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“What’s funny?”
“My name is Marguerite Valard. I’m the illegitimate daughter of King Henri the Second of France.” She leaned her head back against the wall. “I just met my undead father and smashed him to dust with a hammer. I let loose a bloodthirsty vampire who torched the secret vault underneath a secret chamber belonging to a sect of secret holy warriors who I think were about to make sure I never left. I have a dead rat in my hoodie. I can remember being lynched. I have a necromancer and a lich sulking at my feet looking like a kicked puppy. What’s not to laugh about?”
Oh, great. There were the tears again. She growled in anger and swiped at her face. She was sick of crying!
Gideon placed a hand on her knee. “I…I am to blame for all of this. Not you.”
“I fucking know that!” When he recoiled at her sudden outburst, she almost felt bad. No, she shouldn’t feel bad for him. Even if those silver eyes were looking at her like he really was a kicked puppy. “You—you did that to him.”
“I did.” His jaw ticked, and he pushed up from the floor and paced away from her. He wiped a hand down over his goatee before he continued. “Your father…I was very angry. It doesn’t condone what I did. When I realized I should free him, it was too late. He was in the vault, and I had no way to right my wrong.”
“What did he do to piss you off?”
He shook his head. That was one of the questions he wouldn’t answer.
She stood from the floor and brushed herself off. “Why couldn’t you go in to get to him? Too dangerous, or because they had your heart in a jar?”
“Bah, taking my heart was useless. They tried all sorts of torture on it to see what it would do to me.” Gideon waved his hand dismissively as he stared out the hotel window at the street below. “Set it on fire, stabbed it, drove nails through it, submerged it in nitrogen. That last one gave me a surprising amount of heartburn, but”—he stopped mid-thought, and turned to look at her with wide eyes—“what do you mean, had?”
Fishing into her bag, she pulled out the glass box, straight out of Snow White.
Gideon stared at the beating heart inside and shook his head, stunned. “You never cease to amaze, princess…”
“Now I know why you call me that.”
“I suppose you do.”
She let the moment hang in silence between them. He didn’t ask for his heart back. He didn’t reach for it. He just stood there, watching her, and she watched him in return. What was this between them? What had it been? What was it going to be?
He had tortured her father. Left him to lose his mind in the darkness. He was to blame for everything that had happened to her; he said it himself. But in those silver eyes, she saw something. Something she might now be just barely brave enough to name.
“Gideon?”
He shut his eyes, as if knowing what was coming. “Yes, princess?”
“Do you love me?”
He smiled, a sad and wistful expression. When he looked at her once more, there was that look of longing she had seen on him a few times before. She hadn’t known what to do with it then—or she had been too afraid to open that can of worms. But now she had cracked the lid, and the little wriggling creatures were free.
His voice was little more than a whisper. “I loved you the moment I laid eyes on you. I have…tried to hate you. I have tried to forget you. I have tried to feel nothing at all.” He gestured at the box in her hand. “But you have always held my heart, and you always will.”
I’m surrounded by melodramatic men.
Stepping toward him slowly, she held the container out to him. He took it from her gingerly and ran his fingers along the glass lid. “I am glad to have the literal instance returned.” He didn’t wait for her to answer him or reply at all to anything he had said. “I will do this in the bathroom. I fear it might be…messy.”
And with that, he walked away from her and shut the bathroom door behind him. When she heard the shower turn on, she wondered what he was doing. But at his strangled sound of pain, she decided she was much happier not knowing after all.
She sank into the chair by the window and put her head in her hands. Algernon scurried onto her lap, chewing on one of the ends of her hoodie string.
She had one answer to her mystery, but it only led to a dozen more. She was Marguerite Valard, bastard princess of France. And Doctor Gideon Raithe, a lich and necromancer, loved her…
God, she was exhausted. She wanted to curl up and fall asleep. Too much had happened all at once. She felt as if she had been rolled down a hill in a trash can. It was all whirling, hard impacts, and every time she thought she knew which end was up, everything changed again.
Gideon loved her.
She wished she knew how to feel about that. But she was only reacting from moment to moment. It would take more time—and a bottle of alcohol or two—to sort out what it meant.
Unfortunately, she had another more important, more immediate question she needed to figure out the answer to. It was pushing everything else out of her mind. It just kept repeating in her head again, and again, and again.
