Chapter 10
Every so often, the memory came hurtling back into Narcise’s mind.
Although it was more than ten years since Giordan Cale had destroyed her, every nuance of the moment, every sight, sound, color, scent…even the remembrance of the way her being simply stopped and then imploded…it all came back.
As if it were happening again.
Anything could trigger it: the sight of a piece of charcoal on her drawing table. The sound when her maid dropped a handful of hairpins that scattered on the floor. The glimpse of a head of brown curls. The scent of a peach.
Whatever it was would send her mind shooting back to that moment when she walked into Cezar’s private chambers.
Even now, her belly shuddered, threatening to send her last meal spewing forth, but try as she might, Narcise couldn’t keep herself from going back there, reliving the very minutiae of a time she’d kill to forget.
She’d been looking for her brother—something she generally avoided doing, but there was no help for it, for she hadn’t had a fencing lesson or a painting session for three weeks, including the false one with Giordan Cale—and she wanted to find out if and why he’d cancelled the meetings with her tutors.
Cezar had been unusually absent since the night he’d brought her back after she seduced Cale, and Narcise had welcomed the reprieve, knowing how difficult it would be to hide her feelings about Cale in front of her brother.
At the same time, she’d expected to hear from or to see Giordan himself…but three weeks had passed and she’d seen and heard from no one. Including Monsieur David and her fencing instructor.
At last, after neither David nor Cale appeared for her lesson, she went in search of Cezar, noting vaguely that all of the servants seemed to be otherwise occupied. His private parlor, where he kept the dish of sparrow feathers, was empty, but….
She stepped just inside the door, despite the deterrent of the feathers. She smelled him. Giordan. Giordan had been here recently.
The flush of a thrill warmed her and her heart began to pound with hope. She had no doubt, no doubt at all that Giordan would find a way to free her from Cezar. He’d been here, recently, very recently. Earlier today.
It was at that moment that two things happened: the first—and now, much later, she understood the significance—was that the ever-present tray with feathers was not in the chamber.
The second was that she noticed that, across the parlor, the door to Cezar’s private bedchamber was slightly open.
And there were sounds and scents coming from inside… heavy, erotic, strong scents.
Even now, in her mind, her memory of it, Narcise screamed at herself don’t go there…
But she did. Whether she realized what it was, whether it was the scent on the air, permeating the chamber or whether there was some other reason she was compelled to walk on silent feet over to the chamber door…
…To peer around the crack and to look in…no, no, noooooo, don’t….but she does it again…she looks in…
At first, she doesn’t realize what she sees. It’s the scent of arousal…heavy and thick…of lifeblood and eroticism and man….It catches her, giving that little tug in the center of her belly that spears down low and causes desire….
The chamber is lit well enough by the blazing fire that Cezar always keeps, and several lamps, turned up to a golden glow.
There is a massive bed, its curtains pulled wide, to one side.
A large divan and two chairs are arranged in front of the fire.
A table covered with glasses and bottles sits next to it, and even from here, she can see that three of the four bottles are empty.
The scent of whisky and blood mingle strongly with musk and virility.
There are two people, not on the bed, but on the divan, directly in front of the raging fire, opposite the door around which she peers. Since her brother’s varied proclivities aren’t unknown to her, she’s not surprised to see that he’s with a man.
She can’t see well, she’s not even certain why she’s compelled to watch—perhaps the scent hooked into her mind and dragged her there—but the first glimpse of a pale, slender hand curling over a strong, sleek shoulder makes her breath seize.
There is a cast of amber light over his skin, over the familiar golden curve of arms and shoulders now marred with bitemarks, shadowed by the flickering fire…
the golden brush of lamplight over the strong profile with the patrician nose, so handsome, so perfect…
the glow creating a nimbus from behind thick, dark curls, and an unholy halo around an even darker head adjacent to his.
She can’t breathe. The floor is falling away from her feet as if she is standing on a house of cards, and her body ceases. Everything halts: breath, heart, sensation, emotion.
His rich, tawny skin is slick with perspiration, shadowed from the hands on him…his face half turned from the door, etched tight with pleasure and pain. His lips, drawn back from his mouth in some sort of groan or grimace as fangs drive into his shoulder…
For all of the details of that moment, Narcise remembered hardly anything of what happened afterward.
She must have made her way from the chamber, she must not have screamed despite the shrieking and wailing inside her, stumbling from the private parlor, somehow back to her own room before her body began to feel again.
Shattered.
And then, after that, it was dull and empty.
* * *
Sometime later…days, she thought, based on the number of times a servant came for her to feed…but she had no true concept of time for awhile…Cezar sent for her.
She had no choice but to answer his summons, hardly aware of what she was doing. When she walked into the private parlor, the chamber, the conduit that had led to her destruction, Giordan was there.
Cezar was sitting in one of the chairs, looking complacent and relaxed. “You have a visitor, Narcise,” he said with great congeniality.
“He’s not my visitor,” she managed to say. Despite her best efforts, her voice shook.
Cale turned from where he’d been standing in the corner, his back to the room, his broad shoulders straight with tension. His eyes were bright—too bright. And yet the skin around them was tight. He was fully, formally dressed, but his clothing was wrinkled, less than perfect.
He looked weary—and well he should, based on what she’d witnessed. Narcise’s stomach threatened to revolt just then and despite the fact that she hadn’t fed for two days or more, she knew something would come up anyway.
“Narcise,” Giordan said. His voice was rough and low. But anger and command hummed beneath.
She couldn’t—she turned and left the room, the world spinning into hot red nausea.
He came after her, out of the chamber into a corridor that was uncharacteristically deserted. “Narcise.”
His scent came with him—and with it, a revolting mix of opium, hashish, whisky, blood. And Cezar. She steadied herself against the wall, trying to block the images that assaulted her, that matched the stew of debauchery emanating from him.
“‘It’s you, Narcise. It’s only you,’” she threw his words back into his face, the ones that had sustained her for weeks. “You disgust me.”
“By the Devil, you can’t truly believe—”
“I don’t have to believe. I saw. You.”
He stepped toward her, grabbing her arm. “Do you have any idea what I’ve done for you?” His voice raw, his face, terrible, was close to hers. She smelled blood on his breath, she smelled depravity and sweat and other darkness. And yet…she was aware of him.
“Yes, I have. You’ve completely destroyed me. Something even my brother wasn’t able to do, in decades.” She jerked her arm from his fingers with a sharp movement, turning away, starting back down the corridor. “Get away from me.” Her voice threatened to break, but she wouldn’t allow it.
He’d said she was strong. Oh, he had no idea how strong she was. Her hand closed over a door knob and she turned it, not caring where it led.
“By the Fates, Narcise—”
“Go.” She stumbled through the door, closing it behind her. And bolted it against him.
* * *
He didn’t remember leaving Cezar’s subterranean residence after those nights of hell.
In retrospect, a decade later, Giordan wondered that the man even allowed him to do so—but then, of course, by that time, Cezar had gotten what he wanted.
At least, for the moment.
With Narcise’s hate-filled, witch-like visage burning in his memory, her acid words screaming in his mind, Giordan found himself raging blindly through the streets.
Violence pounded through him, his abused body weak and overused, his hands, his very skin a reeking reminder of the hours and days past.
He had no real memory of where he went and what he did once out of Cezar’s place: it was dark, and his world became a hot, red rampage, filled with the taste and scent of blood, the heat and suppleness of living flesh, the rhythmic pulsing against his body, the slap and thud of flesh against flesh.
There might have been screams, shouts, cries, moans and groans.
There were certainly deaths and injuries.
Giordan’s vision burned with red shadow. It was as if coals had been shoved beneath his lids and seared into his irises, coloring his sight.
He supposed he went mad.
Do you have any idea what I’ve done for you? His own hoarse words rolled in his brain, over and over, desperate and angry even as he sought relief.
He woke some time, some hours, perhaps days, later in one of Paris’s narrow alleys. Tucked back in a corner. Alone.
That moment was clear in his mind even today, a decade after: that moment of re-emergence, of clawing up from the depths of a heavy, dark sea. As if he’d dragged himself awake from the worst of nightmares.
But it had been no nightmare, those three nights of hell. And what he’d thought of as the light at the end of the tunnel, as the prize for his endurance and existence through hours of torture, turned only into the slap of betrayal.