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 a while—Cezar sent for her.
She had no choice but to answer his summons, hardly aware of what she was doing. When she walked into Cezar’s private parlor, 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. Rage and pain threatened to erupt.
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 who knew how long, she knew something would come up anyway.
“Narcise,” Giordan said. His voice was rough and low. But anger and command hummed beneath.
Why was he angry with her?
She couldn’t—she fled the room, the world spinning into hot red nausea. She couldn’t think, couldn’t comprehend, could hardly feel. Nothing but the raging whirl of her emotions.
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, whiskey, 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. The scents of his betrayal.
Somehow, from the depths of herself, she managed to find words. His words. “‘It’s you, Narcise. It’s only you.’” She threw them 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.” Her voice broke and she felt herself falling back into that chasm of desolation and grief, a whirlwind of blackness. Disbelief and pain. Such pain. She had to get away from him. A roaring filled her ears, the deep, dark roar of hatred and agony. “Get away from me.”
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 hardly heard the words, for they were lost in the horrible swirling scent of blood on his breath, the smells of depravity and sweat and other darkness.
She talked over him, the roaring in her mind and heart blocking his words as she spewed her pain onto him. “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. “Get away.”
He’d said she was strong. Oh, he had no idea how strong she was. Her hand closed over a doorknob and she turned it, not caring where it led, hardly aware of what she was doing. Have to get away from him.
“By the Fates, Narcise, listen—”
“I can’t bear—” She shoved a hand over her mouth to hold back the vomit, and stumbled through the door. As she slammed it behind her, falling against it, trying to breathe something other than him and his depravity, he slammed against it, rattling it in its hinges.
And then he was gone.
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 all that he’d wanted.
At least, for the moment.
With Narcise’s hate-filled, witchlike visage burning in his memory, her acid words screaming in his mind, Giordan found himself raging blind and lost 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. She wouldn’t even listen. She wouldn’t listen.
He woke sometime, 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 reemergence, 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. And the hot memory of humiliation.
Narcise.
Giordan rubbed gritty eyes with trembling fingers that smelled of blood and semen and opium and filth. He saw that the alley was hardly wide enough for him to extend his legs, but so long that he could see only that it angled into nothingness.
The walls on either side of him loomed tall and windowless, like dark sentinels. The brick was cold against his bare back, chill and rough with dirt, sticky with unidentifiable substances. Even springy with a bit of moss. The ground below, uneven with cobbles and filtered with a random tuft of grass, seeped damply into his breeches.
All at once, Giordan became aware of the sun. It emerged from a heavy cloud as if a curtain had been drawn away. The golden light spilled into the alley next to him and would soon filter over the spot where he lay.
At first, he didn’t have even the energy to pull to his feet. Nor the desire.
His mind was stark and empty, devoid of thought, even emotion. Just…empty.
Finished.
She’d finished him.
But then, as the base need for self-preservation stirred with the shift of the sun, Giordan prepared to heave himself upright.
At that moment, he saw the cat.
She sat there, pale and blonde against the shades of indigo and violet and gray that filled the alley. Her blue-gray eyes were fixed on him in that way of her race, unblinking and steady.
But there was no miffed accusation in this feline’s stare. Her tail, which curled comfortably around her, had no annoyed twitching at its tip. She exuded peace.
She looked just like the cat who’d stared at him from a nearby roof some weeks ago. Just after he’d met Narcise.
Giordan realized belatedly that some of the weakness in his body stemmed from the presence of his Asthenia, positioned just-so in front of him. She sat just far enough away that he wasn’t breathless and paralyzed, but close enough that he felt the essence of her presence like uncomfortable waves.
And he realized that, until she moved, he could not escape from the alley.
“Scat!” he said with as much sharpness as he could muster, but at the same time, a wave of grief for his own fat orange Chaton roughened the back of his throat. “Move!”