“Too late for that,” Bourbon says. “When he refused to stay and accept the consequences, he called for me to rescue him. He couldn’t tell his family—they’d have turned him out—and all his friends hated him by then. I got him back to Paris and helped get him married off the Continent. The country wench probably couldn’t have found him if she’d tried, but better not to take the chance. His family never knew. I suspect your mother doesn’t either, that her union to him is invalid, as he had one already when it was formed. It’s only he and I that know the truth. And you. So tell me, Montague.” He leers at me, a toothy grin that the firelight licks. “What do you think of your father now?”
My head is pitching in a way that has nothing to do with the drinking from the night before. It’s hard to take it all in in this single heaping dose, but what I think at once is that my father—my Reformation of Manners Society father—the man I’ve lost years of my life ducking my head before, racked up debts and ruined women and then ran from it all rather than claim the consequences. I am thinking that my father lies, and maybe the foul things he’s fed me about myself for my whole bleeding life were just as untrue. That my father cheats. That my father has no pedestal from which to hand down judgment on me for my sins.
He’s not a gentleman, any way you might unravel the word.
He’s a scoundrel. And a cowardly one at that.
“Running out of time,” Bourbon says suddenly, as though there’s any way he can gauge the hour in this pit. “Perhaps your friends don’t care for you after all.”
He hefts the pistol from his belt and I flinch, but Helena steps between us. “Don’t you dare shoot him.”
“I’ll shoot him if I goddamn like. This island is sinking around our heads and my key has been taken by pirates and children. If your mother’s bewitched heart isn’t in my hand by the end of this day, Condesa, your father will rot for the rest of his life, I’ll see to it.”
Bourbon lifts his pistol, but Helena doesn’t move. Neither do I, though that’s a far less gallant thing to be noting. There’s something quite ungentlemanly about cowering for your life behind a lady, but if Helena wants to put herself between Bourbon and me, I’ll not refuse that gift.
But the duke freezes suddenly, pistol still leveled, with his head cocked toward the door. I can hear it too—a dry slapping echo coming down the corridor of bones behind us. Footsteps.
Bourbon looks to the door of the tomb, but Helena looks to me. Our eyes meet—a strange, solemn hush in the middle of a storm.
Then she steps back, leaving nothing between me and Bourbon, but before he can make good on his promise to shoot me, someone shouts, “Stop!”
I’ve only got a second to get a good look at Percy standing in the doorway, Felicity at his side—both of them panting like they’ve been running, and both dripping wet from the floodwater—before Bourbon grabs me from behind and drags me in front of him like a shield. The cold press of his pistol noses my temple. “Where’s my key?” he calls.
Percy fumbles in the pocket of his coat, his other hand raised above his head, until he comes up with the toothy Lazarus Key and holds it up to the light. It casts a frail shadow across the vaults. “It’s here. Take it. Please. Take it and let Monty go.”
“That’s it?” Bourbon says, his head tipped toward Helena for an answer. “That’s all?” Helena nods. “Unlock it for me, then,” Bourbon calls to Percy.
Percy blanches. “What?”
“You heard me, unlock the drawer. I’m sure you can work out which one. Quickly, please.” The pistol jerks against my skin and I let out a soft whimper without meaning to. Percy winces. The duke still has one arm clamped around my chest, so tight it’s hard to breathe. Or maybe that’s just the fear stopping me up.
Percy steps forward slowly, hands still raised, and then slides the key into the hole in the Robleses’ drawer. As he turns it, there’s a series of clicks, like a stick’s being dragged up a stack of vertebrae. The drawer pops open. Percy stumbles backward to where Felicity is frozen, looking as frightened as I’ve ever seen her—raw, naked fear, no battlements to hide it.
Helena and Bourbon both advance, and I’m still wedged before the duke, so when they cozy up to the drawer and peer in, I’m forced to as well.
For one strange moment, I think it’s Helena in the vault. But the woman lying there, pale and naked, is older, her nose thinner and chin rounder. Her hair covers her bare shoulders in shimmering waves, and I can smell the perfume off it. Her skin too looks newly oiled, like the funerary rights were done just before we arrived. Her eyes are open, and the whole of them is black, as though they’ve been filled with nightshade. Stitching runs up the center of her torso from her naval to her collarbone, a scarlet sheen pressing against her skin from the other side, like a lantern tossed beneath a sheet.
Neither dead nor alive.
I understand suddenly, in a way I hadn’t before. No one but me had had to see her to realize this would be taking a life.
“That’s my mother,” Helena says, soft as a prayer, and I look up at her. She’s staring down at the woman, two fingers pressed to her lips and a look about her that feels as though she might come untethered at a breeze.
Bourbon lets me go just long enough to get his pistol against my spine and take a step back from the vault. I can hear him rooting around in his coat; then his arm enters my eye line. He’s clutching a great knife, which he extends to Helena. “Do it, then.”
She doesn’t take it. “You have the key. I’m finished.”
“Our agreement is complete once I’ve the heart. Your father can stay in prison if you retreat now.”
“I won’t.”
Bourbon taps the blade of the knife flat against the rim of the drawer. It rings like a tuning fork. “Consider your actions, Condesa, before you cross me.”
“That’s my mother.” Her voice tears on the last word, a ragged note of grief like ripped paper. She stumbles back from the tomb, one hand pressed over her mouth.
Bourbon’s pistol nudges me in the back. “Fine. You do it, Montague.”
“Oh dear God, no. No, thank you.”
“Go on.”
“No, please, I can’t—”
“Here.” He reaches in with the butt of his pistol and cracks the woman across the chest so that her rib cage collapses with a sound like dropping a stone on a sheet of ice. Helena flinches like it’s she who’s been broken open, both her hands flying up to press against her own heart. “Let me start things off for you,” he says.
I’m shaking like mad at just the thought, but it isn’t really a choice, with that pistol again to my back and both Percy and Felicity standing there. My fear is less that he’s going to shoot me and more that he’ll turn it on them. All my soft spots are exposed.
Another gust of the hot air hits me—hot air that’s rising off her, I realize, pulsing from that glowing heart as it beats. My breath sticks in my chest.
Then Felicity says, “I’ll do it.” Bourbon regards her as she extends a steady hand. “I can,” she says. “Better than Monty. Give it here and I’ll do it for you.”