The Golden City

braces and unbuttoned his shirt, tugged it off, and laid it atop the coat.

He was a well-made man, athletic and lean. Oriana found herself staring at his back, weighing whether the lack of a dorsal stripe detracted from its attractiveness. No, it doesn’t. There was something fascinating about that span of monochromatic skin.

Her eyes were drawn then to a narrow cut crossing the side and back of his left shoulder. It was still oozing, no doubt the source of the bloodied sleeve. Mr. Ferreira tried to inspect the wound, pulling his arm forward and craning his neck around to do so. Then he turned toward the liquor cabinet and spotted her there. He started and cursed under his breath.

Oriana quickly hid her smile behind her hand. While it hadn’t embarrassed her to be caught nude, as it would have a human woman, it had embarrassed her to be caught at all. Now she had the upper hand. “A knife wound?”

His cool manner restored, he attempted to survey the slash again. “Yes, but not deep.”

As she couldn’t go to a hospital herself, she’d been trained to handle minor injuries. She opened the liquor cabinet, selected the brandy decanter, and carried it over to the table. She picked up his bloodied shirt and, once she’d poured some brandy on it, lifted it to his shoulder. “Who did this?”

He hissed when the fabric touched his skin, but otherwise he didn’t flinch from her familiarity. “I’m not sure.”

“You didn’t see your assailant?”

He gazed at her, his expression calculating. “I did, but I didn’t recognize him.”

She pulled the shirt away. The blade must have scraped along the skin, leaving a shallow cut rather than a puncture, so the wound wouldn’t need stitching. “Do you have something to bind this?”

“I was going to use the shirt,” he said with a short laugh. “And I was planning on drinking the brandy.”

Oriana handed him the sodden garment. “You must have gauze somewhere. Iodine?”

“Open the bottom drawer of the cabinet.”

Oriana returned to the liquor cabinet and, from the bottom drawer, extracted a bottle of iodine in a paperboard box that also held a few rolls of gauze and a pair of sharp-looking scissors. The handles were small, but she could probably use the very tips of her fingers to control them. She took a pair of glasses from an upper shelf and returned to the table.

“Who is Erdano?” she asked as she set everything down.

He picked up the brandy decanter, poured two glasses, and slid one over toward her hand. “What did my mother tell you?”

Oriana ignored the glass for the moment and peered at his wound again. There was a bit of skin that would need to be cut away, but it looked clean otherwise. She removed her mitts and laid them aside. “I gather he’s your half brother. She said he lives at Braga Bay, but only selkies live there.”

He was facing away from her at the moment, so she couldn’t see his expression. “And your deduction is?”

“That Erdano is a selkie,” she said as she negotiated the small handles of the scissors onto her fingertips. “And that your mother must be, as well.”

“Yes,” he said, his head bowing. “If my mother were handed over to the Special Police, it would mean her life.”

“Don’t move, please.” She dabbed at the wound with some of the gauze, and then began to cut away the extra skin. So Mr. Ferreira was half selkie himself. That shed new light on his willingness to harbor a sereia in his household. He could ensure Oriana’s safety here . . . because she could turn the threat of exposure back on him and his mother. “I’m done cutting.” Oriana wiped the scissors on a scrap of gauze. “Your mother’s human in this form,” she pointed out. “They can’t prove she isn’t.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Someone can. Someone has her pelt, which would be ample evidence should that person choose to expose her.” Oriana touched iodine-soaked gauze to his wound, and he flinched. “Are you enjoying that?”

“Of course I am,” she said, not entirely sarcastically. She sponged the wound and then the skin around it. “Was her pelt taken from her?”

He sighed when she laid down the iodine-dampened gauze. “It was stolen three years ago, and since then she’s been trapped in human form. Until we can get it back, she won’t get better.”

“Is her”—Oriana laid clean gauze over the wound while she tried to find an acceptable term —“distraction due to its absence?”

Mr. Ferreira took a sip of his brandy and nodded.

How very sad. No wonder the woman stared out at the water; she couldn’t go back. In human form, Lady Ferreira was as vulnerable to the water as Isabel had been. Oriana had Mr. Ferreira lift his arm so that she could wrap a length of bandage about the shoulder, and then he held that tight while she looked through the box on the table. A moment later the bandage was secured with a safety pin, although if he was a restless sleeper it probably wouldn’t hold.

Mr. Ferreira drew out one of the chairs, sat, and drank down his remaining brandy in one gulp. Facing her, he looked little different from a sereia male. That thought sent warmth throughout her body that had nothing to do with the brandy. She was glad then that she couldn’t blush. She settled across from him and finally took a sip of her own glass. Brandy burned her throat and gills, but Isabel had taught her to stomach it. “Was it this Paolo she’s so afraid of?”

He sat with lips pursed for a moment.

“She said he wants to kill you,” Oriana added. “That he’d taken away your brother and your father. Did he kill them?”

He rubbed a hand across his face in a weary gesture. “About a year and a half ago, Alessio fought a duel over a lover. Despite the fact that the other man fired into the air, Alessio was shot through the heart.” He regarded his now-empty glass, then poured another. “I was abroad. I’d been traveling across the continent and I hadn’t come home for . . . well, a long time. When my father finally learned I was in Paris and sent a telegram about Alessio, I started home. I had already missed Alessio’s funeral, so I didn’t rush. A few days before I arrived, my father died of pneumonia.”

Two deaths so close together had to have been hard on him. He’d come home from his travels to find no brother, no father, and a mother sliding toward . . . not madness exactly, but Lady Ferreira wasn’t whole either.

He rubbed his eyes with one hand as if they stung. Perhaps he was fighting tears. Then he dropped his hand, shook himself, and took another sip of his brandy. “I didn’t know how bad things were. They had all been sparing me the worry, you know. But Alessio and Father fought constantly, about everything. It was just easier for me to be elsewhere. I would give anything to go back and change that.”

“You didn’t know,” she said. “You never know when your family will be taken away from you.” Her own life had taught her that.

He gave her a wry look. “I should have known, Miss Paredes. I should have come home. Instead I was far away, playing police officer when I should have been here, helping search for my mother’s pelt.”

She wished she had some clever words, soothing words, to placate him, but he would likely always blame himself, just as she did over her sister’s death. “So is this Paolo to blame?”

“My cousin Joaquim—who’s an actual police inspector, unlike me—he and I investigated my mother’s claims thoroughly. We’ve never found any evidence to corroborate the claim.”

“Then why does she think he’s responsible?”

Mr. Ferreira sighed heavily. “When the pelt was stolen, the thief also took a strongbox from my father’s desk, a box that contained only my grandfather’s correspondences. You see, Paolo’s my father’s bastard brother. Older than my father, but never acknowledged. My father believed his brother stole the letters to find some evidence of his birth he could use to blackmail us, to obtain a portion of the inheritance he didn’t get. The pelt was taken in case the letters proved useless. But we’ve never found any verification of that. No proof.”

So they had ample motive, but nothing more. “And your mother’s just repeating your father’s claims.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We have looked everywhere, Joaquim and I. We know the pelt hasn’t been destroyed—that would kill her. But each lead we had fizzled away. I personally searched every one of my