At least I could die knowing the two people who had loved me most had died loving me, died after saving me.
“Rodger would do the deed, wouldn’t you, son?” he asked conversationally.
A shiver ripped out my spine.
Mrs. White whimpered, but Rodger only adjusted his hold, boyish face obscured partially by shadows, but the wedge of his smile even more white in the dark.
“Happily,” he responded.
“Unfortunately, that’s not quite what we have planned,” Noel said, as he adjusted and reached beneath his chair to produce another handgun, this one antique and so ornate it didn’t seem functional.
“Do you know how to use one of these, dear Ruthie?” he asked.
I stared back and forth between the weapon and the man with growing horror. “No.”
“Little filthy liar,” he crowed happily. “You killed Giuseppe di Carlo with a gun. Oh? You thought I didn’t know. I told you knowledge is power, Ruthie, and I have both in spades. Now, get up like a good girl and play this game for Rodger and me.”
My entire body shook as Noel helped me to my feet, and I gagged as he pressed the cold, heavy weight of the gun into my hand. My stomach ached with sharp agony. My vision swam as Noel stepped to my side and dug the point of his knife into my side over a kidney. Rodger handed his mother a small gun and stepped to the side with the barrel of his weapon still at her temple.
We were pawns on the board of a father and son chess game. Noel wanted to teach Rodger what it was to sacrifice his queen.
“What does he get by doing this?” I asked softly, already knowing the answer.
“Why, my dear,” Noel purred into my ear. “He gets you.”
I swallowed around my heart where it sat lodged painfully in my throat and tried to steady my hands as they clasped over the handle of the gun.
“What’s the game exactly?”
“You have the opportunity to kill Mary right now with no opposition,” Noel explained, his voice almost wispy with delight, a man high on something less tangible than a drug. Something made of pure, distilled evil.
“What if I don’t shoot her?” I asked.
He tsked. “Then your poor soft heart will be the death of you, as it is the death of every weak being, because then Mary will kill you to save her own life, won’t you, Mary?”
Mrs. White only shook harder, sweat pouring down her face like tears.
“You see, Mary knows what it takes to succeed in life. She gave me her good years, complete access to her body so I could do simply unspeakable things, and she gave me a son. She worked hard to live a long life, and I’ve no doubt, if given the opportunity awarded by your cowardice, she will work hard again to prolong it further.”
“I won’t kill her for you,” I vowed.
I wouldn’t.
I didn’t care that Mrs. White was a traitor to womankind and that she deserved to die for all the horrible things she had facilitated on Noel’s behalf.
I wouldn’t stain my soul by killing a woman without recourse, even one who was the wife of the devil himself.
“So be it,” Noel accepted easily. “I’d hoped to play with you for years to come, but that new slave is fresh enough to last for a while. You don’t have anyone left who will miss you, so I can bury you in the maze with the rest of the women.”
“Rest of the women?” I breathed as my heart started to race with anticipation.
Was this it?
The moment before my probable death and the drugged tea or his arrogance was finally kicking in. Was Noel finally going to confess his crimes?
“Funny, isn’t it? To think that Alexander spent so many years searching for the answers to his mother’s death, and she was buried in the backyard the entire time.”
Noel’s wicked laughter echoed through the high-ceiling room. It juddered through me like an electric shock, resettling my brain chemistry and lighting up my nerves.
“The slaves, I understand,” I said, surprised by the calm in my voice. “But your wife?”
“She was slumming with the dago and conspiring to run away with my sons straight into his filthy arms,” Noel’s face was twisted up like hot metal, seared with ugly hatred. “It had to end. Just as I had to end the baby Alexander so foolishly planted in your belly.”
The imprint of the two hands that had pushed me down the ballroom steps and killed our baby burned at my back.
My body went hollow with despair, and then all of the sudden, filled to the brim with lava-like fury that densified into stone.
“I’m going to kill you,” I told him through my teeth.
He laughed. “You can try, but if you don’t kill Mary right now, you’re the one who will be dead.”