1.6. A Million Razor-Sharp Reasons

The rain, perhaps sensing a real corker of a symbolic gesture, chose that moment to introduce itself.

Annalise tsked and fixed her hat back on her head. “One hour, all,” she repeated. “Spread the word, if you please, and if someone could fetch up breakfast for my little hellions.”

The crowd began its murmuring dispersal. Seth looked for his path through the bodies.

A heavy-ringed hand landed on his shoulder. “Seth, my boy.” When Rohan il Agante had descended from his balcony, Seth wasn’t sure. But here was the patre. “Let’s get out of this shower, yes?”

Seth actually preferred it out here, he wanted to say, but Rohan was already steering him toward the manor. And Rohan’s men—Polecat, Sure-Thing, this real prick named Prichard—were already at his back.

“Now, Seth,” Rohan said, when his voice could safely be halted by the stone walls of his manor’s vestibule. “How do we feel?”

“All right, considering.”

“Sleep well?”

“Uh. All right, considering.”

“Considering…?”

“Well, it was in a barn.”

“A stable, son,” Rohan corrected. “Stable’s for the animals we keep. Barn’s for the animals we kill.”

Polecat and Prichard looked at one another, sharing a silent discourtesy for this mostly-wrong metaphor.

“I think she knows, patre.” Seth’s composure broke. “I think she’s just waiting, but she knows.”

“Now how would she know?” Rohan grinned unkindly. “Who’d tell her? Are you thinking of turning yourself in?”

“I’d—” Seth had been thinking of that, exactly. But as the words marshalled on his tongue, he realized what this was, and his response beat a hasty retreat back down his gullet. “What do you think I should do?”

“I think you should keep walking with me,” Rohan said. “My office.”

“Okay. Now—” Seth slowed down. His escorts did not, and he picked up speed again just to keep from tripping into them.

“Rotten business, Seth.” Rohan shook his head. “Rotten bloody business. Just bad luck compounding. You saw my face, when we opened that box. Yes?”

“I did. You were stricken.”

“Stricken,” Rohan confirmed. “I didn’t know what this was, either. And I wish I had. Wouldn’t have mixed you up in it, that’s for sure.”

Seth stopped walking completely, then. The man behind him put a hand on his shoulder.

“Patre,” Seth said, mournfully. “Please.”

“I’m sorry, son.” The pain on Rohan’s face, to his credit, seemed real, and the apology as honest as anything the patre had ever allowed past his lips. “I wanted this last chance for you.”

“I,” Seth said, without much of a plan for the next word, which was just as well because that’s when they jumped him.

“No,” he snarled. “No no fuck you no!”

“Get his legs. Legs, you—”

“Hit him. Someone—”

“Stop. Stop moving.”

No. No, no no. This was not over while his head was on and his heart beat. This was not over until he was in the ground. Bright pressure; hot salt. A bellow of enraged pain.

“Fucking saints!”

The grip on his shoulders went slack.

“He fucking bit me. Fucking Seth.”

Seth thrashed, dropped to the floor hard, kicked harder, connected with something that even a hardened crook can’t train himself to shrug off, was rewarded with a yelp.

And like that he was free. Clutching hands finding only scraps of clothes and air. He bolted.

“Go.” Rohan’s shrill scream followed him down the tacky portrait hall. Not a trace of paternalism remained. “Go, you stupid fucks, go! After him!”

“Sure thing.”

Seth went sprinting through the double doors of the manor, lungs thundering, and just about bowled over poor old Shaffer, who was where he usually was, begging for braces by the patre’s threshold.

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“A brace, milord!” Shaffer wailed after him in his three-tooth lisp. “A brace or even a solitar would do, milord!”

“Pick your fucking marks better, Shaffer!” Seth threw a dismissive hand in the air. “I told you!”

Through the ebbing crowd he stumbled toward the great black-iron carriage, caution forgotten, all elbows and apologies.

Confess, he told himself. That buys you time. You know they want you dead, you know Annalise is offering mercy. She’ll almost certainly kill you at some point; she’s a Verdugo, and that’s what they do. But if you can convince her to spare you at first, and maybe kill Rohan to boot, you’ve got time to figure out your escape route.

“Out of the way,” someone cried, from the killhouse he’d fled. “Out of the way, damn you! Patre’s business!”

A final desperate lunge, the infuriated shove of a cussing cooper, and Seth spilled to his hands and knees in the gathering muck before a pair of shapely calves in tall black riding boots. He scrambled his way to his feet. Annalise was leaning on Demetrius’s flank, staring at him with a concern he could only call motherly, and a barbed bolt of guilt stuck him through the chest.

“My name is Seth il Gutierre,” he said. “And it was me. I stole from you. It was me, Annalise, and I’m sorry as fuck. I can help you get it back. It was Patre Rohan il Agante who made me do it, and his men are chasing me and—”

Annalise seized him by the collar and spun him around toward the carriage, one huge steel-cable arm locked across his chest. “Ofelia,” she called.