the leather corset. He slit the laces and opened it, and as the support fell away, he saw the long purple-edged wound gape open. He caught a glimpse of glistening muscle or organ before he wrenched his gaze away.

Curled on the bathroom floor of the cabin, Michael gagged.

The tiny movements of her rib cage, the ruined br**sts, were a torture to witness.

The household guard began to take an axe to the door.

“I’m not going to get better,” she said in that ghost voice. “I’m so sorry. I would for you, if I could.”

He kissed her forehead, her eyes and her beautiful mouth.

“You’re going to get better,” he said. He settled on the bed beside her, moving with infinite care so that he did not cause her any more pain, and he laid his head on the silken pillow beside hers. At the same time, he pulled his stiletto and held it tucked against his arm so that she could not see what he did. “You will like my home, I think. I have cows, and a few sheep. In the winter, there is snow on the fields and nothing to do but laze abed with a fire roaring in the fireplace.”

She breathed, “I would like to see snow.”

The guards were halfway through the door. In a few more blows, it would splinter. He touched his lips to her temple. “A noblewoman nearby has gardens filled with irises and azaleas. We will make love in the winter, and I will steal flowers for you in the spring.”

“And I must learn how to milk a cow.” For a few fleeting moments, amusement and tenderness had banished the shadows in her thin face.

He rose up and leaned over her. “We will live until we are very old,” he said against her lips. “And we will be happy right up until the moment we die.”

“I love this dream,” she whispered. It was the last thing she said to him.

As the final blow from the axe splintered the door down the middle, he slipped his stiletto under her ribs and pierced her heart. Her spirit slipped so easily from her body, with a relieved sigh and the lingering brush of an insubstantial caress.

He’d had a few moments in which to decide against escape, when the realization of empty years stretched ahead of him. While he knew he had done the only thing he could, that he had been right to release her from her torment, something broke inside him.