Prince of Hearts (32 page)

You love her.

Sasha stiffened and felt his stomach drop to his knees. He shook his head in denial.

Fyodor stabbed his finger at his words for emphasis.

Sasha swatted the paper away as he stumbled to his feet. "It doesn't matter, even if I do."

Fyodor wrote something else and held it in front of Sasha's face.

She loves you.

The words still had the power to floor him. Impossible though it was, she
had
claimed to love him. When he deserved her condemnation for reducing her life to a shambles. For taking so much from her. Especially that final, drunken night together when he'd taken
her
like the beast he was. Thrice.

Thrice
. Even though he'd been completely off his face and therefore shouldn't have had the wherewithal for a satisfactory
once
, especially in a chair. But as soon as he'd touched her, he'd been gripped by a monumental, aching fever that no amount of vodka could quell.

That night may have been a drunken mistake, but as he'd lain there, holding her in his arms, he'd had the first peaceful night of sleep in decades. How could he let that go? He wanted to throttle her, to kiss her, to chain her to him forever. And it was exactly this outcome of events he'd sought to avoid by leaving this life. Too late.

He'd not wanted her love. He couldn't bear it ... though hadn't that been what he'd been craving from her all of these years? Begging it from her at every turn by his requests, his constant demands that kept her always by his side? Weaving her into the gaping, empty holes of his life without her consent? Feeding off of her wholesomeness like some giant, parasitical monster?

But what choice did he have but to give her up? She was not like Luciana or any of his other women, who could be content as a temporary mistress. And he didn't want her like that. She was not like any woman he'd ever known. He wanted all of her, for the rest of time. Yet he'd taken too much from her already, and he didn't dare ask her for more.

He wasn't even sure if she wanted more from him. She'd made that very clear to him when they parted. Even if he were to consider Bonding her, she'd never agree to it. She thought he was too damaged. And she was right.

Fyodor touched his shoulder and shoved another note onto the desktop.

Don't let her go.

Sasha gave a humorless laugh and shook his head. "I must, Fyodor. I am poison. I'd end up hurting her in the end."

Fyodor crossed his arms and glared at him, as if to say he already had.

"Even more than I have already," he amended wearily.

The bell on the post box blared again as yet another message came in, and Sasha groaned in exasperation. He'd lost control over every facet of his life, so he was not about to let a post box bell lay him low. And he needed to hit something. Hard.

He stalked over the fireplace and retrieved the poker, then stalked to the post box, raising his weapon. Ilya whimpered from his bed by the empty hearth and fled the room entirely at this sign of impending violence. Fyodor's human eye went wide in alarm when he figured out what Sasha intended. He stepped between the box and Sasha.

Sasha lowered the poker. "Out of my way, Fyodor. If I have to hear that infernal bell go off one more time, I swear I will go down to the Ministry of Correspondence and level it with my bare hands."

Fyodor studied Sasha's face for a moment and decided he was in earnest. He stepped aside.

Sasha raised the poker.

"Are we interrupting something?" came Rowan's wry voice from the doorway.

Sasha spun around, nearly losing his balance, and the poker clattered to the ground. He listed to the side, and Fyodor propped him up. There seemed to be quite a few people entering his study. Uninvited.

Rowan turned to a man even taller than the giant Fyodor with a grim expression. "I told you we'd find him like this. He's in no shape for this, Your Grace."

Sasha felt Fyodor stiffen next to him, which was a considerable feat, considering his friend was nearly entirely made of metal. His vodka haze quickly faded as his heart began to pump adrenaline through his veins. Rowan, Drexler and Lieutenant Matthews were not entirely unwelcome, but the others were. He’d go so far as to call them intruders.

Franco Salerno hovered near the rear of the group, looking as if he'd rather be in Hell. Sasha wanted to scream in frustration. Whenever that man appeared, bad things tended to happen to him. Like spending weeks in a stinking Genoese jail. The other intruder was hardly an improvement, however. The last time Sasha had seen the Duke of Brightlingsea had been after the fall of Sevastopol forty years ago. It hadn't been long enough.

The Duke was the tall, broad brute of a man standing next to Rowan, dressed completely in black, with hair as black as Sasha's, and a black scowl on his face. Fitting, in Sasha's opinion, for if ever a man was surrounded by darkness, it was the Duke. Sasha had forgiven Alyosius Finch for his role in the Sevastopol genocide, but he could not forgive the Duke.

Brightlingsea had claimed his so-called Solution was the only way to stop the unbeatable Abominable Army from overtaking the continent. Perhaps he'd been right, but the price had been high. The Duke's Solution had laid waste to thousands of square miles of land, from Constantinople to Kiev, ensuring the Abominable Army's defeat. The resulting miasma, officially blamed on the Steam Revolution, had blanketed the whole of Europe for years, suffocating its inhabitants until none could survive without an Iron Necklace.

Brightlingsea had made an impossible decision, one Sasha hadn’t envied. But it wasn't for this decision that Sasha blamed him. It was for the true genocide that came next, when the Duke, in his grief, abandoned his post and left the field to the idiots in the War Office.

He blamed the Duke for turning his back while hundreds of thousands of survivors like Fyodor, unwilling victims of Stieg Ehrengard’s lust for power, were slaughtered while they lay helpless in the field. They'd been free of the strange hypnosis Ehrengard had used to compel them, and blameless for what they'd been made to do. But the War Office had declared them less than human and therefore disposable.

Only the Duke could have prevented such a travesty, had he not run away. This was what Sasha had a hard time forgiving.

As far as Sasha knew, the Duke hadn't left his self-imposed exile on his remote Welsh estate in forty years. Seeing him here now was enough to clear the rest of the vodka from his mind. Or very nearly. He reached down for the fire poker, just in case he needed it.

Fyodor had to prop him up again. He shook off Fyodor's arm, attempting to retain a shred of dignity. "
Your Grace
, finally stirring from your lair after all these years?"

The Duke frowned at him ferociously. "Don't try my patience,
Tsarevich,
" he growled. "I'm not happy about being here either."

"Why
are
you here? We caught the murderer."

"No, we didn't," Rowan said in a grim tone.

Sasha laughed in disbelief. "You can't possibly
still
believe I am the murderer. Rowan, Elijah, you were
there
. You heard Vasily admit his guilt."

"Your brother was involved, but we don't believe he is Osiris," Rowan said.

"Again, I didn't do it!" he insisted.

Rowan cringed when Sasha went for the poker once again. "For God's sake, pull yourself together, Sasha. No one believes you did it!" he muttered in exasperation. "Not even Franco."

Sasha studied Franco warily. The man scowled at him, as usual, but the anger that was usually behind the scowl was gone. In its place was something that looked very much like guilt. That was new.

"What the hell is going on?" he demanded. "Why don't you think Vasily was the man we were looking for?"

"For one thing, he was a vampire. Did you not wonder how he became one? Who turned him?" Drexler asked with exasperation. "Or have you been drunk for the entire week?"

"I've been drunk for the entire week," he said honestly, running a frustrated hand through his hair. Elijah brought up a valid point, one Sasha had briefly wondered about. But he'd been distracted. Badly. He turned his attention back to the Duke. "Did
you
know that London is infested by vampires?"

The Duke gave the Inspector a sidelong glance. "I have been informed of the situation. But that is another matter. I am here to put a final period to this whole infernal business with your heart, Tsarevich."

"I don't see how that is any of your business," he said, affronted. "I am leaving London. She has agreed it is for the best."

The Duke's expression went from annoyed to incredulous. "Are you speaking of a woman right now, Tsarevich? The same woman who has reduced you to this ridiculous, drunken state?" He shook his head. "Does it look like I care? I was speaking of the device that beats in your chest, you idiot."

The others backed up a step at the edge to the Duke's voice, even Fyodor. Brightlingsea wasn't the leader of the most powerful group of men on earth for no reason. But Sasha had never been afraid of him. He'd grown up with Ivan the Terrible for a father, after all. Brightlingsea was a kitten in comparison. He glowered at the Duke. "What about my heart?"

Rowan approached him, put a hand on his shoulder. "You might want to sit down, Sasha. There's a story here you're not going to like."

Sasha shook off Rowan's aid. "Get to the point, then get out. I've had enough of the damned Council to last until eternity."

The Duke summoned Franco forward with the flick of a finger. "I'm thirsty. You tell the tale, Salerno, since it's your fault we're in this mire," the Duke said, striding over to Sasha's sideboard and pouring himself a drink.

Franco sighed unhappily. "There were to be thirteen of us originally. The heart that now beats in your chest was stolen by one of Leo's acolytes, who disappeared without a trace. Then you came to our attention a century later. To most on the Council, your existence was unacceptable and illegal. We voted to retrieve the heart and give it to the man it was originally intended for."

Sasha was floored at this revelation, but he didn't know why. He'd always known he couldn't trust the Elders. "You were going to kill me and take back your heart?" he asked.

"I voted against it, Sasha," Rowan said quietly. "And the motion was eventually overruled, after the Duke seized control of the Council."

Brightlingsea didn't look pleased at Rowan's interjection. He tossed back his glass of vodka, scowled at the bottom of it, and poured another. "We decided to let you live."

"How magnanimous of you," he muttered.

"Unless you proved unworthy. Then we reserved the option of retrieving the heart."

"Killing me, you mean," Sasha corrected.

The Duke scowled at him. "It was agreed from the beginning that should any of the Elders be proven guilty of a heinous crime, their hearts would be forfeited and destroyed."

"I wonder you are alive, then," Sasha said. "And Stieg Ehrengard, after what he did."

The Duke gave Sasha an arctic smile. "Oh,
he
won't be alive much longer, you have my word on that, Tsarevich," he said in a tone that disconcerted even Sasha.

Before Sasha could digest this new intriguing development, Franco began to speak again. "In your case, however, because of your unique situation, the Council agreed that your heart would not be destroyed, but rather restored to its original owner. My brother. Carlos Salerno. I Bonded him to extend his life as we searched for the missing heart. I've continued to Bond him in the centuries after you were discovered. But I've come to believe he may be the one responsible for the murders."

Sasha couldn't believe what he was hearing. He took Rowan's advice and sat on the edge of his desk to absorb this news.

Franco continued, pacing the room. "When the murders began, I was more than happy to believe you responsible. The heart that beats in your chest was my brother's, after all. I never suspected Carlos could have orchestrated the whole thing." Franco shook his head. "But what you said in Genoa made me think of him. We are no longer close, and he's gone his own way for centuries. I see him only when he wishes to renew our Blood Bond. I knew it broke the covenants to give a Bonded such latitude, but Carlos was supposed to be an Elder like me. I felt guilty, I suppose."

"You've hounded me for three centuries, and you never once stopped to think it was your brother, the man who wanted my heart?" he demanded with barely-restrained fury.

"I love my brother. It is still hard to accept the fact that he may have committed these horrible crimes," Franco cried.

"We believe that somehow Salerno enlisted Vasily in his plan to implicate you in the murders," Rowan continued, sensing Sasha's desire to attack Franco, and hurrying the conversation along to avoid a confrontation.

"I recalled that Carlos made a trip to Russia around the late 16th century when we were hunting for the heart," Franco said after a deep breath. "He must have met Vasily there and turned him to use him against you."

"What makes you so sure your brother is behind the murders?" he asked.

"When I followed you to London, I saw him," Franco said.

"You followed me? Of course you did," he growled.

"And he was in the company of a woman who should have been dead a century ago," Franco continued as if he hadn't heard Sasha's snide comment, "which is when I saw Theodora last. I knew then my brother had broken at least one Council law, and I had no choice but to seek out the Duke and relate my suspicions."

Sasha froze at Franco's words, his blood running cold. Rowan went still as well, demanding, "Did you say Theodora? You never mentioned her before."

"What does your brother look like?" Sasha urged, rising to his feet, completely sober now as a horrible suspicion began to take root.

Franco had no chance to answer, however, as yet another uninvited guest appeared in the doorway, breathless and clutching her side as a pale Madame Kristeva hovered over her. Lady Christiana pierced Sasha, her brother and the Inspector with a disgusted glare, her bodice heaving. "Does no one ever check your wireless? I've been trying to contact the lot of you for an age!" she declared with exasperation.