But he was thinking, thinking. What his bravos needed was time. Time to realize this house was empty, too dark, time to start prowling about it.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” he demanded straining suddenly against the leather, his hands clutching at the air before him. “Why didn’t you do it in the gondola? Why didn’t you kill meee!”
“Quickly, stealthily?” came the familiar husky whisper. “And without explanation? The way your men came for me in Rome?”
Carlo narrowed his eyes.
Time, he needed time. Federico had a nose for danger. He would realize something was wrong. He was only just outside this house.
“I want some wine,” Carlo said. His eyes moved to the table, the bone-handled knife in the fowl quite beyond his reach, the goblets, the flask of brandy on its side.
“I want some wine!” His voice thickened. “God damn you, if you did not kill me in the gondola, then give me some wine.”
Tonio was studying him as if he had all the time in the world.
Then with one of those impossibly long arms he reached out and moved the cup towards Carlo.
“Take it. Father,” he said.
Carlo lifted it, but he had to bend his head to drink. He sucked up the wine, washing out the rank taste, and as he lifted his eyes he felt the dizziness so strong surely his head must have fallen heavily to one side.
He drained the cup.
“Give me some more,” he said. That knife was much too far away. Even if he could somehow have tipped this massive table, heavier than the chair in which he sat strapped and helpless, he could not have caught hold of that knife in time.
Tonio lifted the bottle.
Federico would know something was amiss. He would approach the door. The door, the door.
As he was mounting those steps ahead of her, he had heard some loud noise echoing through this place like the boom of a cannon, and some thought in his mind that a woman should not have been able to throw a bolt over the door like that.
But that wouldn’t stop his men.
“Why didn’t you do it?” he demanded suddenly, the cup in both hands. “Why didn’t you kill me before now?”
“Because I wanted to talk to you,” Tonio answered so softly it was a whisper. “I wanted to know…why you tried to kill me.” His face, which had been smooth and impassive before now, was coloring with the faintest emotion. “Why did you send assassins for me in Rome when I had done you no harm in four years, and asked nothing of you? Was it my mother who had stayed your hand?”
“You know why I sent them!” Carlo declared. “How long did you plan to wait before you came back for me!” He felt his face flushed and wet, the sweat salty on his lips as he licked them. “Everything you did told me you were coming! You sent for my father’s swords, you spent your life in fencing salons, not six months in Naples you slew another eunuch, and in the next year, put a young Tuscan to rout. Everyone was afraid of you!
“And your friends, your powerful friends, would I never stop hearing of them, the Lamberti, the Cardinal Calvino, di Stefano from Florence. And then on the stage you dared to use my name, as if throwing the glove in my face! You lived your life to torment me. You lived your life as if it were a blade thrust forward drawing ever closer to my throat!”
He sat back. His chest was a mass of pain, but oh, it felt good, so good to voice it at last, to feel the words pouring out of him, an uncontrollable stream of poison and heat.
“What did you think? That I’d deny it?” He glared at the silent figure across from him, those long white hands, those claws, playing with the handle of that long, bone-handled knife.
“I gave you your life once, expecting you to stick it between your legs and run with it. But you made a fool of me. God, has one day passed that I have not heard of you, been forced to speak of you, to deny this and deny that and swear innocence and feign tears, and declare platitudes and resignation, and lies without end to it. You made a fool of me. The sentimental one, afraid to shed your blood!”
“Oh, Father, curb your tongue,” came Tonio’s astonished whisper. “You are unwise!”
Carlo laughed, a mirthless dry laughter that made the