Rooks and Romanticide

by J. I. Radke

  “Don’t worry, baby brother. We’re not killing him. We’ve got a better plan. Father Kelvin will take care of him.”

  Peering out the window, looking out at the day that seemed to mourn for him because he could not bring himself to, Levi wished he could tell his father what was going on, right there under his nose but unbeknownst to him. He wished he could walk away from the window, but his feet would not move. He wished he could talk, just to anyone who would listen—but he could hardly swallow.

  He felt hollow, and numb, and a little overwhelmed by the gnawing dread that something volatile was building in the air.

  But what could he do?

  He was only Levi, the romantic, the baby brother. And there was no power in any of those things.

  SOMEHOW LEVI made it from the hall window to the rooftops over Lovers’ Lane. There, broken and bloodied on the ground, were the Earl and Lady Dietrich.

  It made his skin crawl.

  His stomach lurched.

  It was different when the reality wasn’t numbed by the rush of fight-or-die.

  The rain misted, dampening his clammy skin, but his neck was sweaty under his fur collar. Levi was about to leave, obviously too late—not that he’d really had a plan of action or anything. Nobody cared what an inexperienced gunslinger thought. And then his eye caught on the boy staggering into the alley from the streets.

  Levi was rooted in place overhead, watching, and he could hardly breathe.

  Beautiful little thing, getting wet in the spitting rain. Beautiful because his lashes were long and his eyes were big, and his hair fell about his face in a perfect wispy laurel. He wasn’t small; puberty had been kind to him, but he was a fragile Ganymede swimming in that big coat as he just stumbled along with no real purpose whatsoever. He looked dazed, disoriented. He almost stepped on his father. He stared for a long moment, and Levi watched him as he stared. Levi watched him as he dug in his pockets, then stared some more as if completely at a loss.

  Levi’s mouth was dry. It occurred to him then, bright and painful, the Dietrich heir. That was the Earl Dietrich’s son, Cain Dietrich. But why was he alone? God, to find your own parents’ corpses….

  Levi’s throat locked. His heart hammered. He wanted to go down there and gather Lord Dietrich’s orphan son into his arms and rock him and run his fingers through his hair and kiss his wet cheeks and tell him, It’s okay, they haven’t gotten you yet, and I’ll make sure they don’t. I’m a romantic, and Quinton’s the fighter, but a romantic man can be a force to be reckoned with too, because love is insanity and obsession, and I’ll teach you that.

  Levi watched Cain Dietrich fall in a puddle. Up on the rooftops, Levi’s fingers shook. He watched Cain Dietrich stand up and continue forth, mindlessly, squinting up into the rain. And then there was a familiar voice, down in the alley, calling out to him.

  It was Oberon. Sweet, sweet Oberon. The guy with the big heart.

  “Don’t worry, baby brother,” Quinton had said. “We’re not killing him. We’ve got a better plan. Father Kelvin will take care of him.”

  Cain Dietrich crumpled into Oberon’s arms, in the corner of Lovers’ Lane. And Levi knew Oberon would take him to St. Mikael’s, Father Kelvin’s pride and joy.

  Levi scraped down the side of the building, where the sagging old fire escape was. He wavered a few steps, down off the roof now, before he turned into a nearby alley and got sick. An expensive Ruslaniv lunch didn’t taste as good the second time around.

  He pressed his face to the cold stone of the building next to him and closed his eyes. Father Kelvin. His own father called the man a nut, but what church leader wasn’t?

  God, he couldn’t shake this sense of desolation. It wasn’t exactly guilt. It was more like intense anxiety, a hate, a maelstrom of everything from pride to helplessness—

  Levi knew one thing for sure, shivering in his militia jacket, and that was that this genius idea of his brother’s was not going to end the feud any time soon.

  THE SHORT period of peace shattered.

  There were months on end of brutal bloodshed. A breath of war was in the air again, civil war, and rioters were on the edges of their seats as men slept with guns under their pillows.

  Levi met Rosalie not long before a fight in Pavlov’s Place. He sent her gifts; she sent him smiles. For the first time in forever, it seemed, he’d found a safe haven for his weary mind, and his cold heart was warmed by Rosalie’s laughter. He went to sleep thinking about the way she looked in the sunrise, sitting in her open window in just her muslin dress, shoulders bare and hair swept loose and untamed up off her white shoulders as she read or wrote or smoked a cigarette she’d stolen from Levi’s silver case. She read the papers like a man would. She wrote poetry and stories about ghosts, and she was the kind of privileged whore one would call a practicing mistress. Her pale legs always looked so delicious in her black thigh-high stockings.

  But the streets were dangerous. Gangs roamed in the name of the ruined Dietrichs, baring their fangs at anyone who looked at them wrong. Gangs fought in the name of the Ruslanivs, instigating brawl after brawl in a state of crazed triumph and invincibility now that the Dietrichs had been practically destroyed. And BLACK was no exception, of course.

  The Queen wouldn’t get involved. The web of bloodshed was too tangled. Some feared Her Majesty would ask New London to secede from the province, to become its own troubled state.

  It was far too effortless for BLACK to frame a group of radicals for the murder of the Dietrich family, but worse yet, nobody cared. Nobody remembered the radicals’ names or any travesty of justice that might have been displayed. The world was in uproar, and for BLACK there were gunfights, poker games, victory raids, and pride. Too much pride.

  The biggest fight was the fight between the jaded Dietrich Security and BLACK. The Dietrich Security surprised them on the scene of a fray between street gangs. The Dietrich Security was ruthless in the wake of their family’s tragedies, as the remaining heirs tried still to untangle the Dietrich legacy and fortune and name a new earl.

  Oberon fell victim to hidden blades and bullets. Rosalie had come running as soon as she’d heard of the battle, and she’d begged the fighting to stop and was shot three times in the chest, then once in the head.

  The Dietrich protective services were virtually slaughtered.

  But Vyncent was injured; he died later in the hospital. Petyr wavered on the verge of a psychotic break, and Eliott cried because so many people had died, so many innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.

  Days later, news surfaced that the Honourable Cain Dietrich had somehow reappeared at the gates of his manor, a changed creature but alive and ready to take over as the head of his family almost a year after his parents’ deaths.

  Quinton threatened Father Kelvin’s life if he didn’t dismantle his circus, and off Kelvin and his boys went even farther north than Yekaterinburg, to the cities along Muscov Bay. It was another flawless cover-up on Quinton’s part—and just in time too, somehow. The man had the devil’s luck.

  Not even a week after Levi’s father sent Quinton and the remaining senior members of BLACK away from New London until further notice, hoping their absence would mean less violence, the new Earl Dietrich’s first order of postdelegation business was to seize St. Mikael’s under suspicion of all sorts of illegal activities.

  The story of the season was that nothing was found there, and the little Earl Dietrich who had shown up at home so mysteriously went to the country for a few months to “recuperate mind, body, and soul.”

  Levi’s father was quiet for weeks. His wife wore mourning colors even though her son was technically still alive.

  The chaos was a chaos with system again. Levi found his old collection of Poe.

  Levi read.

  SCENE FOUR

  IN HIS mind, Levi could walk the halls of memory in the dark with all the sure faith of a blind man on familiar turf.

  But narrowing his eyes at his reflection in the
mirror, he suddenly felt a shortage of surety. He felt like he didn’t know himself at all.

  Who was he? Lawrence Levi Ruslaniv, heir to the Ruslaniv House, captain of BLACK, the Ruslanivs’ secret gang. Blond hair, brown eyes, a gentleman’s build, and the quick glance of a trained killer.

  His father was dying, either of life’s grief and regrets or vicious old age, and his mother insisted yet on mourning black despite having one son still alive and in her arms.

  His only brother had been a maniac, and Levi didn’t know if he was living or dead, banished from the city as he’d been.

  A romantic, they all said, pitying him behind those false smiles of appreciation, but the truth was that after his only two loves had been ripped away from him, Levi had become a gambling, drinking, guns-blazing mockery of a romantic, because his heart had closed up and left him hollow and cruel and jaded. Undeserving of such a title, anyway. Romantic.

  The world was an ugly, stinking, disappointing machine, and he was just another rusty cog, wasn’t he?

  Levi hated it.

  Suddenly, and passionately, Levi hated everything about his life and the way it was. The opulence, the indulgence, the luxury, the lies, the evasion of accountability—

  Rather, the way that it had been before he’d become the Levi Cain Dietrich knew. Or had known. The lone wolf gunslinger who had sworn his loyalty on his life and who had inevitably committed the ultimate betrayal anyway.

  God, why did he have to be another pawn of this feud started so long ago, too long ago to even pretend anymore? Why couldn’t he just follow his whims, and shake free of the bondage of witless, unquestioning loyalty to some antiquated and forgotten maltreatment?

  It dawned on him then, like the sun breaking free of a morning mist.

  I’ve decided to follow my whims, he’d said.

  Following my whims, he’d told Cain.

  And when the words had fallen from his lips then, he’d believed them to be a fib, an invention of this solitary gunslinger charade, an utter fabrication to get himself on the Earl’s good side.

  Levi gawked at his reflection with wide eyes. He felt sick with the sudden realization. God, it was maddening, how it had hidden there in the depths of his soul and he hadn’t seen it. How could he not have seen it! How irretrievably stupid was he!

  Living for himself was all he wanted and had ever wanted!

  Through this character he’d played for Cain, he had stumbled upon warped self-discovery in the pit of cold, heartless violence that had become his life.

  What left him in an even worse state of utter despair was not that fact, but the chilling idea that he had never adopted a character in his games to garner the Earl’s trust.

  He’d just been himself.

  Levi threw himself up and away from the mirror as if his reflection threatened him. He paced. Thought threatened him, on the contrary. Cold thought divorced from emotion, shoving the bold and stunning truth in his face.

  He had only been himself!

  That was why the guilt was crippling. That was why he could not stop thinking about Cain, about the awful hatred that had darkened his face in Dmitri’s Pavilion and seemed to leave him mindless and trembling. That was why he couldn’t move on from the frozen feelings of that day and carry out these sloppy and irrational plans BLACK had formulated based on Levi’s first accidental run-in with the hated Earl.

  And for the first time in forever, it seemed his heart ached, and he cherished the feeling because he was simply being himself.

  He had to see Cain again.

  He had to speak with him, explain all these things. Desperately and obsessively, he needed to taste Cain’s forgiveness. He needed to know that there was redemption for these things, and he just hoped the revelation had not come too late. He felt manic with the urgency. The truth sank its teeth into him and wouldn’t let him free.

  Love was monstrous, wasn’t it?

  It struck him then, cold and vivid.

  Levi wanted to end this feud once and for all, but Cain needed to agree to it.

  “Levi! Levi, where are you headed?”

  Levi turned in a tense and guilty way as if Eliott could read his thoughts or the inner whispers of his pounding heart. But Eliott was too dense for all that. Eliott knew him well, but surely not that well. Levi stood in the dark hall, all bundled up in his street wear, and he regarded Eliott in impatience.

  “Out,” he replied tartly.

  “What did your father want, earlier today?” Eliott asked, strolling to a stop at Levi’s side and speaking in a low and confidential tone.

  Levi’s stomach tightened. He hated these hellish butterflies, the vicious gnaw of real feelings. “For me to keep an eye on the Dietrichs,” he husked, cutting Eliott a pointed glance. This is my task, that glance said. Stay out of it. “They’ve been digging around about St. Mikael’s.”

  Eliott didn’t seem to catch Levi’s drift. “Perfect!” he breathed, eyes all but dancing excitedly in the dimly lit hall. “You’ve gotten close enough to the Earl, haven’t you? You could distract him, and we could take a peek around his offices and see if we can’t find what he knows.”

  “Whose idea is that?” Levi hissed. “Yours, or the Witch’s? Or William’s, even?”

  Eliott’s face soured. His scowl was deep, uncharacteristic. It only gave away that the idea was not his. It was all Levi had to see to understand. “The hell’s got you all tangled up?” Eliott spat back. “It’s BLACK’s idea,” he stressed, rather bitterly, as if to prove Levi’s recent withdrawal from their work together. “Your father wants this infernal vendetta put to rest, doesn’t he? That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to put your father at ease before the fighting sends him to his deathbed!”

  Levi knew Eliott. He knew Eliott well. He didn’t want to be reminded of Quinton and Quinton’s warped ideas of justice, because he knew in his bones Eliott was not a cruel and devious mastermind like Quinton was. But still Eliott’s offended speech stabbed him right where it hurt the most, and Levi shoved roughly past his cousin and friend. He shook his head, a sneer darkening his face.

  “Right, because the whole world has my father’s best interests at heart,” he cried over his shoulder, ashamed of how spiteful and full of hatred he sounded but unable to stop the venom. “Don’t make me laugh, Eliott!”

  “I guess I’ll just ask you again tomorrow, you moody bastard!” Eliott called after him.

  Levi didn’t reply.

  It was probably for the better if he was asked tomorrow.

  Presently he was filled with a refreshed purpose. Other matters meant more to him at the moment. Like the freeing sense of renewal and his own plan to put the centuries-old feud to final rest.

  SCENE FIVE

  EMILY WINCED.

  Aunt Ophelia dodged the slam of the doors just before she was shut between them, and, just as she had three times already, without another moment’s thought, she jerked them open again and stood in the threshold, hands on her hips.

  “I’ve had enough of this!” she roared.

  Her coarse and unsympathetic voice echoed in the halls. Servants cowered around corners, casting apprehensive glances when forced to pass the scene in the master wing of the house. Emily stood at the nearest turn, with the Persians behind her, whispering in their bubbling brook of a language. Aunt Ophelia’s words were hasty and fierce, and the retorts that met them from inside the master bedroom were not much better.

  “All I’ve asked for is to be left alone, Auntie!”

  “You’ve been slinking around the house like death itself, Cain, and frankly, I’m sick of it! I’m not asking you to let me into your little kingdom of trouble, but good Lord, you can’t just decide to be a moody spoiled child again without any sort of responsibility for it. Your father wouldn’t have had it, and I certainly won’t either!”

  “Then leave me be.”

  “It’s been ten days of this, my beloved nephew, ever since you stormed off the scene in the Pavilion—”<
br />
  “Just leave me be, Ophelia!”

  “We’re a week into December, with many business items to consider before the end of the year. We’ve received letter after letter from the public and other lords, including Lord Ruslaniv, regarding God knows what. They’ve just been added to the rest of the pile in your office because business cannot proceed without the word of the Earl!”

  “I don’t care about any of that right now. I refuse to so much as read the names of those filthy, flea-ridden dogs!”

  “You don’t care? Are you ill? If you’re not delirious, you’re mad, and I’ll be forced to—”

  “Please, Auntie. I’m just in a foul state of mind. There is nothing you can do about it, and it’s not like you’re my nurse or my mother, so just let me be!”

  There it was, a firm and hateful statement cold as the pit of Hell according to Dante. And there, again, the crack of Cain’s palms against the door and the rush of air as he heaved them shut. But this time the movement was halted by the powerful smack of Aunt Ophelia catching the thick, masterfully carved doors in ready hands.

  Emily could see it all from around the corner, hands clasped worriedly against her chin. Cain glowered up at his aunt, and Aunt Ophelia returned the murderous scowl. Cain seemed to falter for a moment. Emily thought about the way he’d been the last week and a half, after he and all of Security had rushed out to Dmitri’s Pavilion at short notice.

  He’d been sullen, and brusque, and vile, eyes damning everyone and everything they observed. He’d pushed one maid to tears with his insufferable attitude. Emily had caught her in the hallway after elevenses, trying to weep in secret, and Emily didn’t want to admit that her fiancé was being such a despicable monster of a man, but it was the truth. He was almost intolerable, and despotic. And he wouldn’t speak to her, and he wouldn’t even look at her. Even when he sighed and touched her hand to bid her good night, he wouldn’t meet her eyes. It pained her.