Queen of the Night (The Revanche Cycle Book 4) (9 page)

“Sir?” the scout asked. “What are we going to do?”

Baum walked behind his desk, sank into his chair, and rested his chin on his knuckles. He’d engineered everything to perfection: deposed a corrupt emperor, taken the reins of the nation, and made an alliance with Cardinal Accorsi to guarantee a pliant and cooperative Church. Plans unfurling like a clockwork scroll. All save for this. One madman, in one rebel city.

So why does it feel like I’m losing control?
he asked himself.
And how do I get it back?

*     *     *

“You’re slipping,” scowled Hammerface Celso, jabbing a finger at Aita.

She sat at the head of the table in her estate’s dining hall. A gallery in alabaster, the table draped with white linen and lit by silver candelabras. Before her, seated to her left and right, were the men charged with being her hands, eyes, and ears in the city. Her father’s lieutenants, and now hers.

Usually there were eight. Six now, with two chairs conspicuously empty.

They weren’t alone. Each of her underlings had been granted leave to bring a right-hand man of his own. Rough men in cheap leathers, loitering at the edges of the room and openly brandishing weapons on their hips. A safeguard in case anyone came to the table with ideas of treason in their greedy, venal minds. Aita’s servants skirted nervously around them, bringing a feast to the table. Steaks, steaming and rich, and ladles of creamy asparagus.

Aita held her chin high and cradled her glass of water. “Would you have spoken to my father this way?”

“You ain’t your father,” Celso said. “I’m starting to wonder if you’re even his kin. Two of us are dead. Two of us, and it was your damn husband what did it. Basilio woulda had this mess fixed in no time flat. What are
you
doing about it?”

A couple of the other men obliged him with grumbling nods. The others held their silence, looking between Aita and Celso like gamblers deciding who to place their money on.

“It would be easier for me to hire more assistance,” Aita said, sipping her water, “if you weren’t hiding twenty percent of your income from me.”

Celso blinked. His hands sat in his lap, fingers clenched.

“Oh.” Aita smiled and set down her glass. “You didn’t think I knew that. Much like your friend Clemente here. Clemente, I understand you’ve opened a new brothel on the Via Gramsci that you forgot to tell me about. A very profitable one.”

While Clemente sank into his chair, the man to his right fixed him with a lethal glare. “What the hell? The Via Gramsci is
my
street.”

“It is,” Aita said, “though I’m sure you’ve been making up for the loss, given that your pickpocket gangs are working on Signore Celso’s territory. You see, gentlemen? This is what happens when we don’t work together. This is what happens when you don’t follow the rules. Chaos.”

“This is what happens,” Celso snarled, “when a little girl does a man’s job. You just sauntered on in here and dropped into Basilio’s throne like you earned it. What’ve you done to earn our respect? Nothing.”

“That’s fair. Though to be frank, I inherited my father’s position after years of careful research. Studying you. Your organizations, your followers. Each and every one of you was stealing from my father, and for all his vaunted powers of insight, his fearsome control, he didn’t know it. But I did.”

Clemente rested one hand next to his plate. Fingers brushing the hilt of a steak knife.

“Well,” he said, glancing to the others. “I guess it’s out now.”

Aita inclined her head. “It is. I needed a brief period of adjustment when my father died. Time to settle into his chair and feel the puppet strings of his empire around my fingers. Time to quietly make deals with the
right
people. I realize I may have looked a bit weak in the process. And to be fair, my husband has been a nagging thorn in all our sides. That wasn’t part of the plan.”

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.