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The heavy black-walnut door swung inward to reveal Carlotta bearing a silver salver laden with brioche, coffeepot and cup, and a small package bound up in twine and brown paper. She maneuvered the salver into an empty place on the workbench that ran down the center of the chamber. Then she bowed and withdrew, shutting the door again behind her.
From what seemed the very minute Enzo had returned to Halcyon after his disgraceful departure from university, the alchemical workshop of Ca’ Scaevola had felt like his own sanctuary. Mother’s interests lay abroad, Lucrezia’s interests lay in the prince’s palace, and Giovanna’s interests lay in the countryside, which left no one in the family to bother with amateur scientific pursuits. And so Enzo had the whole queer cabinet of curiosities to himself. Its decorations—and its peculiar musk, the result of centuries of alchemical residue seeping into every corner of its work-bench—reminded him just enough of the libraries and laboratories he’d left behind to keep him from going mad with missing university. And it allowed him the space and materials to continue certain experiments into peculiar anatomy. The archived journals of his late great-aunt, in particular, proved very fruitful indeed.
Even when not involved in study or experimentation, he found the workshop had a restorative atmosphere. The desiccated crocodile suspended from the ceiling felt like an old friend within the span of a mere fortnight. And just now, freshly bathed and scraped after his morning fencing lesson, he sat without a waistcoat at the cylinder desk between the life-sized charts of zodiac man and wound man reading an adventurous novel entirely for leisure.
Enzo marked his place in his book with a ribbon, then arose and approached the workbench. He’d sated himself with sarde en saor immediately following his fencing lesson, so the brioche held little urgency for him. Coffee proved a more tempting prospect.
But none so intriguing as an unexpected package.
Enzo took it up from the salver and turned it over. It had no wax seal or any other sign to show who had sent it. It was rather small, fitting easily into his palm, yet felt somewhat heavier than he expected. Whatever it contained did not seem uniform in shape. He raised an eyebrow, untied the string, and folded back the brown paper.
A severed human finger lay in his hands.
The digitus secundus, his mind supplied, alias the forefinger. A grown yet youthful specimen, slender and elegant, tapering ever so slightly towards the nail. It oughtn’t have shocked him so much as it did. He’d held stranger things before. Many of them also human organs.
But this particular one held a disturbing familiarity. And an instant afterward, he realized why.
He had held it before.
He had kissed it. He had drawn it into his mouth. It had caressed him in turn, its teasing touch lingering on his skin. It had entwined and interlaced with his own over and again. It had torn furrows into his back and silenced his lips and traced the curve of his ear and delved within him and gripped him with as much strength as elegance—
And now, detached from the whole, it appeared curiously delicate and frail.
It was a jest, Enzo told himself. Fiore playing a prank in waxwork with the assistance of his sculptor friend. But no sooner had Enzo conceived this lie than his own well-practiced eyes confronted him with the truth of flesh and blood. Particularly the frayed edges of veins, arteries, ligatures, and nerve-strings spilling out of its ragged end.
And particularly as he dared, at last, to pick it up between his own fingertips and heard his heart sing at the familiar touch even as it plummeted at the awful truth of the matter.
He knew not how many minutes he wasted simply staring at it. Far too long. When at last he could tear his gaze away from it, his eye fell upon the wrapping, which he realized belatedly had a missive of its own inscribed on the interior.
We have your musico. Leave one hundred zecchini in the fountain of Isola delle Merlettaie by midnight if you want the rest of him.
A pulse of rage and fear struck him like a thunderbolt through his chest. For some moments it left him unable to think, much less move.
When he recovered himself at last, he found half the note crumpled into his fist. He set it down and smoothed it flat again. Then he rang the bell-pull.
Carlotta arrived within the minute.
“Find whoever accepted this delivery,” Enzo commanded. “Bring them here. Now.”
Carlotta asked no questions. She simply nodded and vanished back down the corridor from whence she’d arrived.
Which left Enzo alone with his racing thoughts.
His gaze dropt again—as it must—to Fiore’s finger. A tooth if knocked out could be preserved in milk for a time until the means were found to put it back in its proper place. The same principle might hold true for a severed limb. Particularly one so small as this.
But as Enzo delicately picked up the finger again for a closer examination, he realized his error. Even if by some miracle Fiore returned to him within the hour, the digit was already cold and the wound itself half-cauterized. The thought of some sadistic wretch thrusting their knife into coals to bring its red-hot blade against Fiore’s innocent flesh sent a spike of rage through Enzo’s veins. He tempered it with the grim conclusion that the risk of infection would prove too great to attempt a reattachment. Particularly when it had almost no chance of success. He would never toy with Fiore’s life so. The finger would have to be preserved as a wet specimen until Fiore himself could decide what was to be done with it. The alchemy workshop was the very place to do so; he had the jars and the means to whip up the alcohol solution within a quarter-hour.
Except Enzo found he could not persuade himself to set the finger down again. As cold as it felt cradled in his palm, some foolish part of him held the hope that he could imbue it with his own vital warmth, so long as he didn’t relinquish his hold.
And so he remained standing at the workbench, staring down at all he had left of his heart in his hand, whilst his mind churned with horrors.
As to who had taken Fiore and ordered his mutilation, Enzo knew at once. Such deeds could only be the work of the Delfin family. They had taken their ease in taking their revenge, but all the better for them, waiting until Enzo truly had something to lose.
A mere trifle of one hundred zecchini could not sate them. Lucrezia had already paid them a king’s ransom, let alone a courtesan’s. They had a taste of what they wished for in maiming Fiore. Enzo doubted anything short of butchery would slake their thirst for blood. The Delfini would not return their hostage even if they received all their demands. If Enzo disfiguring their heir in a duel had earned this much of their ire, then their pride would find satisfaction in nothing less than murder. And what sanguineous delight they would take in dangling the hope of his heart’s return before his eyes, only to snatch it from his chest and rend it asunder.
No, mere coin would not see his Fiore safe again.
“You wished to see me, m’lord.”
