Free Shadow Keepers: Midnight by J. K. Beck Page B

croak. “Father, no.”
    But Albertus’s attention was only on Tiberius. “Do you think I don’t know what passed between you and my daughter in the stable? Do you think I don’t know how you have despoiled her?”
    “Father, please.” Caris stepped toward him, her hands out, imploring. She saw him pause, then turn and look at her. The harshness left his face then, replaced by the soft features of the father who’d cuddled her upon his knee as a child. “Father,” she whispered, then ran to him when he held out his hand, realizing too late that she was a fool to trust him.
    He grabbed her wrist and tugged her to him, his knife at her throat.
    Two guards flanked him, crossbows now raised, wooden stakes loaded and pointed at Tiberius. “We will walk out of here,” Albertus said. “And you will walk away from my family and my daughter. You are both fortunate Giancarlo will still have her. You willmarry at dawn,” he said to Caris, “and I will be well rid of you.”
    Her body went cold and rigid. She tried to speak, but there were no words. She told herself it didn’t matter—Tiberius wouldn’t let this happen to her. He wouldn’t let the marriage happen, wouldn’t let her father speak to her thus.
    And when Tiberius spoke, it was as if every hope inside her had swelled, and she clung to his words like the last leaf of autumn clinging fast to a tree.
    “You are taking her nowhere,” he said.
    “Dead or married,” Albertus said. “Do you think that at this moment I care how my daughter leaves you? But she
will
leave you.”
    “Kill her, and I will kill you.”
    “You won’t,” Albertus said. “There is a bond between us.”
    “No,” Tiberius said. “There isn’t.”
    For a moment, Caris saw fear flicker on her father’s face, but it passed. “Kill me, then. But the girl will already be dead, and you possibly along with her,” he added, nodding at the marksmen beside him. “Let us leave, and she lives. And so do you.”
    Caris held her breath as Tiberius turned to look at her. “I would rather be dead than away from you,” she said.
    “And I cannot bear the thought of you lying cold in a grave.”
    “Then it is settled,” her father said. “We go.”
    He started to turn away, the matter resolved, then lifted his hand as if gesturing for his men to follow.
    They moved in unison, firing their crossbows at Tiberius as a scream of abject horror echoed through the cave.
    It was her own, of course, and as Tiberius fell, one of the stakes having flown straight and true to his heart, so did she, prostrate on the ground as the man she loved died, and the horror of her life to be bloomed red and fetid in front of her.

Caris sat at Antonio’s bedside, watching his sleeping face. A tear trickled down her cheek, and she bent over and kissed his forehead. “I shall miss you, little brother.”
    She closed her eyes and breathed deep, her body numb, her mind fuzzy. She was sleepwalking now, so unlike the flurry she’d been in when they’d first returned, ignoring her pain and her tears as she rushed through the palazzo to the healer’s apartments. She’d tugged the old man out of bed and had stood in his chamber while he thrust his arms into a dressing gown, all the while urging him to hurry, hurry, her brother needed his tending.
    Now she knew that Antonio would be all right. It would take time, but he would survive. The knowledge soothed her. At least it had not all been for nothing.
    Her heart was about to burst in her chest, so full was it of more unshed tears. She’d been unable to cry in front of her father. She’d been forced to sit under his watchful eye and listen to his talk of Giancarlo as she watched in her mind, over and over again, the way the man she loved had fallen, the stake going straight into his heart.
    She gasped, her breath a raspy shudder. “Tiberius,” she whispered, wishing that his name could conjure him. It couldn’t, of course. Her dreams of him had died with