Page 93 of A Dangerous Bargain

“I thought you had died, Niccolo. Do you have any idea how your disappearance has weighed on us? I blamed myself for it.”

He flinches. “Why?”

“What did you expect me to do when you never came home after I told you to leave?” My voice goes hot and high, and I’m too loud for this silent city, but I don’t care. How could he think he could disappear without a word and everything would be fine? How could he decide that tearing our family apart was what needed to be done? I deserved a say. We all did.

“I didn’t expect you to do anything. I was taking care of it!” His face shutters. His glow is suddenly grayer, darker. The last bit of color clinging to the landscape before a too-early winter sunset. “But I was wrong. I’m sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing.” He laughs unexpectedly. “Papà really fucked us over, didn’t he?”

Father. I inhale sharply and search the piazza, as if his shade already lurks to tell me how disappointed he is in me yet again. Oh God, is screaming at me from beyond the grave possible now? Have we moved from a place of metaphor into horrifying possibility? What if he haunts me forever in this afterlife?

“Virgil.” Niccolo’s hand is on my shoulder. “He’s not here. I promise.”

I nod once, grateful for the reassurance, even more grateful that I didn’t have to voice my fear out loud.

Niccolo speaks again. “I know Papà was unforgivably cruel to you, but he got to me, too. When he died—when I was suddenly in charge of everything—I thought I had to do it alone, because he had told me so in a thousand different ways. When I turned away from you, I knew I should go back and tell you the truth, but I didn’t know how to apologize for hurting you.” His eyes bore into mine, green at the edges and sunbursts of copper around the pupils. I could be looking at myself. “I’m apologizing now. I shouldn’t have shut you out. I was wrong, and I’ve very much paid for it. Can you forgive me? I love you so much. I never, ever meant to leave you.”

Years of guilt, years of tying myself in knots over things out of my control. Trying to control them anyway and blaming myself when they didn’t work out. Pushing people away because I thought the brokenness in me was my fault and not the fault of the world that broke me.

I thought I was doing the right thing too. We both did.

“Yes.” I wrap him in my arms, ribs creaking. “I forgive you.”

He hugs me back, body slack with relief.

My throat is tight—almost too tight to speak through. “In Florence, your body—”

He sighs and scrubs a hand over his chin. In this world, his ring is missing. “I know.”

I think of the stranger wearing his face, how cruelly he laughed at us. The fear and rage and terror in his eyes when I spoke his name. “You don’t remember who you are, and the Medici use you to do their dirty work. They’ve forced you to kill people—”

He shudders and presses a burning-hot finger to my cold lips. “You can’t feel like that here.”

“Feel like what?”

“Demons hunt souls.” Niccolo’s voice is low and quick, but even he can’t keep the thread of panic from it. “Feeling too much, acting too human, it’s like lighting a bonfire for—”

He stops abruptly.

An awful, icy feeling crawls over my shoulders. I turn slowly.

The demon-cat from before has returned and stares with gleaming red eyes. Another steps out beside it and sits on its haunches. Then a third.

Their eyes glow like embers, more and more of them burning from the gray each second. Surrounding us.

“Niccolo,” I say carefully. “What happens when demons catch souls?”

His ghostly gold light has dimmed to a barely there caul over his skin. Niccolo has mastered the art of repressing his feelings, but I haven’t. “Oh, the usual things you’d expect. Torture. Dismemberment. Boiled alive in a cauldron of blood.”

I nod, mouth dry. “And souls can’t die, so it goes on for eternity?”

“They get bored. Eventually.”

One of the demon-cats licks its lips and creeps closer.

It tasted my soul, and it wants more. And now there’s Niccolo’s soul beside mine, glowing with… whatever it is lost souls glow with.

Side by side, I can’t help but notice that my brother only has a few inches on me now, the head or so he once held above me no longer there. We’ve wronged each other. We’ve made decisions alone we should’ve made together.

But he’s still my brother, my volpone.