He tried to hold her back, but she just reached past him and pulled the latch. He almost fell as the door opened behind him. She closed the door behind herself and locked it.
“My lady,” he said. “Stop. Please.”
“Oh yes, I’ll stop,” she said. “When it pleases me. Or should I say, after you please me?”
“I told you, we’re finished. If my father finds out—”
“Oh, bugger your father. He’s as much of a bumbler out of bed as he is in it. He’ll never know.”
“Your husband is just downstairs—anyway, it doesn’t matter, Trudana. You know what I’m here for.”
“If your father wants his globe back, he can come get it himself,” she said. She put her hand on the front of his breeches.
“You know he couldn’t come see you here,” the prince said. “It’d be a slap in my mother’s face.”
“He gave it to me. It was a present.”
“It’s magic. My father thought it was just a stone, but Khalidor demanded it. Why would they do that if it weren’t—no!” he slapped her hand away as she tugged open the laces.
“I know you like it,” the duchess said.
“I do like it. But we’re finished. It was a mistake, and it will never happen again. Besides, Logan is waiting for me downstairs. I told him what I was doing.” The lie came out easily. Anything to get away from this woman. The worst of it was how much he had enjoyed her. The woman might be ugly, but she was more skilled than almost any of the women he’d bedded. Still, waking up and seeing her the first thing in the morning was more than he wanted to think about ever again.
“Logan’s your friend,” she said. “He’ll understand.”
“He’s a great friend,” the prince said. “But he sees things in black and white. Do you know how uncomfortable he was with me leaving him downstairs while I came upstairs with my father’s mistress? I need you to get the gem. Now.” Sometimes, he could just thank the gods that Logan was a known prig.
“Fine,” she said peevishly.
“Where is it? Your husband could come in any second.”
“My husband just came home today.”
“So?”
“So whatever else he is, the pig’s faithful, so he’s practically burning with passion whenever he gets back from a diplomatic assignment. He’s recuperating downstairs. The poor dear, I think I exhausted him.” She laughed, and it was a harsh, callous sound. “I kept imagining it was you—” With what she must have imagined was a seductive look, she shrugged her shoulders and the front of her dress fell open. She rubbed up against his body and tugged at the laces of his breeches again.
“Trudana, please. Please keep that on. Where is it?” He didn’t even look at her body, and he could tell it infuriated her.
“As I was saying,” she said finally, “I knew you’d be here tonight, so I gave the globe to my maid. She’s just two doors down. Are you satisfied?” She hitched up her dress and walked to her dresser. She looked at herself in the mirror.
The prince turned without saying anything. He’d thought this was going to be easy, that he was going to make his father owe him a huge favor for doing practically nothing. Now he saw that Trudana Jadwin was going to be a lifelong enemy. Never again, he promised himself. I will never sleep with a married woman again.
He didn’t even pay any attention to the sound of a drawer sliding open. He didn’t even want to look at Trudana. He wasn’t even going to stay long enough to lace up his breeches. One second more was one second too many.
His hand was on the latch when he heard the rapid shuffle of her feet. Then something hot lanced into his back. It felt like a wasp sting. Then Trudana’s body crushed into him, and he felt the stinger sink deeper. His head smacked against the door in front of him, and he felt the sting again.
It wasn’t a sting. It was too deep. He gasped as roaring filled his ears. There was something wrong with one of his lungs. He wasn’t breathing right. The stabbing continued and the roaring receded. The world took on a startling clarity.
He was being stabbed to death. By a woman. It was embarrassing, really. He was the prince. He was one of the top swordsmen in the realm, and this fat-assed old woman with saggy, uneven breasts was killing him.
She was breathing, practically gasping in his ear, the same way that she had when they made love. And she was speaking, crying as if every stab were somehow hurting her. The self-pitying bitch. “I’m sorry, oh, oh, I’m sorry. You don’t know what he’s like. I have to I have to I have to.”
The stabbing continued, and it irritated him. He was already dying, his lungs filling with blood. Coughing, he tried to clear them, which succeeded in spraying blood on the door, but his lungs were mincemeat and blood just rushed back into the gaps.
He slumped, hit his knees in front of the door, and she finally stopped. His vision was going dark, and his face slumped forward into the door.
The last thing he saw, through the keyhole, was an eye on the opposite side of the keyhole, emotionlessly watching him die.
He found the door with no problem. It was locked, but he picked it in seconds. Let her be asleep. Please.
Easing open the door of the cramped room, Kylar found himself staring at an oversized meat cleaver. It was being held by Elene. She was very much awake.
In the darkness, Elene obviously didn’t recognize him. She looked torn between screaming and hacking at him. Her eyes locked on the sword in his hand. She decided to do both.
Slapping her hand with the flat of his bollock dagger, Kylar launched the knife out of her grip. He dodged a grasping hand and got behind her in a moment, clapping a hand over her mouth.
“It’s me. It’s me!” he said as he had to twist this way and that to dodge flying elbows. He couldn’t hold a hand over her mouth and pin both arms and stop the kicks she was aiming at his groin. “Be quiet or your mistress dies!”
As she seemed to regain her sanity, Kylar finally let Elene go. “I knew it!” she said, furiously but quietly. “I knew I couldn’t trust you. I knew it was just going to be you.”
“I meant your mistress will die because your noise will bring the wetboy here.”
Silence, then, “Oh.”
“Yes.” In the dim moonlit room, he couldn’t be sure, but Kylar thought he saw her blushing.
“You could have knocked,” she said.
“Sorry. Old habit.”
Suddenly awkward, she picked up the cleaver off the bed and put it under her pillow. Looking down at her nightgown, which was disappointingly chaste, she seemed embarrassed. She grabbed a robe and turned her back while she pulled it on.
“Relax,” Kylar said as she turned back to face him. “It’s a little late for modesty. I saw your statue. You look good naked.” Why had he twisted that last bit to make her sound like a whore? Even if she was sleeping with the duke, what choice did she have? She was a servant in the man’s house. It wasn’t fair, but Kylar still felt betrayed.
Elene folded as if he’d hit her in the stomach.
“I begged her not to display it,” Elene said. “But she was so proud of it. She said I should be proud too.”