Corroded

Damn him. Just when I felt as if I were gaining ground, he went and did something so...so...incongruous.

Osoba’s hand settled on my shoulder. It was not a friendly gesture. “Be still.”

My head jerked up, shaking loose a fine layer of black. “Take your hands off me.”

An order to no avail. The strong fingers gripping my shoulder did not ease, and as two men in red trousers and wide-sleeved tunics stepped soundlessly into the receiving room, I understood why.

I did not often deal with the Veil’s men direct, yet when I did, they were servants—or perhaps some version thereof. They wore black breeches in that funny foreign style and black slippers. The red trousers these men wore suggested they were of a different caste, though I knew little enough of the system to which they ascribed to call it that with any authority.

The Veil’s warriors approached in soundless unison, once more like enough in manner and dress but not in physical feature. One was taller, the other was leaner in shape—near rail-thin, and older. The topknot each sported was black, but I detected traces of gray in one that I had not seen among the men before.

Yet it was this older man whose movements I watched most closely. There was something much more serene about him, smoother in motion and delivery, that I did not trust.

In the corner of my eye, I watched the lion-prince incline his head. Respect, I think, but not obeisance. Not to the Veil’s servants, warriors or otherwise.

The muddled hierarchy of this place was mind-bogglingly complex.

I should not have been surprised, not after I’d seen the shared lingual capability between him and Hawke some months past, yet I confess to a moderate amount of wonder when Osoba spoke to the men in the same Chinese dialect Hawke knew.

Unlike Hawke, he shifted his voice into a somewhat more nasal range, which I would have found laughable if I weren’t so focused on the eyes of the older servant that watched me.

It was the other who conferred with Osoba. As was rapidly approaching the custom, I did not know of what they spoke. Not until the man I watched withdrew his hands from his bell-like sleeves and gold filigree winked in the light.

The breath vanished from my lungs.

Where I would have lunged for the palm-sized oval, Osoba’s grip on my shoulder did not allow me the opportunity. The Chinese man who held it raised it for all to see, and said in heavily accented and quite butchered English, “It left for you.”

The light caught on the gold rim, glinting in the delicate workmanship. An oval of burnt umber framed the black silhouette of a profile I knew only because I was familiar with my own.

My mother’s features, the curve of a cheek so like mine, the curl of her hair draped over her shoulder, decorated the cameo whose flat backing lacked any means to wear the piece.

It was not decoration. It was no bit of jewelry. One did not forget the object that was intended for one’s destruction.

Chapter Eight

My eyes narrowed. “Give it here.”

He did not.

Osoba’s voice returned to its normal resonance. “Apparently, this was left within the sweets’ chambers.”

Red tinted the outlying corners of my vision. What little bliss remained with me burned to nothing.

That murdering bastard. It suddenly came clear to me: the absence of my father’s material possessions when I’d gone back to the laboratory, the disappearance of this very cameo whose mechanism had contained the serum that was meant to subjugate me.

The sweet tooth, the rival collector who had murdered my father to save me, only to murder my husband for no particular demand, must have made off with the device.

Why? Why in all the hells of all the religious texts in the world had I not considered this?

And why leave it here, now?

Yet even as I worked my way through the manic rise of furious questioning, my skin turned cold. I turned, wrenching myself free of Osoba’s grip, and asked sharply, “Was anyone hurt?”

The gaze he levied upon me was considering. “Yes.”

I flattened a hand against my chest, where my heart jerked. “Who?”

“A sweet awoke with an aching head and no memory of her assailant.” Sensing my next question, he added, “She will mend.”

“So no one saw the man—” I caught myself, “—or woman who left it?”

Another burst of Chinese assailed me.

Osoba looked at the servants, then again to me. “The Veil demands recompense.”

Damn and blast and as many other invectives as I could reasonably imagine in a moment’s notice. I had no room with which to maneuver, no direction that was not blocked by the lion-prince or the two Chinese servants. I drew up my chin. “I had nothing to do with this.”

“Is that not your face?”

I couldn’t very well admit to it being my mother’s. That would open up a great deal of questioning that I did not want the Veil to have. Josephine St. Croix’s many accomplishments had been held over me for years. I would not allow the ghost of my mother to force my hand now.

I set my jaw in mulish determination. “The Veil may go soak his head.”

I had half-hoped to earn a gasp of shocked dismay. None of the men surrounding me delivered. All I could read in Osoba’s intent came in the subtle easing of weight, the firming of his shoulders. I knew without having to look that the men behind me had taken the stance I was learning to recognize as their way of preparing for a brawl.

Fine. They could have it their way. Exhaustion had ebbed to a simmering edge of anger and adrenaline, and it was this I drew upon as I lashed out a foot not at Osoba, but at the younger of the Veil’s servants.

To my utter delight, the ball of my foot connected with his knee. He grunted.

The rest fell upon me in a great snap of momentum.

Osoba was not a frontal assault brawler. I had expected him to come at me, and this he did, but not in any way that I predicted. Where he had begun in front of me, he came at me suddenly from the left, utilizing my distraction from the older servant as that one slipped beyond my guard and delivered an open-handed strike to my plated ribs.

It surprised him, I think, when his hand connected with slatted leather. The effort did push me back several steps, which allowed Osoba room to twine behind me and link my arms so tightly in his, I could not understand how he’d done it without dislocating his own.

Not impossible, given the nature of a circus’s performers.

However, he had not considered my own training—or perhaps was just unaware of it.

My corset provided support and shape, but it was not meant to keep my figure from collapsing in upon itself. I rolled my shoulders back so far that my shoulder blades touched, an act I hadn’t had to accomplish for some time. It hurt enough that would regret this decision, too, come tomorrow.

I think I surprised the so-confident whip. I was half from his floundering grasp—earning a brief and reverberating chuckle that surprised me—when the two servants rejoined the fray.

I stood no chance.

I started cursing when each grasped an arm, freeing me entirely from Osoba’s slacking hold, and only got louder as they dragged me back into the halls I’d only just left.

“What is this madness?” I demanded. “Take your hands from me!” My efforts earned no ire from my captors. They handled me with almost graceful synchronicity, maneuvering me in such a way that every attempt to impair or disengage fell victim of my own momentum.

Osoba followed, his occasional bout of laughter after a particularly crude threat only stabbing red-hot rage