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“No!” she hissed. “Gaius loved me! Me. He would never have done that to me. You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“But Gaius never enthralled to you,” I taunted her. “If you had been that important to him he would have enthralled you, he would have been preparing to turn you into a vampire. But he never did that or he never would have let you go. He would have come to claim you after the police took you away.”
“He was going to do it,” she said. “He promised. He would have. In time. He loved me. You don’t understand what it was like. I know that he loved me.”
“Maybe he loved Leonie too,” I said. “He loved Audriett and you at the same time, so maybe he loved many women.”
“That is not true! I would have known it. Leonie had her faults. Leonie was overreaching. She let the fame and the wealth of the Ronins go to her head. She wanted more than she was allowed to have. But Gaius would never have done that to me. Never.” Her voice rang with conviction. I couldn’t tell if it was merely because she wanted so badly for it to be true or because it actually was true.
“And anyway, Leonie loved Steffane,” I said casually. “So she couldn’t have loved Gaius.”
“Exactly,” Constance said, nodded along to my words. But then she realized what she had done and she shook her head sharply. “No. She was scared of Steffane. He was stalking her.”
“Liar,” I said. “Where did the money come from, Constance? Did they pay you to say that?”
“How dare you!” she shrieked. “How dare you say that I would take money? He killed her. He did it. It was him!”
“I believe that you believe that,” I said to her. “But you took the money anyway, didn’t you Constance? You believed it was him so you lied in court and you took the money. Who paid you? There’s no point lying to us any more, Constance. We know the truth.”
Her eyes flicked rapidly from me to Storm several times. She swallowed hard. She started crying again. “I had to lie,” she whispered. “I had to do it. They paid me to do it, but I would never have done it if it hadn’t been him. I knew it was him that killed her!”
“So you admit that you were lying,” I pushed, needing to know exactly what she had lied about. “It was true that Steffane and Leonie loved each other?”
“Love?” she said bitterly. “It was lust. It would have blown over. Maybe it had already blown over, because why else would he have killed her? He never loved her. He is not capable of love.”
“Who paid you to lie, Constance?” said Storm in a steely voice.
She looked at him pleadingly. “I had to do it,” she said. “I don’t know why they wanted me to do it, but I knew they would kill me if I said no. And I had to take the money. Gaius didn’t come for me. I had nowhere else to go. I was scared. I had to take the money. It was so much. And Leonie was already dead. She was gone. Gone!”
“Who?” insisted Storm.
But Constance wouldn’t answer. She just shook her head. She was too scared to tell us the truth. “It didn’t matter. Steffane killed her. It had to be him. Why does it matter?”
“Was it Gaius?” I said. “Did he pay you to make sure that Steffane got locked up?” She would have done it unquestioningly for Gaius; that much was obvious.
“Gaius would have never done that to Steffane!” she said sharply. “You would have never said that if you knew how much Gaius loved Steffane. He would have never let Steffane go to prison! I should never have testified aga
inst Steffane. I knew Gaius wouldn’t like it, but Gaius was sick and I was so scared!”
“What do you mean that Gaius was sick?” said Storm.
“He caught the Vaerus X after the murder happened. He was too sick to come to court or do anything to help Steffane. I would never had done it if Gaius had come for me. I called him a hundred times but he never came. I thought he didn’t want me but it was because he was sick. I would never have lied if I had known. I ruined it. He hates me. He must hate me.”
I was too impatient for answers to indulge her self pity. “Then was it Rodrigge who bribed you?” I asked. “Rodrigge was jealous of Steffane. Did he frame Steffane?”
“That wimp?” she spat in disgust. “He was spiteful and covetous. He always wanted what his brother had. He was so jealous of how much Gaius loved Steffane. He even tried to steal Leonie away from Steffane.” She laughed scathingly. “But Leonie wouldn’t have him. She laughed at him. But it couldn’t have been Rodrigge. It was impossible for it to have been anyone but Steffane.”
“What happened the night of the murder?” I asked. “Tell us what you remember.”
She laughed hysterically, and then she burst into tears. Loud noisy sobs that racked her body, as if she had been driven to the edge by her memories.
She gasped out her words between her sobs. “It was my last night with Gaius. When all the guests had left, I begged him to make love to me. I thought if I could just give him a baby he’d love me like he loved Audriett. She gave him two babies. Two! I begged him to try one last time with me. I had taken an ampule of fertility potion that I’d spent months trying to get. I was so determined to make it happen that I didn’t care what was happening with Leonie. I didn’t even look for her at the end of the night. I didn’t check if she’d gotten safely to her room.”
“Did you see her with Steffane?”
“She’d made me so angry that night, and I just didn’t care any more. But my fertility potion went to waste because Gaius was… He wasn’t like himself. I thought he was trashed, that Steffane might have spiked Gaius’s blood-toast for fun to try to ruin Rodrigge’s big night. I was so mad at Steffane about that. But now I realize that the Vaerus X must have already infected Gaius that night. He had been so tired. He went to sleep in my arms. How could I have known what would happen? How could I have known that would the last night I ever held him?”
I was disgusted that she was lamenting the loss of her vampire master over the loss of her daughter. I was sick of her refusal to tell us the truth. “Did you ever give a crap about Leonie?” I said. “Some mother you were. Even now you’re too busy thinking of the vampires who killed her to do what is right for her.”
