neck, my sweaty cheeks—a bloody veil of my own. I blew it aside in loud impatience. “You’re only here to take your pound of flesh.”
“A quaint enough truth,” replied the Veil. Once more, I read nothing in his nasal tone. Simply a voice. “You will be prepared, Miss Black, and you will take your place tonight.”
I sneered. “I thought I wasn’t pretty enough to fetch a price.”
“For this?” An oddly tinkling chuckle, as if I’d deeply amused him. “A very special event will be held, all in your honor. Rest assured, you will bring a price. And more.”
My fingernails dug into the wood so deeply, one snapped below the quick. The sharp pain was nothing as to the fear that swallowed me whole. “No,” I whispered, all bravado forgotten. “The rings? The circus? I can’t... You wouldn’t...”
“You can.” The veil’s tone sharpened. “You will. If you attempt to escape, if you balk even once, if you so much as open your mouth and dare to contradict us, we
That I could take. That, I wholly deserved. I shuddered, though I forced myself to straighten my shoulders.
Yet even as I opened my mouth, the Veil continued in the same razored manner. “We will begin by punishing our ringmaster, who has been too lenient with you.”
My chin jerked up.
“We will punish our sweet, who has failed in her endeavors to report on your actions.”
My teeth came together again, so tight that pain drummed sharply in my temples. I inhaled deeply through flared nostrils, held the opium-laden smoke in my lungs.
“We will punish the agreeable girl who maintains our Menagerie apparatuses.”
“Why?” I hissed out.
The tone did not change, matter-of-fact pleasantry. “Because it will hurt you to watch us do so.”
The blood drained from my face. Stunned, I stared at the opulent screen, saw nothing beyond its crimson silk and ornate gold embroidery.
“One by one, Miss Black, we will punish everyone who has ever made contact with you. You will become a pariah, a thing of pain to all who lay eyes upon you. Where you go, blood will follow.”
I slumped. The will to fight, the anger that I so desperately clung to, faded. What point was there? I had nothing left. No family. No husband. No virtue, no inheritance, no freedom.
No Teddy.
Where I went, blood already spilled, lurid and obscene. My heart, that blackened pit within my chest, crumbled to ash. My head lowered. “Very well,” I said, and every syllable audibly shook. My fingers trembled so badly, I could not do anything but twist them together in my lap. “I am yours.”
“Yes,” agreed the Veil, offensively polite in the face of my terror. “You are.
I closed my eyes. “The tail of a rabbit mustn’t be long.”
“Not mustn’t,” the Veil corrected. “Can not. Like the rabbit’s long tail, those who resort to treachery can not last. You have been foolish, Miss Black.”
Heaven help me. I already knew this much.
My lips curved into a tortured slant. “
Possibly, I surprised him. He said nothing for a moment, allowing the crackle of the fire to fill the silence. Sweat slid down my temple, trickled to my throat.
Still, I could not swipe it away. I could not summon the will, the energy.
Nothing. I had nothing.
This time, a chattered fragment of Chinese earned two hands on each arm. I did not bother to fight them.
As one, the Veil’s servants took me from the too-hot room.
I was not left alone for a moment. They should not have bothered. I lacked the will to fight my captors now, burdened as I was by a debt I had no choice but to pay. As willing as I had been to drag the sweet tooth here, to leave Zylphia to the punishments the Veil threatened, I could not follow through now.
I was a murderer, just like the men I had chosen to collect. Just like my father, who had ordered his associate—dear Lord, my Teddy, my dearest friend—to murder on his behalf.
Like Teddy himself. So many hours spent in my parlor, debating with such spirit the theory and application of the science periodicals. How often had we danced? Him because it pleased him to tease me upon the floor, and me because it was the only way I could shake off the Master of the House’s matchmaking eye.
Which was the mask? The vile acts in the dark, or the man who had met my every vigorous debate with good humor and sharp intellect?
Which was the lie?
What fight I might have offered, what fury I could have unleashed, would not come. Bowed and broken, unable to place my blood-stained soul above the well-being of all who had ever helped me, I allowed the Veil’s servants to care for me without struggle.
Whatever they had planned, I would commit.
To think such thoughts was not to will them true.
Terror sapped what calm I had left as the hours faded. For the rest of that awful night and most of the following day, I’d slept the sleep of a corpse, and whatever the Veil had done, it had taken my pain. Or, fortunate as I was not feeling, my state of advanced recovery had closed the wound in my side. I couldn’t be sure.
It hurt when I moved, likely would have hurt all the more were it not for the medicinal refuge I hid behind. The servants left tending me made sure that I had opium to smoke, dulling whatever feelings I might have had to bear. Even my bath passed without a struggle.
The attire they brought me took my deadened sense of dread and wrapped it tightly around my insides. Squeezed as viciously as the corset they strapped me into. I had no familiar faces, this time. Only two women I had no names for—one black as pitch with the lush accent of the Caribbean, and one whose hair was nearly white with age.
If either knew me, they said nothing—only as much as needed to prepare me.
The sheer blouse I wore had cap sleeves that clung to my shoulders and ended in a bell poof just beneath. The corset over it was the color of eggshells, beaded with tiny glass drops that would catch the light and wink at the audience, and cinched tight enough to force my waist into as fashionable a curve as my body would allow. It had been a long time since I had been quite so pinched.
I did not cry out. I barely felt the pain of ribs compressed to vicious demand.
That it seemed somewhat more narrow than it should, I attributed to falling out of the habit of seeing myself so compressed. It did not occur to me then that I had lost some excess flesh to the tar I continued to take.
Beneath the corset, I wore bloomers designed especially for a performer. They left much of my legs bare, much too short for comfort and the same color as the rest.
At my throat, a froth of sheer material in a kind of false cravat.
Upon my feet, slippers in like white, also beaded.
My arms and legs were bare, left unornamented entirely. My hair was wrestled into place, smoothed and curled as it had once always been. It took both women, but they piled the waist-length tresses into a loose coil, pinning it in place, then capping it with a like froth of white that made me look too much as if I prepared for a farce of a wedding.
I stared dully at myself in the narrow mirror and did not flinch at the sight.
They pressed kohl into the rims of my eyes, painted my mouth and reddened my pallid cheeks. In the end, I became something of a blend between the whore the Ripper had accused me of being and the bride I had once been—exotic in the eyes, wicked at the mouth.
Obediently, I sucked the smoke from the slender jade tube pressed into my hands—the filigree upon the pipe so fine as to be considered priceless—and did not argue when the Veil’s servants came to fetch me.
A cloak was draped over my shoulders, lest I catch a chill.
I had stepped no farther than the confines of my prison when the reality of my predicament encroached upon me.
The circus. The red tent, looming large upon the grounds, always seemed as if it dominated all eyes. It
