Lord of Unkindness Ch. 20

 Notes: Happy Thanksgiving!!! 

Title: Lord of Unkindness Ch. 20

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Chapter Twenty

 

Passing a panic attack back and forth isn’t the best use of Ciro and Angelo’s time, but he can’t help but lose himself a little bit when he hears that name. Annette. Annette.

Annette Fontaine, of the Fontaines of Lyon, one of two bright, shining stars of her generation. She and her sister Jacqueline had been on the short list as marriage candidates for Ciro from the time he was born—both were older than him, Jacqueline by five years and Annette by two. Jacqueline married when she was eighteen to a man with a complementary magical ability, so the union between Annette and Ciro was affirmed instead.

He hadn’t been entirely happy with it, nor had he been entirely against it. He and Annette had known they were potential spouses for each other their whole lives, and grew up with carefully structured meetings, gradually getting to know each other. She was…

Warm, with curly brown hair and a cherubic face, freckles peeking through the makeup that her mother insisted she wear, smiling with a little twist in the corner of her mouth, like, “Can you believe this?” but quiet. She always wore shades of red, yellow, and orange, and her familiars were cats—and every single one of them was orange.

“It’s my favorite color,” she told him when he was five and she was seven, older and wiser, someone who knew how to handle stupid questions like “why are all your cats the same color?”

Ciro wrinkled his nose. “Too bright.”

“I’m not making you look at them, boy baby.”

One bracing grab around the waist and a hot cup of tea later, and Ciro has gathered himself enough to say, “I don’t think she owes me anything.”

“Funny, that’s not what she told me after I helped her fake her death two years ago.”

He gapes; he can’t help it. “You…what?”

Angelo sets his tea down and looks seriously at Ciro. “Few of us are blind when it comes to your family, Ciro. Everyone with any smarts at all knows to have a backup plan when working with the Hamblys. It’s only gotten worse since your mother died and Nephele was given more responsibility.”

“Too much responsibility,” Ciro mutters. “My father let her start running jobs at thirteen. I can’t tell you how many of them she fucked up on purpose just because she thought it was funny, or because it gave her the chance to do something to someone that she didn’t like.”

“She’s a sociopath,” Angelo agrees. “Annette always knew it, but she didn’t really understand it until…well.”

Until Ciro’s twenty-first birthday party. Until their engagement was formally announced. Until Nephele sent her rats through the cooling system into the room where Annette’s familiars stayed whenever she was visiting in the Tower. She was permitted to have one with her at all times, but never more than that. Of course, they’d be given free rein of the building once she and Ciro were married, but until then her twenty-two other cats were put into a room designed for their comfort.

Nephele let two hundred rats loose in that room while Ciro and Annette were toasting to their future. It was…

Terrifying to see Annette fall to the ground, champagne glass shattering against the marble as she clutched her head and began to scream. Her familiar curled around her, yowling fiercely, lashing out when her parents tried to get near. Only Ciro and her sister were allowed in close, and Jacqueline was the first to put it together.

“Where are her familiars? What’s happening to them?”

Ciro watched blood pour out of his fiancee’s nose, pool in the corners of her eyes, even drip from her ears as her magic was attacked. He left her, then—left her in her sister’s arms and ran to the room where Annette’s precious familiars were resting, playing, safe safe safe, let them be safe—

The room was a bloodbath when he entered. Small orange corpses, many of them surrounded by dead rats, were being torn to pieces by the living ones who remained. “Nephele!” he screamed, looking into the camera in the corner—not that he or she needed it to be aware of each other. His cousin always kept a close eye on him. “Stop it! Stop!”

The rats didn’t stop. The cats were dead, the magic was ripped to nothing, but the rats didn’t stop.

So Ciro made them. He had one bird with him at the time, just one, but he focused all his power on it and funneled it heavily into the creature’s body until it grew larger, larger…a raven the size of an eagle, then the size of a tiger. Then he loosed it into the room, and closed the door behind him. Nephele was most powerful when she used her familiars in their natural state.

Let her try them against him, then, and be snapped up like breadcrumbs.

“Annette almost died in her sister’s arms.” Ciro stares down into his tea with a frown on his face. “I don’t think Jacqueline forgives me for leaving them to go hunt down Nephele’s creatures.”

“Possibly not, but from what I hear, it was your retaliation against Nephele that allowed the Fontaines to get out of the Tower without being accosted by more than threats from your father.”

“Maybe,” Ciro allows. “Nephele tends to take up a lot of space when she’s throwing a tantrum, and she threw a hell of one that day.” He brushes a hand over his left shoulder, where he still bears scars from her clawing hand. “She was furious with me. They all were. What else were we supposed to do, though, force Annette to stay?” It occurs to him now that perhaps that was exactly what his father expected—blind loyalty before all, a complete sublimation of norms in favor of power. The Fontaines hadn’t seen it coming.

Ciro couldn’t be part of something so vicious. “Once they were out of the Tower, the dynamics changed. They were free of Hambly influence, and Annette said she’d never marry into our family, or eve return to the Tower. And then she—” died, he’s ready to say, except she didn’t. He knows that now. It’s a comfort, but it hurts too. Annette didn’t trust him with the truth, even when it would have helped soothe his wounded heart.

They hadn’t loved each other, not the way the best couples did. But they’d been friends. They could have lived well together, supported each other, stayed friends and had children and done the things they needed to do to make their families happy without making each other miserable. Annette had been Ciro’s best hope for a good life while in the grips of his family, and then…

“She wanted to make a clean break,” Angelo says, reaching for Ciro’s hand. “With everyone, even her own family. Only her sister knows she’s still alive. She lives a very careful existence now.”

“She makes it work.” There’s accusation in his tone, and Angelo acknowledges it with a nod.

“She does, but Annette at her most powerful has never had more than, what, twenty-three familiars? Whereas you have well over a hundred. And she’s never been able to manipulate their forms like you can, which is why she turned to a new sort of magic as she recovered her power away from the pressures of your respective families.” Angelo smiles. “She still has a cat. Orange, cute, kind of dumb. Just the one, but she’s capable of magic beyond what her familiar can do. I know she can help you, Ciro. And I know she’ll want to.” He squeezes Ciro’s hand. “She misses you.”

“I miss her, but. The risk.”

Angelo nods. “I’ll have to help mitigate it, which means I need to go see her and bring her back here in person. It won’t take me long, no more than a day, but you’ll be on your own in the meantime. Is that all right?”

Ciro forces a smile. “Oh no, a whole day by myself. How will I survive?”

“The smart way,” Angelo says, and he’s not smiling back. “By staying inside and recovering your strength and doing absolutely nothing to draw attention to yourself. You promised, Ciro.”

“I know.”

“Don’t break it.” Don’t break me, Ciro hears, and he won’t. He can’t. He’s got to give this a shot, for Angelo’s sake.

And maybe for his own, too.

“I’ll wait for you,” he swears. “And I’ll work hard for Annette.”

And won’t that be a fucking head trip. He hopes she doesn’t slap him across the face first thing when they meet again after two years, but he’d deserve it.

He’s got at least a day to brace himself. It’ll have to do.