She heard the footfall a second before the sharp blow to the side of her head. Her vision spun as she sprawled on the ground, face pressed against a sharp rock and the rough, pungent needles. A kick to her stomach froze her breath, a creaking noise escaping her mouth. She panicked, begging her lungs to work as bright points of light swam lazily in her vision.
She reached for her wrist sheath, and a boot came down, pinning her hand to the ground. “I know your tricks, little whore.”
Her sluggish, aching head recognized the voice. She gasped, grateful her stomach muscles were working again. “Ivan?” He was a dark blot against the sun, standing over her. He dropped to his knees, straddling her, pinning her legs beneath his and holding both her wrists above her head. His face was so close to hers she could see the pocked scars covering his cheeks, the dark roots of hair beneath his skin.
“You think you are special? You are nothing.” He spat in her face, the warm, sticky saliva dripping down her temple and into her hair. “You are a whore, and whores are good for only one thing. You should know your place.” Backhanding her across the face, he grabbed both her wrists in one of his enormous hands, then reached down to his trousers.
Lada tried twisting away, but his weight pinned her legs. Disbelief warred with the disorientation of the blows to her head. She could not be here. This could not be happening. Ivan could not be beating her.
“You will never be one of us,” he said, putting his face right above hers so she could look nowhere else as he wrenched her tunic up and grabbed for her underclothes.
She slammed her head into his nose. In his momentary distraction, she pushed up, knocking him off-balance enough to free one leg. She brought it between his, and he howled in pain, rolling off her. He pushed himself to his feet, and Lada jumped on his back, fastening her legs around his waist and wrapping her arm around his throat. She grabbed her own wrist, pulling the arm tighter. Ivan staggered backward, slamming her into a tree, but she held tight. He clawed at her arm, trying to get a good enough grip to yank it away. She slammed her heel down into his stomach and groin, three sharp jabs.
Finally, he stumbled forward, falling to his knees.
“I am not one of you,” Lada said, her mouth right next to his ear. “I am better.”
Ivan pitched forward and Lada went with him, never relaxing her arm though her muscles screamed for release. Long after he stopped moving, she stayed there. And then she stood and walked away.
This was the third man she had killed.
This time, her hands were clean.
She found Mehmed in her room, waiting for her. Walking past him, she pulled off her tunic and dropped it into the hearth. The low-burning flames picked at it, a slow devouring as the cloth turned black and caught fire. “There is a body in the woods behind the fortress,” she said, watching the tunic contaminated by Ivan’s hands turn to ash.
“What?” Mehmed’s hands hovered in midair, on either side of Lada’s hips.
She turned to face him, carrying the fire in her eyes as a burning shield against everything she saw. “Also, I want to lead my own contingent of Janissaries.”
RADU HAD NEVER IMAGINED how deeply lonely being well liked would be.
At tonight’s feast, he sat only three people down from Murad. A position of honor, one that made him highly visible—and desirable—to all the attending pashas, their pashazada sons, visiting valis, local spahi leaders jockeying for position against rival Janissary leaders, even several powerful beys. People who were, by virtue of their birth, all more important than he was.
But he was here, and they were not, and they all wanted to know why.
Radu smiled, eyes wide and guileless, looking as though he were innocently delighted with everything before him. Halil Pasha sat immediately to his left, though, and it was hard to be aware of anything else.
Halfway through the course of roasted game birds with a delicate, creamy sauce, Halil spoke. “You have not been to visit my son Salih since your dear friend Mehmed left last month.”
Radu swallowed the piece of meat threatening to choke him. There were so many traps in that sentence, so many things to avoid or spin in the right direction. He had no doubt that Halil Pasha viewed him with suspicion, and Halil Pasha was the deadliest man in Edirne. Radu shrugged, offering an embarrassed and pitying smile. “I found that Salih and I do not…share the same interests.”
Halil Pasha’s eyes hardened knowingly as he glanced in Salih’s direction. He was at the far end of the table, barely visible. At every event they had attended together, he had tried to catch Radu’s eye, and he had sent him several invitations to visit, but Radu felt it kinder to do this than to let him think there could be something real between them.