There was only one guard at the door, a dark-haired man wearing the Prince’s livery and, at his hip, a sword. He nodded at his two fellows and said, briefly, ‘He’s inside.’
They stopped long enough at the door to unlock the chain and free Damen completely. The chain dropped in a heavy coil, and was simply left there on the floor. Maybe he knew then.
The doors were pushed open.
Laurent was on the reclining couch, his feet tucked up under him in a relaxed, boyish posture. A book of scrollworked pages was open before him. There was a goblet on the small table beside him. At some point during the night, a servant must have spent the requisite half hou
r unlacing his austere outer garments, for Laurent wore only pants and a white shirt, the material so fine it did not require embroidery to declaim its expense. The room was lamp lit. Laurent’s body was a series of graceful lines under the shirt’s soft folds. Damen’s eyes lifted to the white column of his throat, and above that the golden hair, parting around the shell cup of an unjewelled ear. The image was damascened, as beaten metal. He was reading.
He looked up when the doors opened.
And blinked, as though refocusing his blue eyes was difficult. Damen looked again at the goblet and recalled that he had seen Laurent once before with his senses blurred by alcohol.
It might have prolonged the illusion of an assignation a few seconds longer, because Laurent drunk was surely capable of all kinds of mad demands and unpredictable behaviour. Except that it was perfectly clear from the first moment that he looked up that Laurent was not expecting company. And that Laurent did not recognise the guards either.
Laurent carefully closed the book.
And rose. ‘Couldn’t sleep?’ said Laurent.
As he spoke, he came to stand before the open archway of the loggia. Damen wasn’t sure that a straight two-storey drop into unlit gardens could be counted as an escape route. But certainly otherwise—with the three shallow steps leading up to where he stood, the small finely carved table and decorative objects all providing a series of obstacles—it was, tactically, the best position in the room.
Laurent knew what was happening. Damen, who had seen the long, empty corridor, dark and quiet and absent of men, knew also. The guard at the door had entered behind them; there were three men, all armed.
‘I don’t think the Prince is in an amorous mood,’ said Damen, neutrally.
‘I take a while to warm up,’ said Laurent.
And then it was happening. As though on cue, the sound of a sword being unsheathed to his left.
Later, he’d wonder what it was that caused him to react as he did. He had no love for Laurent. Given time to think, he would surely have said, in a hardened voice, that the internal politics of Vere weren’t his business, and that whatever acts of violence Laurent brought down upon himself were thoroughly deserved.
Maybe it was bizarre empathy, because he’d lived through something like this, the betrayal of it, violence in a place he’d thought was safe. Maybe it was a way of reliving those moments, of repairing his failure, because he had not reacted as quickly as he should have, then.
It must have been that. It must have been the echo of that night, all the chaos and the emotion of it that he had locked up behind closed doors.
The three men split their attention: two of them moved towards Laurent, while the third remained with a knife, guarding Damen. He obviously expected no trouble. His grip on the knife was slack and casual.
After days, weeks spent waiting for an opportunity, it felt good to have one, and to take it. To feel the heavy, satisfying impact of flesh on flesh in the blow that numbed the man’s arm and caused him to drop the knife.
The man was wearing livery and not armour, a blunder. His whole body curved around Damen’s fist as it drove into his abdomen, and he made a guttural sound that was half a choke for air, half a response to pain.
The second of the three men, swearing, turned back—presumably deciding that one man was enough to dispatch the Prince, and that his attention was better spent subduing the unexpectedly troublesome barbarian.
Unfortunately for him, he thought just having a sword would be enough. He came in fast, rather than approaching cautiously. His two-handed sword, with its large grip, could cleave into a man’s side and go some way towards cutting him in half, but Damen was already inside his guard and in grappling distance.
There was a crash on the far side of the room, but Damen was only distantly aware of it, all his attention on the task of immobilising the second of his assailants, no thought to spare on the third man and Laurent.
The swordsman in his grip gasped out, ‘He’s the Prince’s bitch. Kill him,’ which was all the warning Damen needed to move. He swung his entire body weight against the swordsman, reversing their positions.
And the knife stroke meant for him ran into the swordsman’s unarmoured sternum.
The man with the knife had pulled himself up and recovered his weapon; he was agile, with a scar running down his cheek under the beard, a survivor. Not someone Damen wanted darting around him with a knife. Damen didn’t let him pull his knife from its grisly sheath, but pushed forward, so that the man stumbled backwards, his fingers opening. Then he simply took hold of the man at hip and shoulder and swung his body hard into the wall.
It was enough to leave him dazed, his features slackened, unable to muster any initial resistance when Damen restrained him in a hold.
This done, Damen looked over, half expecting to see Laurent struggling, or overcome. He was surprised to see instead that Laurent was alive and intact, having dispatched his opponent, and was rising from a position bent over the third man’s still form, relieving his dead fingers of a knife.
He supposed that Laurent had possessed, at the very least, the wits to utilise his surroundings.