“What deception is going on here? Tell me now, and you may just survive this night.”
He released the pressure on my throat a little, and I hunched over, gasping for breath. I eased one hand under my cape, as if holding my chest, still trying to recover, but as I did so, I unsheathed my knife and then sprang away, raising the dagger between us.
“You little deceiver,” he snarled, advancing upon me as if he wasn’t scared at all.
“You are the deceiver, pretending friendship, alliance with the Sienese, supping with them, and then betraying them to the Florentines.” I pulled my sword from the back sheath, even as I dodged a swipe from the Paratore knight, who was aiming for Luca.
I heard Lia gasp, but my eyes remained on my most lethal enemy as he moved to pull an ax from the wall. My eyes widened.
“’Tis a pity, slicing such a delectable creature to bits,” he said, moving toward me again. “But at least I’ll have her sister for myself.”
His words stopped me cold. I stood my ground and let him approach, timing his footsteps, calculating how fast that ax might come, probably gaining speed as it arced downward—
He whirled and brought the ax around, full force. I pulled back just enough, sucking in my breath, feeling it slice through my cape, as Lia screamed.
But as Lord Vannucci pulled up on the ax, intent on bringing it down on my head this time, I made my own strike, slicing through the leather of his pants and cutting his thigh.
He glanced down at his leg and his face became a mask of fury. “You little witch,” he bit out, raising his ax with powerful arms and bringing it down so fast that I felt the wind across my forehead and nose. He didn’t let up then. He continued his attack, bringing it past me, beside me, over me again and again, never letting up, never giving me an opportunity to strike again, as I barely found time to take my next defensive stance.
I bumped into a stool, bent, threw my blade at him and then pulled the stool around to toss it at him. I was getting weaker and more desperate. I was shocked when he ducked in the wrong direction, perhaps thrown off by the fact that his ax was again whirling around in an arc, and the stool slammed into his nose. He let the ax sink to the ground and stumbled backward, holding his blood-spurting nose.
“Gabi!” Lia cried.
I glanced over to her and then to Luca, who was up against the wall, his leg pushing against the hulking knight who was trying to shove his sword into Luca’s throat. Luca’s leg trembled; sweat rolled down his flushed face. The knight’s face was red and sweaty too, determined.
I grabbed another ax off the wall, whirled, and slammed the beastly, heavy thing between the shoulder blades of Luca’s attacker. He recoiled, tottered backward, and fell to the ground, the ax still lodged in his back.
I looked up at Lia, who had her face in her hands, staring at me with wide eyes. And in that moment, I felt torn between two worlds. My sister was gazing at me as if she wondered who had taken control of my body, and I was looking at my hands, dirty, blood spattered, as if they might belong to someone else, indeed. What was I doing? How on earth had I come to killing three men?
“Gabriella!” Luca cried, wrenching me to one side, just as Lord Vannucci swung his ax past me.
I fell against the cell door and looked back to see Luca charge against the man, pushing him across the floor, his long ax of no use in such close proximity. He rammed him into the wall and then punched him across the face. Lord Vannucci was instantly unconscious. He sagged to the floor.
With trembling fingers I pulled the ring of keys from the giant’s belt, afraid that he might not be dead, the ax still lodged in his back, like in some freaky horror movie.
Luca, panting, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and then stumbled over to the stairwell. He held his breath for a second, listening.
“Anyone coming?” I whispered.
“Nay,” he whispered back. “But we best be up top as soon as possible. I doubt the Paratore guards are feigning their own demise, assisting Marcello to open the gates.” He smiled, teasing me.
“Hey!” I cried. “I did my part. ’Twasn’t as easy as it appeared.”
He continued to grin. “I’m certain of it.” His eyes shifted from me to Lia as I finally found the right key, shoved it in and turned it.
Lia came through the door and drew me into a fierce hug.
I hugged her back, then turned to Luca.
“Saints in heaven,” he said, crossing himself even as he shook his head. “We might fight our way out of here, but then Marcello and I will spend the rest of our lives defending the gates, with two ladies as lovely as you behind them.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Ever the charmer, this one. “Sir Luca Forelli, I present my sister, Lady Evangelia Betarrini.”
He crossed the room as if he had all the time in the world, took her hand, looked into her eyes, and then bent to kiss her knuckles, his eyes never leaving hers.
I sighed when I heard Lia’s breath catch. It was enough that I was torn, with my feelings for Marcello. I didn’t need Lia all messed up too.
“Luca,” I said, more sharply than I intended. I paused, eased my tone a bit. “We need to get up to the courtyard, right?”
His eyes sharpened, and the dreamy haze disappeared. My knight was back. He turned, hurried over to the wall of weapons, and began shoving daggers into his belt. I did the same. “Are you decent with a sword too, m’lady?” he asked over his shoulder to Lia.
“Me? Nay,” Lia said.
“She’s an archer, remember?” I said, wrapping a dagger sheath around my calf and tying it off.
“Ahh, right,” he said, eyebrow cocked. “Most excellent.”
“Yeah, yeah, Romeo,” I muttered, grabbing the leather quiver of arrows from him and handing them to Lia. She already had the bow in her hands and was looking at it like it was some museum artifact—which, of course, it could’ve been. “Come on.”
My mind was on Marcello again. We ran up the stairs and out the building from the side, edging around it.
Guards at the top of the castle parapet were charging forward, to the front gates, when we first heard it. The sound was loud enough that it reverberated in our chests, a tremendous pounding. They were here, the Sienese, attempting to storm the gates, to break them with a massive battering ram. The sound became rhythmic within a minute’s time, a tremendous pounding, a battle between trees.
Luca curved an eye around the corner, and it was all I could do to keep myself from throwing him aside and looking for myself.
“Gabs,” Lia hissed, and I immediately flattened myself against the wall again.
A knight ran by, not ten feet above us on the wall. I was sure all three sets of our eyeballs followed his every move. But his attention was outward, not inward.
“Gabriella!” Luca said over his shoulder. He was moving out.
“Stay behind me,” I said to Lia.
But there was little need to urge her. She was like a shadow, so closely did she follow me. I smiled a little smile. We were not going to be separated again.
Luca, hunched over, scurried to an outbuilding twenty feet away, and after a second’s hesitation, we followed suit. But halfway across, I spotted him.
Marcello was under attack.
And in grave danger.
“Lia,” I mumbled.
She straightened, beside me, and her long fingers wrapped around my upper arm. “Is that him?”
“That’s him,” I said. But I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed by fear.
Marcello was trying to keep three knights at bay, and two men were drawing arrows on him from up above.
I was about to watch Marcello die.
“Lia…”
But she was already moving forward, calmly crossing the courtyard like she owned it, ignor
ing Luca’s harsh whispers. Her attention was on the first knight, pulling back his bowstring, taking aim. She paused, sensed the wind, and revised her aim, then let her arrow fly.
I watched it, as if in slow motion, as it shot across the space and split through the first knight’s throat.
But Lia was not done. She was already on one knee, squinting and taking aim at the second as he turned, spotting us. She let the next arrow fly, and the arrow struck him in the chest, driving him backward, over the parapet wall.
“Saints in heaven, I believe I’m in love,” Luca growled, running past me, sword drawn, to go to Marcello’s aid. He glanced from my sister to me with a wink.
Lia was drawing a third arrow, as if she was calmly taking another target in practice, not eliminating the enemy, and Luca’s momentum spurred me on too. I drew my sword and ran after him, shouting, trying to draw the attention of those bent on bringing Marcello down.
Marcello tripped and fell to his back and stilled, watching his opponent as the man drew back his spiked ball.
I stumbled, watching him, and almost went to the dirt myself. But then I saw him dodge the pounding swing and leap to his feet from his back. He smiled and whirled, bringing his sword around, again at play, not yet beaten.
His smile allowed me to take what seemed like my first breath since I spotted him, surrounded. Hope surged through me. We just might get out, I thought. We all might live. Please, God, let us live.
And as I ran forward, as the foreign sound of a warrior’s cry rose in my throat, as I clashed with the first knight and felt the jarring clang of our swords that made me shudder like I’d just taken a jolt from a loose electric wire, as Marcello caught sight of me and mouthed my name—the din too loud to make out the syllables—as Lia took down two more knights from the walls with her arrows, as Luca narrowly saved Marcello from a death blow, leaving me breathless, I knew we were gaining.
Impossibly, we were gaining.
CHAPTER 19
“Look out!” Marcello cried, his voice breaking through the dull sounds that seemed to fill my ears, as if I were underwater, looking at me with wide, frantic eyes. But I couldn’t move out of the way fast enough. The man came from behind, the coward, and I was just turning to parry his strike, but I was too late, too late, too—
The deepest I’d ever been cut before was a kitchen knife incident. And it didn’t require stitches.
This was way worse.
As Luca jumped between me and my attacker and blocked his next blow, I hobbled away, unable to see anything but the blood seeping out into an ever widening pool of crimson at my side, crimson like the Paratore flag. I put my hand to my wound and pulled it away, staring at it, thinking that it was like something from a Halloween store. Fake blood. Like that much blood couldn’t be real.
I lifted my fingers and blood actually dropped from them, plopping to the cobblestones at my feet, exploding, dividing, hopping into ten more.
I didn’t feel any pain for a minute, maybe two. Probably shock, I assessed distantly. I turned, trying to get a better look at the gash.
Okay, huge mistake. I saw my gown, sliced open. Flesh, like a rare steak.
I turned and gasped for breath as Lia ran to me, taking a shoulder roll to dodge raining arrows, then taking aim and shooting again. Would we never reach the end of the Paratore knights? Were they not all supposed to be over at Castello Forelli?
She glanced at me, my wound, and then paled. She dropped her bow, letting it skitter to the ground—was it odd that I couldn’t seem to hear it?—and ran the few remaining paces to me. She took my arm as I went to my knees, fighting the urge to vomit.
“To your back, Gabi, go to your back,” she said.
I did as she said. But how was this supposed to go? I did as she said; I had always been the one to see to her scrapes and bruises, to comfort and care.
But I looked up to her as if she was more mother than sister in that moment. I was desperately afraid. And beginning to feel the searing pain in my side.
“Evangelia! The wall!” Luca screamed.
Two new archers had arrived and were running down the castle allure, alongside the outer parapet. We would be within range in seconds. Another was still shooting. We were lucky he had terrible aim.
Lia closed her eyes as if willing herself to take courage, then checked out my wound. She turned an odd shade of gray-green and looked away, gasping for breath. Then she turned to me, leaned over and took my bloodstained hand, pressing it to the wound. “You hold it there, Gabriella. Hold it!”
I pressed, but all I felt was soft, not muscle. Mushy flesh moving far too much. I could make no sense of it.
Lia was behind me, then. Lifting me by the armpits, dragging me around, behind a well. “Do not stop pressing,” she demanded. “You cannot die on me here, Gabs.”
And then she was gone. To bring down more archers? To help open the gates? I didn’t know. And truthfully, I had a hard time caring, one way or another. The sky was still a dark purple dotted by stars, and I could feel the drumming beat of the battering ram at the front gate of Castello Paratore, as if it were keeping time with my heartbeat, which seemed to be weakening, slowing, along with my ability to process what was happening around me.
I looked up to the stars, so familiar to me from my summers in Toscana. Clytemnestra, Orion. They all began to spin, above me, as if I were watching a time-lapse video of the constellations in motion. Here and there, the dark shadows of those fighting entered my field of vision, but I found them irritating, a distraction. All I wanted to do was watch this swirling pool of starlight above me, a dance that transcended this trifling world of humanity, an homage to God Himself.
God? God? Am I going home now? I want to go home now, I think.…
I was descending—or was it ascending?—when one thought abruptly stopped the skies from swirling.
Lia. I couldn’t leave without her.
And then a second thought.
Marcello.
I don’t remember much from those first days. Flashes of light. Screaming. Tears slipping down my face. And the blessed abyss…White light. Calming. Beckoning. Calling me.
Come…
Marcello’s hands covered my left. I knew him by his smell of wood smoke and cinnamon. But I couldn’t seem to open my eyes. He was praying for me, in Latin. Begging God to save me, to bring me back to him.
But wasn’t it easier if I just left now?
Returned to my own time or…disappeared altogether?
“No, Gabriella,” she was saying.
Lia.
“No. You come back to me now,” she whispered in my ear fiercely. “I cannot do this alone. And Gabi, I can’t get back without you,” she said, her tone rising several notes. “I’ve tried.” Was she crying? “God help me, I went back to the tomb, put my hand on the print. I was so scared, Gabs, so scared. But it’s cold, Gabi. Cold. We need to do it together. I don’t want you to die, Gabriella. I don’t want to grow old without a sister. But Gabi, Gabi! If you leave me now, I’ll be stuck here forever! I can’t get back to Mom! Gabs, Gabi…please. Please wake up. Please….”
It was time. Choose a path.
Succumb to the light and its entrancing pull, filled with peace, joy, completion.
Or drag myself back to fighting my way out, living my life until I glimpsed this gateway again.
It was that clear, that matter-of-fact.
Now? Or later, Gabriella?
Was that God speaking to me? Asking me? Was life and how I lived it—if I lived it—up to me?
Free choice, Dad always said. We all have freedom of choice. Over and over again, minute by minute. How will you live your life? For yourself? Or for others? For something good? For love?
Love.
Evangelia. There was no one I loved more. My sister, so different from
me, and yet one with me.
But it wasn’t her beside me now.
Marcello was by my side. I smelled him again. Felt his hands covering mine. So warm. So warm. Hot. Almost like the cave wall.
My eyes flew open, wondering if I was about to transport back to my own time. Away from him.
And in that moment, I knew I didn’t want to.
My vision, as if I was waking from a deep and long dream, was fuzzy. But bit by bit, from the outside in, each inch of what I could see was clarified. And there he was. Marcello.
His big, brown eyes grew watery, and he cradled my face in his hands and shook his head. “Gabriella. Gabriella?”
I tried to say his name, but my voice was garbled, weak.
Eagerly, he went for a cup of water and then gently eased it to my lips. I felt the water on my tongue, my cheeks. Knew enough to be embarrassed when most of it slipped down my face and neck.
But his eyes were alight, as if I were a miracle on earth.
I pushed what I hoped was some semblance of a smile onto my face, but I could feel my lips cracking as I did it.
Still, he looked at me, not like I was some monster of the desert, bleeding, pale, rising before him as a ghost…but rather like an angel coming to him across the far, green hills.
His lush lips parted in awe as my eyes flicked open. And he blinked with heavy, dark lashes, as if he might be dreaming.
Was I?
Could a guy—a guy like this be that anxious to see me to health, to wellness?
“Gabriella,” he said, winding his warm hands more firmly around mine, so wretchedly cold. “Gabriella,” he whispered, leaning forward and kissing my temple, my forehead, my nose, my eyes. “Gabriella.”
He spoke my name in the same way he might say beautiful or wondrous or amazing and really mean it.
“Marcello,” I croaked, wincing that it came out in a froggy voice in comparison to his princely tone.
But he smiled as if he had heard it as I had meant it.
Marcello. Dedicated. Strong. Mine.
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