Natalia gasped at her thoughtless words.
But Sophie’s attention had wandered. “If that’s all, I have to go.”
Glancing ahead Natalia saw a group of boys emerge from the adjacent building. One that included Titus Cato. “Sophie—”
Sophie gave her a quick hug. “Farewell, Nat. I wish you well in your new position. You’ve always aspired for greater things and now you will have them. But I’m content here. I fit in, as you do not. So please, don’t keep pushing me to want what you want. Just be happy for me, as I am for you.”
With a sinking heart, Natalia watched her only sister join the group of rowdy boys just ahead and then split off to stroll in tandem with Gentleman Cato.
Day six
“W
here the hells were you yesterday?” Luc demanded in a surly tone when Natalia entered his cell the following morning. “I was locked up in this cage alone, strapped to this bed again, with nothing but imbeciles around me. They drugged me and shaved my face. Gods know what else they did.”
“Your new look suits you,” she told him, as she unlocked his restraints. When he continued to glower, she admitted, “I went to the institute. To visit my sister, Sophie. I was a teacher there until the afternoon that you and I ... until recently.”
She let her words die away, embarrassed to have mentioned the matter. She was rattled, was all. Sophie was back to being her stubborn self again. The fact that she’d taken up with Gentleman Cato had Natalia worried. But she pushed all that aside for the moment.
“Do you have any family yourself?” she asked him, moving away now that he was released.
He glared at her, rubbing his chafed wrists as he sat up. Today he was wearing a fresh pair of the drawstring trousers that were a stock item at the Healing Center, and nothing else.
“No, you don’t,” he said, still sounding grouchy. “No turning the conversation into an interrogation. I’m not in the mood.”
“Very well, then. You may direct our conversation instead.” She set a robe beside him on the mattress, hinting.
But as she took his vital signs, Luc only lifted her lifechain and silently toyed with it. She’d begun allowing him to roam loose in his cell during her visits, but now she eyed his hand pointedly.
“Technically, I’m not touching you,” he said. “Still within your rules.”
She didn’t reply, which gave him tacit permission to examine the chain.
He rolled one of its beads between his fingers. “What is this?”
“My lifechain,” she told him, pressing the metal disk of her stethoscope to his breast.
“What is it for, I mean?”
“If you must know, it reveals a woman’s age.” She jotted down the measure she’d taken of his pulse.
He cocked his head at her. “Not all women wear them though. Sometimes men do. The attendant, for instance.”
“You’re observant. In this community a woman gives her lifechain to her husband upon their marriage.” His other measurements taken, she started to ease away.
“Wait. Explain the custom to me.” He held fast to the chain, wanting to keep her near.
“It is forever removed by her husband on their wedding night. Afterward, he then wears it at his throat as a necklace to show his ownership of her.”
“Ownership?”
“She becomes his possession, a convenience to him. A vessel for his lust. Keeper of his household.” Her matter-of-fact tone gave no indication of her feelings, but her slender foot was tapping.
A graveled chuckle left him. It felt rusty. “And I thought I was cynical about love.”
“There is rarely any question of love between a husband and wife here.” She tugged at the chain.
“Technically, this chain is mine.”
“What?” she asked in confusion.
He smiled slowly. “Your memory is short ... wife.”
She pushed at his hand and yanked, and he let the beads slip through his fingers.
Turning, she went to the counter and slapped her stethoscope and clipboard onto its surface. “I’m not your wife.”
“I distinctly recall a promise, one about giving yourself to me for all time, or something along those lines anyway.”
“You heard?” She reached for her clipboard and pen. “What else do you remember from that day?”
He crossed his arms. “You agreed this would not be an interrogation.”
She stopped writing. “Yes, I suppose I did,” she said reluctantly. “And you’re quite correct. I am legally wed to you. So are half the women in the community.”
“But you’re the only one I want.”
She looked at him, abruptly speechless, then quickly recovered. But her cheeks remained a telltale pink. She was attracted to him, he realized in satisfaction.
“I rather imagine that what you
want
is to deceive me with your flowery words, so that you may escape this cell.” She sidled away, clearing her throat. “You’re understandably restless.”
“Hells yes! I’ve been cooped up in here for a week.”
“What I mean to say is that I know that you’ve gone for some time without ...” She stepped to the cabinet and carefully set her clipboard on it. “That is, if you’d like a female companion to sojourn here with you overnight, I can arrange for one.” The pink in her cheeks deepened. “Or more than one.”
The smile that stretched his lips felt unused and strange as it formed on his face, but it felt good. “Thank you for the very kind offer,” he said, humor in his voice. “But ...” He came behind her, close enough so he could feel her body’s warmth, but still not touching.
Luc wanted to bury his face in her throat, in the silken fall of her hair, to hold her and join his body to hers. It was a thrill beyond compare to actually desire physical closeness with another being. For the first time since the catacombs, he saw more than desolation in his future. Because of this woman. He planted his hands on the countertop on either side of her waist, effectively capturing her.
“You’re the only female I want to
sojourn
with.”
Natalia whipped around, her eyes going wide with alarm when she saw how close he’d come, and she pushed at him. “What are you ... no.” She darted a glance toward the glass and lowered her voice. “Please move away from me, Luc. There’s always someone watching us. It may be just an attendant, but it could be a government official or even an Advisor.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
He frowned toward the glass. “Why? What makes me so important to them?”
“You tell me.”
Straightening, he jerked his chin toward the glass. “And if I do? Will you write it on your little clipboard and deliver the news to them?”
Her silence damned her.
“Do you know what a miracle you are to me?” he asked, gazing down at her.
Her brows rose and something akin to fear crept into her pretty brown eyes. She shook her heard slowly.
“Back in my world, I could not bear to be touched. I didn’t fornicate except on nights when my Calling drove me to it. But with you, it’s different. I want you to touch me, Natalia. Lia. I want you to lie with me. Be with me.” He leaned toward her, his eyes on her mouth. His unfettered hands rose toward her.
But she ducked away. “I’m flattered, of course,” she said stiffly, once she’d put half the length of the cell between them. “However, do you realize how that sounds? After less than a week?” She took a fortifying breath. “You have to understand something, Luc. It’s perfectly natural that you’ve formed an attachment to me. And you’re not the first patient to do so while under a healer’s care. I’m your whole world at the moment. Your touchstone. Soon enough, these feelings you think you have for me will pass.”
Luc stared at her, slowly shaking his head. “You disappoint me, Healer. You really do.”
Natalia studied his expression, surprised at what she read there. Had her rejection truly wounded him? “How old are you?” she asked in exasperation.
“Eighteen.”
Oh gods, he is even younger than I suspected.
She lifted the length of her lifechain and held it out to him. “There are twenty-eight beads on this chain.”
He raised and lowered one powerfully muscled shoulder. “So?”
“So I’m a
decade
older than you are.”
“So you’re twenty-eight. What does that matter?” Then, “You believe yourself too old for me to want you?”
“I’ve lived longer than you, experienced more. I could almost be your—mother.”
He laughed, and for some reason that made her angry. “You know nothing of my experience of life,” he informed her. “Believe me, I’ve lived through hells. And I feel far, far older than you’ll ever actually be.”
He turned his back on her. “You can go now.”
She folded her lips inward, biting them, not sure how this conversation had gone so wrong. “Tomorrow, then.”
Natalia waited for his nod, inexplicably relieved when the acknowledgment came. Then she unlocked the door and left the cell, relocking it as she departed. A few steps farther, and she drew up short.
Along with the usual attendant, Advisor was seated there. He looked as if her sudden early leave-taking from the room had caught him by surprise. Had he been here every day observing, only to steal away moments before she came out? The thought made her skin crawl.
“Interesting little scene,” he commented. “Our lunatic seems to have progressed under your devoted care.”
“He’s not—” Grinding her teeth, she turned to the attendant. “I’ll need privacy for my work in future. A curtain is to be hung inside my patient’s cell so that I may draw it over the glass on occasion. When certain treatments require it.”
The attendant glanced toward Advisor, but the latter didn’t quibble. A healer’s methods varied, sometimes involving erotic massage or even fornication with a patient. She had neither in mind, but she needn’t share the reasons for her request. She herself wasn’t even sure what they were.
“Your methods don’t matter to me,” Advisor said briskly. “Just make sure they work. Four more days. Use them wisely.”
She nodded and started to move past him.
“How is that sister of yours? I understand there’s a romance budding between her and one of the gentlemen at the institute.”
She kept her expression carefully blank. “I see you have spies everywhere.”
“I do. Keep that in mind, Healer.”
“Good day, Advisor,” she said coolly, and then she swept from the room.
Day seven
“I’ve brought a peace offering,” Natalia announced as she entered his cell that afternoon. She’d left him alone and unfettered for the first time during her mysterious absence. There was a curtain hung now at the cell’s only window, but he hadn’t pulled it shut while here alone, knowing the attendant would object.
Instead, he’d paced the cell, searching it with his eyes and surreptitious nudges of his fingers, for something he might employ as a weapon when he attempted an inevitable escape. He was strong enough now. Just waiting for an opportunity. And a chance to convince his healer to go with him. As far as he could see, this world was a dying garden, and she its only flower. She deserved better.
When she’d entered just now, he’d still been pacing, trying to remember something, anything. He’d sensed the evil one lurking outside his cell last night and it had made him edgy and frustrated, and had incited his killing instinct. Now he turned toward Natalia, staring at her. At what she held. A bowl. One that was full of grapes.
Grapes.
Elixir.
The gate. The Bacchus fountain in the salon had been a gate! Like a lamp switching on in his mind, he remembered the moments just before he’d come here to this world with exact clarity.
Bastian and Dane had been worrying over the need to obtain grapes from ElseWorld in the face of the new travel embargo in Rome. Grapes from both worlds were necessary to create the elixir used to initiate their Calling. Yet travel to Tuscany and the only known interworld gate in existence had been summarily cut off.
He took a handful of grapes from Natalia. Munching them, he began pacing again. And thinking.
The full moon appeared in this world with the same regularity as it did in EarthWorld. His body told him it would rise here within a matter of days. Three or four at most. His enemy must know how vulnerable he would be then. His body tensed. His incarceration must end before Moonful.
But how to escape? He’d somehow gone backward in time when he’d come here. Which meant he had been given the gift of time in which to return to his family bearing the grapes they would so desperately require come Moonful. But would time reverse again when he traveled back?
The elixir would save his brothers’ lives. If he made it back to them in time. If he could find the gate again—the one he’d apparently used to transport him here.
He scooped another handful of the fruit from her bowl. “These are from vineyards in this community?”
She nodded, and began gathering the paraphernalia she used to do her incessant monitoring of him each day. “The grapes are the only fruit that still grows here. I picked them wild just now. Other crops have withered.”
“They taste different from the grapes in EarthWorld,” he said.
“Different how?”
He eyed her intently, then turned so his back was to the window. “Why don’t you come to my world and find out?”
Sudden tension thickened the air.
Natalia went to the door and locked it, then drew the curtain she’d had installed over the window so his attendant could not play voyeur. She came to him, her expression urgent. “Is there a gate here in this village? One that leads to your world?”
“You tell
me
.”
“The only gate I’m aware of is in Enclave a Toscana, miles from here,” she said honestly. “The beneficial effects of the sharing of grapes between worlds are no longer felt this far north. It’s why this land is dying. Why the priests hoped you were a godking sent to save us. When you appeared so inexplicably, they thought you might have come through a local gate. Here in the community.”
“I did.”
She leaned forward, breathlessly. “Where exactly?”
He considered her briefly, then his expression changed to an interesting mixture of guilelessness and cunning. His arms went overhead, and his body stretched mightily. “Do you want to know what I need?” he asked her. “A bath. A real one. Not some cold sponge running over me. Is there a public bathhouse nearby?”