Queen of the night the r.., p.7
Queen of the Night (The Revanche Cycle Book 4), page 7
Celso frowned at her. “Plan? What plan?”
“Cleaning house,” Aita said. “I am my father’s daughter. If you’d known that, you might still be alive right now.”
“What do you mean, still—”
His words ended in a ragged gurgle as a blade punched through the back of his neck, spearing out through his throat. Her lieutenants’ right-hand men assaulted the table as one, brandishing daggers and truncheons, falling upon their former masters. A wooden club rained down again and again, spattering blood and bone across the table and soaking the ivory tablecloth crimson. Another man was wrestled to the ground, kicking and thrashing, a wire garrote slicing into his throat. Clemente tried to run and they hauled him to the floor, plunging daggers turning his back into raw hamburger.
Aita gazed upon the slaughter with a polite smile on her lips, sipping from her glass of water.
It was over as soon as it began. The killers—her new cabinet, the men she’d dedicated her time to forging quiet alliances with—shoved the last corpse to the marble floor and took their seats at the gore-streaked table. One sliced off a hunk of steak and lifted it to his fat lips.
“Aw, Renzo,” his neighbor said, “that’s nasty.”
“What?” He popped the meat into his mouth and chewed. “That’s just how I like my steak. Bloody.”
Aita’s genial chuckle, like a crystal chime, rose above the laughter. She lifted her glass high.
“Gentlemen, thank you for joining me in this bold venture. You’ve all lingered in the shadows of unworthy masters for far too long, your talents unnoticed and unappreciated. Together we’ll move this organization into a new, shining day.”
One reached across the table and grabbed a bottle of wine with blood-sticky fingers. He threw back a swig, drinking straight from the bottle.
“I’m your man, we all are,” he said, “but what about this barricade business? Nothin’ coming into the city, nothin’ going out at all—where’s the profit in a dead town?”
“Nothing officially going in or out. I have Lodovico Marchetti’s ear, and his patronage. Where no open market stands, a gray market flourishes—and we will control that market. All the smuggling, all the underground trade. It’s ours to reap. The first thing we’ll do is divide territory—a much fairer distribution, and more profitable for each of you, than my father would have ever allowed.”
“Good to hear,” another said. “But, ah, speaking of ears…I’m just gonna say it. What about your husband? He’s still out there, carvin’ up anybody who carries your banner. I’ll never refuse a proper brawl, but I didn’t sign up to deal with no maniac.”
“I’ve been giving that a great deal of thought.” Aita’s fingertips absently brushed the scar on her cheek. “A great deal. Felix has a weak point: his lover, Renata. That’s what fuels him. That’s what we’ll use to bring him down.”
“How? Last I heard, ain’t no bounty hunter can find hide nor hair of her.”
“True enough. I’m certain he’s sent her to some remote location to hide and wait for his triumphant return. But we also know Felix is here. Inside the walls, isolated and alone. That means he’s cut off from the most valuable coin of all: information.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, perhaps we can’t find Renata.” Aita favored the table with a golden smile. “But Felix doesn’t know that.”
CHAPTER TEN
Another night. Another target.
Felix stalked down empty streets, the city markets abandoned in the dark, no sound but a cold lonely wind whispering across shutters and canvas awnings. He forced himself to breathe deeply, fighting the hammering of his heart, the nervous energy that pushed him to break into a run. The next of Aita’s henchmen kept himself penned up at the top of a two-story inn, always renting the same room. Flooding the hall outside with his thugs, but that wasn’t a problem; the coil of rope and heavy grappling hook dangling from Felix’s shoulder would see to that.
Nothing flashy this time, he told himself. Just slip in from the balcony, kill him in his bed, and slip out again. Do this right and I’ll be long gone before anyone knows he’s dead.
The business of killing had stopped bothering him. He wasn’t sure when that had happened. He felt no hesitation now, and no regrets after the deed was done. Part of him wondered what that meant. The rest of him didn’t have time to think about it. Didn’t want to think about it.
He crept along a narrow alley, closing in. The inn stood across a desolate boulevard, faint lights shining behind scarlet-curtained windows. Felix froze in his tracks.
Fresh paint daubed the stucco wall, scrawling letters in tar-black ink.
WE HAVE RENATA.
Then underneath, an addendum.
ASK ZOE.
Now he ran, racing back the way he’d come. His mission abandoned and only one thing on his mind—Renata—as he headed for the city docks.
* * *
The Hen and Caber bore an autumn harvest of memories for Felix. All the nights he’d lingered alone at a back table, drinking in the warmth of the fire and the merry reel of lute song, savoring the crusty bread and fresh-churned butter. All the nights he’d met with Renata in the alley around back or slipped up to her room, endless waiting and anticipation giving way to sudden passion.
Renata wasn’t here anymore. Neither was the warmth, though the fire still crackled in the hearth, or the merriment. The locals drank in stony silence or murmured conversation, casting a dour eye at every new arrival. The city was changing all around him. The fear of an impending siege weighing heavy on every heart. Felix kept his hood low and his face turned from the light, skirting around half-empty tables on his way to the bar.
“Zoe?” the barman said. “She’s upstairs. Says she ain’t feeling well tonight. Stomach sick.”
As he stood at her door, Felix heard faint weeping. He knocked, knuckles light.
The door opened a crack. One wet, reddened eye peered out at him, one pox-ravaged cheek caught by candlelight.
“A man came to see me,” she said in a broken whisper. “He knew she was my friend. He asked if I knew where you were.”
Felix furrowed his brow. “Did he hurt you?”
“Not…not like that. He…” Zoe shook her head, suddenly mute. She opened the door.
He stepped into her room. Another wave of memories. Not happy ones now. Thinking back to the night he’d taken refuge here, and Hassan the Barber had tracked him down. There was the table where he’d impaled Hassan’s hand with a rusty knife. There was the spot of floor, still stained dark, where they’d struggled for the blade.
There was the wall by the shabby little bed, where Felix had killed a man for the first time in his life. And sawed off Hassan’s head, sending it to his mistress in a gift box.
Zoe sat on the edge of the mattress and cradled a slender carton in her hands. A gold ribbon sat beside her, untied and discarded.
“Zoe,” Felix said, “what’s in the box?”
She held it out to him. Biting her lip, fresh tears in her eyes.
He pulled back the lid and his breath caught in his throat. Staring down at the pale, bloodless finger, lying severed in a bed of red velvet. A note nestled alongside it. He recognized Aita’s handwriting.
“My turn to send you a present,” she wrote. “The first of many. Come to the Piazza del Pastore at midnight, alone and unarmed. If you don’t, expect another package forthright. The next one will have her face in it.”
Zoe looked at him, lost for words, a tear rolling down one pockmarked cheek. Felix stared at the note. Then the finger. Then the note again. The roiling darkness in his stomach—the darkness he’d carried since his voyage to Winter’s Reach—curled eager fingers around his heart.
“I’ll handle it,” he said.
“Felix, these men—”
“I’ll handle it.”
He took the box with him. He couldn’t leave that pain with her. He needed it for himself. Fuel for his fire.
* * *
Leggieri threw up his hands, casting lamplit shadows across the wall of knives in his cellar.
“It’s a trap. You know it’s a trap.”
“Of course it is,” Felix said. “Aita expects me to trade my life for Renata’s. She spoke the truth at the governor’s ball: she’s pragmatic. She’s got nothing against Renata. If I’m dead, there’s no reason Aita wouldn’t let her go.”
“So that’s it?” Leggieri shook his head. “After all this, you’re going to just give up and die?”
“Hardly. We know where Aita wants me. We know the spot she’s marked as the killing ground. And we know her agents will be there at midnight. They can tell me where Renata’s being held. I just have to get it out of them.”
“She won’t be sending amateurs after you anymore,” Leggieri warned. “You’ve earned her best efforts.”
Felix turned to stare at the wall of weapons, drinking in the sight.
“And she’s earned mine.”
* * *
Salmon-colored shingles rattled under Felix’s feet as he crossed the rooftops, a ghost etched in pale moonlight. On one hip, a rapier from Leggieri’s workshop, sleek and honed to a killing edge. On the other, wrapped in gauze and nestled in his velvet pouch, the severed finger. With every slide down an angled roof, with every leap from ledge to ledge, he felt it bump against his hip. Driving his pace like a rider on his back digging in the spurs.
His body was an atlas of pulled muscles and barely healed cuts, but he didn’t feel the pain any more than he felt the cold night wind washing over him. The darkness had him now. He’d stopped fighting. Invited it in. Greeted it as a teacher and a friend. He knew he’d need every resource, every trick, every power at his command if he was going to save Renata tonight.
He needed everything but mercy. That, he’d left behind.
One block south of the Piazza del Pastore, he slowed to a creep and hunched low at the edge of a crumbling rooftop. He’d gotten the knack of seeing by moonlight, like he’d learned to navigate the Mirenze skyline as easily as the streets below. He was as much a feral cat as he was a man. Down on a sleepy side street a beggar hobbled along, draped under layers of tattered rags with his head bowed low.
A miserable sight, were it not for the way the moon glinted off his expensive, high-laced boots. Or how, when his ambling gait shifted just right, he betrayed the telltale bulge of a blade hidden under his rags. Felix thought of swooping down and taking him, here and now, but he steeled himself and stayed his hand. He was glad he did as he crept on by; around the next bend, just below his feet, a pair of rakes leaned against a darkened shop window and passed a bottle of wine back and forth. Watching the street like hawks. Felix smiled as the upturned bottle caught the light. It was dry as a stone, phony as their feigned drunkenness.
The piazza was an open market square, and during the day it played host to auctions of livestock and bulk goods. A lectern stood on a raised wooden stage beside a couple of tall, empty cages and an animal pen strewn with dirty hay. Even by night, the rancid smell of stale piss hung in the air. In a shadowy alcove, a couple stood in a lovers’ clinch. Up a short alley, two more derelicts pretended to sleep under moth-eaten blankets. Months ago, Felix wouldn’t have given any of them a second glance. He’d taken the world for what it was, never peeling back the grimy layers beneath.
He knew a killer when he saw one now. And a trap waiting to spring shut. They’d covered every entrance to the square. No matter which way he entered the piazza, if he came in from below, Aita’s men would be on him in seconds. He had no intention of obliging them. Instead, he got down on his belly, flush to the roof, and watched.
Waiting was agony. He felt the bulge of his pouch against his hip, and his imagination ran wild thinking about what they might have done—might be doing, right at that moment—to Renata. He forced himself to take deep breaths and focus.
An hour drifted by in the dark. Maybe two. The wind ruffled Felix’s hair with icy fingertips. Then it carried a faint voice from the square below.
“Are we sure he got the message?”
“Had to,” answered another voice. One of the killers disguised as a beggar. “We painted the walls at every single place he might have targeted. No way he’s not showing up.”
“You see him? I don’t. I don’t think he’s coming.”
“Almost feel bad for his girl. You think Aita’s really gonna slice her face off?”
A grim chuckle drifted up from below as Felix’s hands clenched on the eave. His blood racing hot and every muscle in his body screaming for him to leap down and start the slaughter.
“It’s Aita,” the other man said. “She says she’s gonna do something, she’s gonna do it. C’mon, somebody has to send word back, and it might as well be us. I’m freezing my arse off out here.”
As the two men ambled off, heading up an alley and away from the quiet square, Felix pushed himself up, crouching like a panther, then rose. Following them from above, his slow, careful footsteps like faint whispers in the dark.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Felix’s prey followed a winding path through the city streets, angling toward the docks in the distance. Felix could taste the tang of salt rolling off the black waters. Moving above the two killers, he reached down and slid a long, horn-hilted dagger from his boot. The metal came free with a serpentine hiss.
He’d been waiting. Waiting for them to get clear of the square, isolated from their partners. Waiting for them to turn down a treacherous alley, barely wide enough for the two men to stand side by side. Far enough, Felix thought.
He leaped from the rooftop, clutching the dagger in both hands, and drove it down like a thunderbolt from the bleak night sky. The blade punched through the crown of his target’s head, cracking his skull, driving all the way down to the hilt. His collapsing body cushioned Felix’s fall. Felix hit the ground, rolled, and his rapier lashed from its sheath as he came up again and charged the dead man’s partner.
The assassin hit the alley wall, eyes bulging and mouth agape, with the tip of Felix’s rapier pressed to his throat.
“I only needed one of you alive,” Felix said. “This is your lucky night.”
“You’re…you’re him. Felix Rossini.”
“That’s right. And do you know what I have in my pouch, signore?”
His response was a timid headshake. Felix gave the hilt of his rapier a little shove, driving the point a fraction of an inch deeper into the tender flesh of the man’s throat. A thin trickle of blood welled up, dripping down his neck.
“My fiancée’s finger,” Felix said. “So you can no doubt imagine I have very little time or patience for prevarication right now. The only thing saving you from the cold of the grave is your usefulness. So be useful. Talk.”
The man swallowed, wincing as his throat swelled against the tip of the blade. “What do you want to know?”
“Renata. Where are they holding her?”
“Do—do you know Hammerface Celso? One of Aita’s lieutenants.”
Felix nodded. “He’s on my list.”
“His place. It’s a warehouse along the docks. No street address, but there’s a carving of a dove above the door.”
“Good. So far, you’re being very useful. Let’s see if you can keep it going. How many guards?”
He shook his head, just a twitch. “Not many. Celso’s there with two men, maybe three. You weren’t supposed to find out. You were supposed to come to the piazza. We were told to capture you alive if we could.”
“And then?” Felix asked.
“We were told to bring you straight to Aita. She’s…she’s at the warehouse right now, waiting.”
Felix’s lips curled into a grim smile. Renata. Aita, blithely waiting for him, unaware he’d slipped from the jaws of her trap. And a token retinue of guards to protect them both. He couldn’t have prayed for a better chance.
“Thank you, signore,” Felix said, “you’ve been very helpful.”
“So does that mean you’ll let me—”
Felix speared the rapier through his throat then twisted it, wrenching the blade free. He turned and strode away as the killer collapsed at his back, choking on his own blood.
The far edge of the docks was a snarled tangle of ribbon streets lined with warehouses, some barred under oaken doors and mammoth iron locks, others gone to seed and half-abandoned by owners who only came to port once in a blue moon. It didn’t take Felix long to find the spot: a squat box of chipped and dirty brick, with the crude outline of a bird chiseled above the side doorway.
He thought about knocking. Get them to open the door, then carve his way to Renata one body at a time. Then he stepped away. No, too much chance of someone putting a blade to Renata’s throat if he gave them any advance warning. He’d have to get inside as quietly as he could, at least until she was safe and in his arms.
Then, he decided, it was time for Aita to die. Time for this nightmare to finally end.
A patch of rough wall, faded by sea wind and time, looked promising. Felix jumped up and grabbed at an outcropping of broken stone. His fingers dug in, a lance of pain shooting up his back as he swung and snatched at another outcropping a few feet away. His boots scrabbled for purchase, one foot finding a crumbling dent to dig his toes into while the other dangled free. Inch by agonizing inch he hauled himself up the wall, toward a long broken window set close to the rooftop. A brick turned to powder under his fingers. Loose chunks scattered to the street below, his grip suddenly falling free. He flailed toward the window with his other hand outstretched, closing on the cold iron frame and squeezing tight with the last of his strength. A nub of jagged glass the size of a coin sliced into his palm. He bit down on his bottom lip, stifling a groan, and caught the window frame with his other hand.
From there he squirmed his way upward and over, inching through the coffin-sized window. A tall rack bearing crates and moldering sacks stood on the other side, the highest shelf just a couple of feet below the windowsill. He pulled himself in and landed on his back on the shelf, gasping for breath, blood guttering down his wrist from the cut. He took hold of the glass chip and wriggled it free from his palm. It felt like he’d been slashed with a razor, the stinging pain setting his teeth on edge. He pressed his palm to his chest and stanched the wound as best he could on the dirt-stained cloth of his vest.
