“How’s everything?” I asked him. “Are your knees still giving you hell? I assume my brother is in his chambers?”
He smiled sadly. “They’re alright, sir. Shouldn’t complain.”
I clapped him on the shoulder warmly. “So, where is he?”
“Asleep, sir,” Ivan said, walking beside me toward the main staircase. “Or, perhaps I should say, he hasn’t yet left his rooms. Will I be seeing you tomorrow, sir?” Ivan asked hopefully. “For the wedding?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. What I really wanted to say was, There’s not going to be a wedding. I fucking guarantee it.
But instead I said a gruff, “Sure,” and ran up the big staircase, taking the steps two at a time.
Rounding the corner to the hallway that led to my brother’s quarters showed me that he hadn’t spent the night alone. A thin girl, sallow and pale, was showing herself out of his bedroom. She wore a silk robe and it hung off her like she was nothing but a skeleton. I shouldn’t have been fucking surprised.
He was a lecherous prick and there was no reason why a wedding would have him change his ways. But even though she was mine, the idea of him going behind Valeria’s back pissed me right the fuck off.
The girl heard my footsteps coming and spun around to face me. I recognized her, but only barely. I’d seen her once before, last holiday season when I’d returned home to spend a fortnight with my mother and father, but back then she looked a fuckload healthier than she did now. She looked so different that it took me a second to remember our previous encounter, but her eyes hadn’t changed: dark brown, sad, mournful. And now she was showing off a brutal black eye and a swollen lower lip.
“I thought I told you to stay the fuck away from this place.”
Her one unbruised eye seemed deeper in the socket than I remembered, and a grayish-red circle beneath made it look like it was set even deeper.
The first time I’d seen her, I’d suspected what he had in store for her, which was exactly why I’d warned her off. It was his standard modus operandi.
First throw some lavish party and invite young girls eager to spend time with the prestigious other guests. Then, from the pickings, find some down-on her luck waif to get in bed with him, then get her hooked on opium and whatever the fuck else. And then treat her like shit with impunity, becoming both her dealer and abuser.
How that motherfucker and I were related, I couldn’t even comprehend.
She looked up at me, wide-eyed and terrified as a sick doe. She was hooked on something and whatever it was, she was hooked bad. Her pupils were dilated but there was no life in those eyes.
“I… I couldn’t,” she stammered softly.
“Get your useless ass back in here now,” my brother snapped from inside the bedroom.
For a long second, she and I faced off like that. Me willing her to do what was good for her and get the fuck away from him, she looking petrified, frozen, stuck between worlds.
“I’ll reward you,” my brother said, his voice smoother, softer. More cunning.
Bastard. For the first time, her eyes sparkled to life and she burst back through the door, leaving it wide open for my entrance. I gave the door jamb a single knock and stepped inside.
The sickly-sweet scent of opium hung in the air, just as I’d suspected. But it wasn’t just opium he’d gotten her hooked on. She scurried over to where he lay in bed, and took a snort of something from that snuffbox-like crevice where the tendons of the thumb meet the back of the wrist.
She inhaled hard and shivered to some semblance of life.
As if she didn’t even know I was standing there, she hooked her leg over his body and straddled him on her knees with her back to me. He ran his pale hands up her body, clearly showing off the bruises he’d left all over her thighs and back. A square-edged bruise on her lower back the shape of a belt buckle was dangerously close to her spine.
“You’re such a piece of shit,” I growled at him.
Petre pulled her down lower onto him, and she curled up in an addicted little ball in his arms. The sleeve of her robe slid up and I saw deep purple bruises on the inside of her bone-thin wrist.
I knew that all this was, in part, to show me what Valeria was in for. But little did he know that Valeria would never go through the hell that this poor girl had been through. Not as long as I fucking lived.
“What do you want?” My brother did nothing to disguise his annoyance at my presence.
To feed you to the pigs down in the valley, you degenerate cocksucker.
I steeled myself against my own rage and sat down in the chair near the door. As much as I wanted to give my brother a bloody bruise in the middle of his fucking face, I knew a better way to get him where it hurt.
What I was about to say was exactly the opposite of what I wanted, but I needed Petre on the defensive.
“Thought I should tell you in person. I’m joining the family business again,” I said. “And Dad wants to put me in charge. I’m here to make it official.”
The look on his face was fucking priceless. Like I’d kicked him right in the nuts.
* * *
Petre stormed out of his bedroom, leaving the poor girl alone in his bed. Following him down the hall, but taking my sweet time, I signaled to one of the servants. “Get her out of there. Take her to the east wing, take care of her.”
“Yes, sir,” the maid said, lowering her eyes. “Absolutely.”
“Call Doctor Lucian if you have to.”
“Of course, sir,” she said with a curtsy, and turned back
