Prince Charming (48 page)

“You are going to have a very painful death, Daniela.” He lunged at her.

She whirled out of the way.

Just then, male voices sounded from the direction of the chamber where the ladder still rested by the wall. Dani paused, realizing it was a couple of the guards. They must have found their way in, coming in answer to her scream several minutes ago.

Orlando turned at the sound, then shot her a searing glare. “When I get back,” he said, “you’re both dead.”

With that, he stalked out of the cell, pausing only to lock them in.

Above them, one of the large rocks suddenly rolled back, letting in a thin shaft of sunlight.

“Your Highness!” a male voice whispered loudly.

Blinking against the light, Dani looked up and saw the last remaining guardsman. The big, burly man kept working, rocking a stubbornly wedged boulder until the opening was large enough for the child to fit through.

Dani wasted no time. “Leo!” She laid her hand on his small shoulder and stared gravely at him. “I’m going to lift you up. Grasp the guard’s hand and he’ll pull you out. Then you must ride with him to the city and tell Don Arturo exactly what happened at the bishop’s. Can you do that?”

The curly-headed boy looked fearfully toward the door. “Orlando said he would cut me up in pieces if I ever told anyone what he did. I think he meant it.”

“He won’t do that, Leo. We’re going to keep you safe. Rafe will protect you from Orlando, but first you have to go help Rafe. Tell Don Arturo everything, yes?”

He nodded bravely. “Yes, ma’am.”

“All right. Now I’m going to lift you up.”

Planting her feet to brace herself, Daniela gritted her teeth and hoisted the boy onto her shoulders. Carefully Prince Leo stood on her shoulders until he could reach the guardsman’s hands, stretched down to grasp his smaller ones. With a mighty heave, the guard pulled Leo up.

A moment later, the guard peered down at her briefly. He threw down a rope to her. Dani paced in the cell below while he went back to work trying to roll the massive boulder out of the way, but though he put all his great weight against it, as the moments passed, he could not widen the opening enough for her to slip through, skinny as she was.

“Daniela, my love!”

She looked fearfully toward the gridiron door, hearing Orlando’s voice echoing to her.

“I’m coming for you now!”

Lifting her chin, she looked up, ashen, at the panic-stricken guard.

“You can’t let him get Leo. The boy’s testimony is the only thing that can save Rafael. Take him back to Belfort—now. There’s no time. Take him now. I don’t want him to—hear.”

“But—”

“Hurry!” she ordered in anguish. “Pull up the rope so Orlando doesn’t see. And…tell my husband that I love him.”

The guard’s face was utterly grim. “Take my weapon.” He tossed his pistol down to her. She caught it in midair, her hope soaring as it landed in her hands. Then he threw down his leather pouch of powder and bullets and sent her a grave salute. “God be with you, Principessa,” he said, then he got up and led Leo away.

She prayed they would make it out safely past Orlando’s hideous traps as she loaded the pistol with shaking hands. She had only one shot at Orlando. She did not expect to have time to reload and fire again. What if she missed some vital part? she thought. Orlando could be wounded, but still strong enough to destroy her. If only she had some means of instantly incapacitating him….

Her heart pounded, her mind ticked, and as she cocked the gun, a diabolical idea suddenly came to her.

She stared from the pouch of ammunition to the iron door.

She could make a terrible trap of her own for Orlando. It was wildly risky, but Orlando was almost supernaturally strong. A bullet might not stop him. She had to protect her unborn child…Rafael’s baby…Ascencion’s future king. She had to survive this, though she knew her chances were next to nil.

It’s my only hope.

Stalking toward the iron door, she dropped to one knee and poured out the gunpowder in a circle about one man-sized pace inside the cell. When Orlando unlocked the iron door and came into the cell, he would have to step directly onto the circle of black powder in order to get to her, and when he did, she would fire her single shot not at him, but at the gunpowder. Struck by the bullet, the powder would catch and make a large, dangerous flare. He would be burned, stunned, and blinded long enough for her to run past him out of the cell and lock him inside. Then Rafael or even King Lazar could decide what to do with him.

What if the shot doesn’t make enough of a spark to catch?

It has to.

Sweat ran down her cheek to think that her life depended on a single bullet.

She could hear him marching toward the cell now. She arranged herself in the far corner of the cavelike cell behind a small outcropping of rock. She rested the muzzle of the pistol on the rock and waited, her heart in her throat, prayers streaming, one after the other, through her mind.

He appeared in the doorway, his eyes glowing with his victory over those two poor guards, and for a moment, his smile was so buoyant and charming, so much like Rafael’s, that she hesitated to pull the trigger, knowing that he could be burned horribly.

Her heart pounding, she watched him reach for the key and unlock the iron door.

As he pulled it open, she took a deep breath. And as he stepped into the cell, she fired at the circle of black powder.

Too late!

He was already stepping past the gunpowder when the flare rose behind him. He let out a bellow of pain and surprise as it threw him forward at the same instant Dani darted for the door, but with a guttural sound of fury, Orlando, on the ground, snaked his arms around her legs and toppled her. She screamed as she went down, fighting him in panic, with the aftermath of acrid smoke choking her throat.

He rose over her in the foggy haze that hung on the air. His granite-carved face was cut and bleeding from his fall. His raven hair and clothes were singed, but on the whole he was unscathed.

Merely enraged.

He called her the foulest possible name.

Thick sulfuric smoke, the aftermath of the flare, rolled through the cell, but above her, through the black cloud, glowed bright, eerie, ice-green eyes. Dani stared up into them, realizing she would never hear her baby’s first cry nor taste Rafael’s kiss again.

Orlando drew back his hand and struck her with all his might.

Dani went sprawling, flattened to the ground.

He picked her up to hit her again.

It was as though explosions were going off inside her head. There were three, four, perhaps five more shattering blows to her head and body. She was too stunned to react, fight, even to cry, limp as a rag doll in his vicious grip.

He is going to kill my baby,
she thought, trying to rally herself to fight as his fist plunged again into her middle. But she saw double from the blows to the head and could not clear her vision, and she just wanted it all to stop, the roaring, ringing noise in her eardrums and the explosions in her head. She could taste her lip bleeding and she knew a tooth on the side was loose. She was semiconscious when he straddled her on the stone ground and seized the collar of her shirt, ripping it open partway down her chest. Orlando was muttering furiously at her, cruel, hateful things.

Then suddenly, distantly, in the dusty single column of sunlight which the Royal Guardsman had widened, she saw the apparition of an angel.

Golden and huge, he stepped closer, looming in silent, gliding power behind Orlando. Her spirit breathed a sigh of relief. She was so glad to see him. She knew he had come to bear her soul away in his arms to heaven.

But as the white light bathed his hair of gold, she caught a glimpse of his hard, angular face, and it was not the countenance of a tender angel of mercy. Beautiful beyond dreams he was, but with earth-green eyes full of celestial wrath, she knew he was an angel of death, sunlight glittering on the jeweled hilt of his raised sword.

Rafael,
she realized just as the thin thread of her awareness clipped gently and sent her floating out into black silence.

With a roar, Rafael drove Orlando back against the stone wall. They sliced at each other with wide, pitiless arcs of their swords.

“I am your brother, Rafe. You can’t kill me,” Orlando panted, parrying his relentless blows.

Remorseless, Rafe’s only reaction was to press him farther back across the cell.

Dani’s scream had drawn Rafe as he had searched the ruined citadel. He’d come across Elan stranded in the pit, and the viscount had sent him in the right direction.

Their fight raged around the stone. Every time Orlando tried to rush toward Dani’s prostrate body to use her as his human shield, Rafe drove him back. With every passing moment, as Orlando’s desperation grew, his face twisted into a more demonic rictus of rage and hatred and pain. He was bleeding and winded, imbued with the strength that came of fighting for one’s life, but Rafael warred on him, his teeth bared, his hair flying over his shoulders. He spun, lunged, and suddenly thrust his sword into Orlando’s black heart, the tip of it biting all the way into the stone behind his bastard brother.

He did not flinch as Orlando died, impaled on his weapon.

For Rafe, the real terror lay nearby in the chillingly still form of his beautiful, gallant, unmoving young wife. Sliding his weapon out of Orlando’s breast with a final snarl, he dropped his sword across his half-brother’s lifeless body.

Crossing the dim, rock-strewn chamber to Dani, he knelt down beside her, a cold knot in his stomach, his heart pounding like it would break.

Gently, he touched her face. He could barely make his voice work. “My love.”

She did not stir.

Steeling himself, he swallowed hard and touched her throat, then closed his eyes. Tears rose behind his eyelids to feel her weak but steady pulse.

He bent lower and scooped her carefully into his arms. He pressed a desperate, lingering kiss to her brow.
Come on, little fighter, you’ve got to fight for me now. Don’t leave me, Dani. Don’t leave me.
He rose with her slight, delicate, bruised body draped limply in his arms, her head resting on his chest. He carried her from that place like the most precious treasure in the world, which was exactly what she was to him. He kissed her cool, smooth forehead and whispered her name, urging her to come back to him, telling her he could not possibly live without her.

Still, she didn’t stir.

  
CHAPTER  
TWENTY

“Mama, she is awake.”

Dani heard the soft, slightly scratchy, feminine voice coming from somewhere very nearby, then a businesslike rustling of skirts.

“Don’t pester her, Serafina. Let her come around slowly,” chided a second woman’s voice.

The first voice had a sparkling quality, like a cheerful bubbling brook, but the second was of a mellower timbre, like autumn sunlight shining through a jar of honey.

“Oh, Mama, isn’t she adorable? No wonder Rafe is so mad for her. She’s like a little porcelain doll lying there. She’s so tiny!” A wistful sigh. “I always wanted a sister.”

“I think she is very young,” said the older woman, her voice tinged with the note of a motherly-sounding frown. Dani felt a soft hand alight on her forearm where it lay limply atop the coverlet.

“I wish she would wake up.”

The hand stroked her arm comfortingly. “Well, she has been through a terrible ordeal, poor, brave little thing.”

There was such rich tenderness in the words that Dani found the strength to open her eyes. The world was fuzzy and distorted, but she could make out two ovals above her which began to clear into faces.

The first distinct feature she made out was a pair of otherworldly violet eyes peering eagerly down at her. She had never seen eyes that color before. She closed her own tightly, ordering them to do their job properly, then flicked her eyes open and found herself staring up at the laughing goddess from the portrait.