Fortuna dei Luni
The guards came for the human at the end of dinner. Fortuna regarded the girl with sharp amusement as it dawned on the sculptress that she wouldn’t be left to her own devices. Not even to climb back up the stairs.
Fortuna tilted her head, studying the sculptress with a critical eye.
She had an interesting face.
Pretty, but nothing extraordinary. Wide-set eyes, expressive and alert, brown of a color that some people might find attractive if they liked the look of medicinal apothecary bottles.
A slender nose, straight with a delicate bridge and a refined tip, and a well-defined mouth that badly needed rouge.
Her hair fell in tangled waves around her slim shoulders.
It was the color of fall leaves, autumnal, sort of red and chestnut, sort of golden brown, a bit of mahogany, as if it didn’t know what it wanted to be.
Either way, it wasn’t blond like her own, the favorite and prized shade in Florence.
The gown the sculptress wore wasn’t up to current fashion, and her fingers were bare and unadorned, and much worse: calloused.
Her skin was olive toned, smooth and supple, but had the appearance of someone who spent too much time outdoors.
Ravenna did, Fortuna grudgingly admitted, have nice cheekbones. High and prominent, lending an air of sculpted perfection.
Her own were nicer, though.
“We’ve enjoyed your company,” Fortuna’s mother said to Ravenna when the last of the plates had been cleared. “But it’s time for you to rest. We all have an early start in the morning.”
Ravenna stared back at Fortuna’s mother with a stony expression, her mouth set in a mulish line.
She went to push away from the table, but her dress was caught beneath the leg of her chair.
Saturnino stood up, his manner abrupt and impatient, and easily freed the hem.
The girl muttered a thank-you, which Saturnino didn’t acknowledge, and in her haste to quit the room she stupidly tripped over the leg of that same chair.
But then Saturnino did something odd.
Instead of letting her stumble in front of all of them, giving her opportunity to humiliate herself, he reached for her hand, the motion propelling her toward him.
Her shoulder, her autumn hair, swept against his chest. It was the first time Fortuna had seen Saturnino touch the human.
Fortuna expected seething annoyance but instead he settled Ravenna back onto her feet, his face disappointingly devoid of any of its usual irreverent qualities.
He’d done it instinctively, and Ravenna mumbled another thank-you, her cheeks rosy and warm, before the guards escorted her out and upstairs to her room.
It was a small thing. No one else had noticed.
But a prickle of awareness coated Fortuna’s skin. The little human wasn’t immune to Saturnino. Far from it. The sculptress might detest her reaction to his physical beauty, but the girl was painfully aware of her brother.
How adorable, how convenient.
“That girl has too much personality for my tastes,” Signora Luni said.
Her father drained the wine. “She only needs a firm hand.”
“That’s Saturnino’s job,” Marco added, dismissive. “The human is properly afraid of him. Didn’t you speak to her family? What did they tell you about her?”
“She’s a creature of habits and rules,” Saturnino said.
“No sweetheart to speak of, and a handful of good friends, some she lost during the battle. Very close to her siblings. Evidently she all but runs the family inn. Dedicated to the business and to sculpting whenever she has time. Which she does in a shack behind the inn.”
“Shame she won’t be able to help them anymore,” Fortuna said with a cold smile. “Oh dear, how will they survive without her?”
Marco sniggered.
Signora Luni frowned at them. “We need someone we can easily control.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Signor Luni said. “We got more than we bargained for with this human.”
“No, we didn’t,” Saturnino said flatly.
“Rein in your arrogance,” their mother said. “Don’t underestimate her temper. In a human, anger can lead to impulsive and rash behavior.”
Saturnino gave their mother a courteous nod. But Fortuna knew her brother—when he deigned to be polite, it was only for show. There was always a subtle hint of mockery in his manners.
Even now, he seemed bored with the conversation, itching to leave them. But she had to make him understand. There was too much at stake for anything to go wrong, and as far as she was concerned, something already had.
They had chosen a girl with too much spirit.
Saturnino was confident he could break it, but Fortuna wasn’t so sure.
“We ought to keep her in the dungeon and be done with it,” Marco said. “Saturnino can manage her.”
Saturnino reached for his goblet of wine and lifted it toward their brother in salute. Again, in mockery. “As always, Marco, I enjoy your riveting contributions to our conversations.” He downed his drink, set it back onto the table, and disappeared out the door.
Marco glowered in Saturnino’s direction, that restless energy curling around him.
He was more at home out in the field with a battle axe, a jousting lance, a blunt sword he could use to run someone through.
Fortuna knew it galled her brother that it was Saturnino who would become the duke if everything went according to plan.
Things were as they should be. Marco was a brute with a sword, while Saturnino thought things through before he acted or spoke.
But sometimes, it was hard to know whose side he was on.
Which reminded her …
The contessa stood and followed Saturnino out into the night.
By the time she caught up with him, he had wandered to the side of the inn, off the main path.
Aimless, looking up at the stars like the romantic he wasn’t.
Saturnino heard her approach, and he glanced at her from over his shoulder.
Moonlight cut his face in half, one part lit in silver, the other in shadow.
“I need a word with you,” she said as she drew next to him. “Several.”
He flicked a cool glance at her. “What is it?”
With his own sister he was never charming. Or remotely friendly. The family was a unit, or could be, if Saturnino could accept the roles they all needed to play, hand-picked a century earlier.
“This was all your idea,” Fortuna reminded him. “And you said that once we found the sculptor, you’d have everything in hand. That everything would go according to plan. Your plan.”
Saturnino turned to look at her fully. “Has my performance been lacking?”
Fortuna cared deeply about many things. Fine wine, power that was hard earned and ruthlessly kept, luxurious fabric, her private garden where she grew all manner of deadly eccentricities, and a particular shade of rouge only her maid seemed to know how to make.
She used connections and gossip the same way people spent and enjoyed currency.
But she also cared about the outcome of their plot, and she would not see it crumble because of Saturnino.
“I think your plan is flawed.”
“Do tell.”
“Humans are fickle and unpredictable creatures,” Fortuna said softly. “They change loyalties and are governed by the needs of their flesh.”
“Unlike you?” Saturnino asked, sardonic humor curling his lip. His eyes drifted up to the second floor, to a row of windows. A line was notched between his black brows, his lips moving silently. He seemed to be counting.
“I’m serious,” Fortuna snapped. “You’re handling this human wrong.”
His attention swerved back to her; his words came out as a taunt. “Am I?”
“This human isn’t swayed by wealth or by our influence. Bribery won’t work with her, but there is something else you can do.”
Saturnino waved his hand, which Fortuna interpreted to mean that she ought to continue. “I think you ought to go back to your original plan and seduce her.”
He let out a low, humorless laugh. “No.”
“Why not?”
“That might have worked before I met her. Not only is she the last sort of person I would want, but we met under less-than-favorable circumstances,” he said, his eyes latching on to a window on the second floor. “She disapproves of me. That girl is a sanctimonious, rigid sort.”
“That hasn’t stopped you before.”
He turned toward her, his eyes darkening in anger. “I have it under control.”
“The human might be afraid of you, of us, but she’s no coward. She broke curfew to get to her brother. Revealed her magical inheritance to the people of Volterra when she knew they would hate her for it. If word about her reached the pope’s ears, he’d order a bounty on her head and her execution.”
He waved this off with another roll of his dark eyes. “She participated in the competition not to save her brother but for some other ulterior motive. Perhaps she’s tired of living under the demands of her family and of that pitiful inn.”
“It’s possible, but regardless, I think you ought to reassess your strategy. It’s doomed to fail,” Fortuna said, exasperated. She stepped closer and reached for his sleeve, but he shifted away. “Can’t you see that?”
He went preternaturally still. Unholy fury burned in his eyes, and tension brewed in the air around him, a swirling tempest of raw emotion. His face flickered in and out of the moonlight that beamed through wispy storm clouds.
“You have not seen humans the way I have.”
A dozen memories swam in her mind. Humans on their knees before her, tied up in her silk sheets, feeding her ripe fruit. Crying for mercy, begging for release, pleading for more. And when she was bored with them, she brewed them a cup of her deadly tea and forced them to drink it. “I know humans.”
“You don’t,” he said flatly. “They are playthings to you.”
She used his words against him. “Unlike to you?”
His words bled into the night. “They didn’t used to be.”
Fortuna’s breath caught. They all knew her brother had gone through something terrible years earlier, decades now. But he’d never spoken of it, and since then, he kept everyone at a distance. Magical creatures, humans, his own family.
Nothing and nobody could reach him.
“What happened to you?” Fortuna edged closer, her words like the soft rustling of leaves against stone. “You can tell me.”
Saturnino bared his teeth at her. “You have not known them at their worst, at their most cruel. You don’t know humans.
I know humans, and”—he drew close to Fortuna, half-hidden in shadow, but she could make out the cold glimmer of his eyes in the near dark— “I will never let a human get the best of me ever again.”