What Wild Moonlight (33 page)

Swallowing her disappointment, she moved back to the stage area. She glanced all around her, but saw no sign of Nicholas. He must have looked for her, then returned to his seat for her performance, she reasoned. As she moved toward the stage, Monsieur Remy, clad in a formal, tightly fitting black suit that gave him the unfortunate appearance of a waddling penguin, drew up beside her.

“Good evening, Miss Alexander,” he said brightly. “I understand you’ve made some changes to your show.”

She smiled. “Just a few. One should always keep one’s performance fresh.”

“Indeed.”

He rocked back and forth on his heels as they stood side by side watching the chanteuse and her partner. As Monsieur Remy’s beady eyes darted from his performers to the subtle shifting and rustling going on in the audience, a tight frown curved his lips. It would not be long, Katya guessed, before the singers were looking for another engagement.

“You didn’t happen to see Lord Barrington this evening, did you?” she inquired.

“Who?”

“Lord Barrington.”

“Ah. So that’s his name.” He nodded. “You did know him after all.”

Katya frowned. “What do you mean?”

“The man I met before. I mentioned him to you in my office on the day you applied for this engagement. Do you not recall?”

She stared at him blankly.

“Your parents’ agent,” he said. “He was here again tonight.”

A tight knot of vague, ominous dread coiled in her belly. “Are you certain it was the same man you saw before?” she asked.

“Quite certain. He was here perhaps thirty minutes ago, near the table where you store the props for your performance. I called out to him, but he turned and left before I could speak to him.”

“What did he look like?”

Remy gave her an odd look, then pursed his lips in thought. “He was quite handsomely dressed,” he began. “Formal jacket and trousers, starched white shirt. He was a tall man with dark hair… and I seem to recall that his eyes were dark as well. He looked to be in his early thirties.”

“Can you tell me anything else about him?”

“It was weeks ago that I spoke with the man,” he said with a shrug, “but I remember that I didn’t like his temperament. He was quite curt, quite impatient. As though he were accustomed to ordering people about all day. He was most displeased when I refused to allow him immediate access to your parents’ belongings. But as I informed him, I had already received your letter informing me that you were en route—”

“Thank you, Monsieur Remy,” she said, abruptly turning away as the singers took their final bow and the heavy red velvet curtain fell. The moment the audience’s applause died down, the stagehands began to scurry about setting up her act. Katya placed a restraining hand on the arm of the man who was wheeling her prop table toward her assistants. “Just a minute, please,” she said.

Her gaze moved painstakingly over the table. A prop placed even a fraction of an inch off could make a difference between a smooth illusion and one that appeared fumbling and inept. She ran her fingers lightly over the objects before her, scrutinizing each item. The cups, the balls, the wand, the mirror. Her every instinct told her that something was amiss, but nothing looked as though it had been disturbed.

She silently lifted the gun. It felt cold and heavy in her hand. Carefully cracking open the chamber, she emptied out the bullets into her palm. Three blank cartridges, each of them carefully marked.

Remy came up to stand beside her. “Is there something wrong, Miss Alexander?”

The mellow strains of the sitar reached her as the orchestra began the opening notes of her performance. She was due onstage in a matter of seconds.

She replaced the blanks in the chamber and gave him a small smile, slightly embarrassed at her show of nervousness. “No,” she said. “Everything looks fine.”

“Very good.” He nodded at the stagehand to finish his setup, then gestured for her to precede him. “I believe your audience is waiting.”

She took her place onstage, readying herself for the Birth of the Butterfly, her opening act. Her concern over the man who had been posing as her parents’ agent faded to the back of her mind as she focused her attention on the performance. She moved from illusion to illusion with the graceful fluidity her father had taught her, never hesitating and never faltering, luring her audience into the magical land of the enchantress.

As her show reached its finale, her assistant, Hubert, withdrew the gun from the prop table and held it before the captivated crowd. He selected two volunteers from the audience to join them onstage to inspect the piece and fire the weapon, thus proving its deadliness. That accomplished, the volunteers took their seats.

Hubert took his position upstage while Katya moved downstage. She calmly met his gaze as she lifted the shallow silver bowl with which she intended to catch the bullet he fired. She was ready; she knew exactly what to do. The split-second timing had long ago been perfected: the gun would fire, a backstage hand would ring a bell to give the illusion of a bullet striking metal, she would wave the bullet she currently palmed in her hand at the audience, making it appear as though she had captured the deadly shot in the silver bowl she held. All neat, tidy, and dramatically effective.

Hubert raised the gun.

He pointed it directly at her.

The drumroll intensified as the audience collectively caught its breath.

As she stared down the barrel of the gun, she experienced a sudden tingling sensation in the back of her scalp, a feeling that was part alarm and part intuition. Something was wrong.

He pulled the trigger.

In the millisecond that followed, Katya was dimly aware that the repercussion of the blank cartridge sounded much louder than it normally did.

She felt a strong shove against her chest, as though a mule had kicked her between the ribs. Her breath left her in a rush and her feet flew out from beneath her. She felt herself lifted and propelled backward, as though she’d been picked up and tossed through the air. Her head slammed against the rough wooden backdrop, the room tilted and spun. Darkness overtook her.

His heart in his throat, Nicholas fought his way through the swarming crowds that filled the theater. Nearly all the audience had risen to their feet; their distressed cries and agitated milling about added to the pandemonium that filled the room—and made it that much more difficult for him to reach the stage. At last he made it to the front row and leaped onto the stage.

His gaze went immediately to Katya. She lay motionless where she had fallen, surrounded by panicked assistants, distraught stagehands, and other performers who had rushed to the stage. Her lifeless pose instantly seared itself into his mind; for one heart-stopping moment he stood unmoving, paralyzed by the agonizing certainty that she was dead.

Then he heard a stagehand’s frantic cry for a physician, followed by another’s call for smelling salts. The import of the words slowly sank in. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead. The realization hit him like air to a drowning man, shaking him free from the stupor that had gripped him.

Nicholas shot forward and dropped to his knees at Katya’s side. He reached for her hand and grasped it firmly in his. Once again he was struck by how small and fragile, how very delicate it felt within his larger one. He pressed his fingers against her wrist. Her pulse was strong and regular, its steady beat more reassuring than words could be.

His gaze moved searchingly over her form. Her skin was pale and her breathing was shallow, but mercifully there was no sign of blood. He was vaguely aware of someone kneeling beside him, then of a stranger’s hand reaching to brush Katya’s hair from her face.

“Don’t touch her,” Nicholas snarled instinctively.

The stranger drew back, an expression of appalled shock on his face. “I’m a physician,” he stammered. “Dr. Ellwood.”

Nicholas slowly absorbed the information, then gave the man a curt nod, gesturing for him to proceed.

“There’s a cot in the back,” a nearby voice suggested.

At Dr. Ellwood’s nod of assent, Nicholas gathered Katya in his arms and carried her to the backstage dressing room indicated by the stagehand. He set her down gently on the narrow cot and took a step backward, allowing the physician room to perform his examination. As Dr. Ellwood’s long, slender fingers gently poked and prodded, Katya suddenly awakened, struggling against the physician as though terrified for her life. Nicholas instantly stepped forward to soothe her, but his ministrations seemed to only intensify her agitation.

A heavy dose of laudanum finally quieted her enough for Dr. Ellwood to complete his examination and—to Nicholas’s overwhelming relief—report that Katya would recover unharmed from her mishap. Apparently a real bullet had filled the chamber of the gun she used for her finale, but rather than striking her directly, the shot had ricocheted off the silver bowl. The impact of the bullet striking the bowl had deeply bruised her sternum and knocked her flat. After gaining the physician’s assurances that he would pay a visit tomorrow to check on her condition, Nicholas called for his coach to be brought around to the backstage entrance.

He sat with Katya bundled limply in his lap, staring out over the moonlit landscape as they left the principality and made their way up the steep slope of the Moneghetti. Her breath fell softly against his chest, low and steady. Amazing how simple the act of breathing was, and yet how profoundly comforting.

As he traced his palm absently over her arm he felt suddenly unburdened. Since his arrival in Monaco he had been cursed with an inability to see the situation clearly, to separate the important facts from the unimportant. His mind had been filled with too many questions. What if it was Richard who was out to destroy him? Had Allyson been involved? Who else would want to see him ruined? But now the questions all faded away. The meaningless chatter that had clouded his thoughts, all the contingencies and what ifs, suddenly cleared, leaving him with a sense of astonishing clarity and resolution.

Someone had tried to kill Katya.

The details of who and why no longer mattered.

It was time for the macabre little game to come to an end.

Katya felt as though she were floating, surrounded by a deep, misty haze. A familiar, masculine scent drifted around her; a cool expanse of starched linen brushed her cheek. She felt wonderfully secure, if somewhat groggy. As her senses wakened, she realized that, in a sense, she truly was floating. Nicholas was carrying her in his arms.

Dull curiosity spread slowly through her. Where was she, and why was he carrying her? She knew the answer was right before her, but reaching it was like fighting her way to the surface of an icy lake. The closer she came to it, the more conscious she was of the terrible ache in the center of her chest—worse every time she drew breath—and the steady pounding that filled her skull.
No, thank you
, she decided. Definitely not worth the effort. She closed her eyes and let out a contented sigh as she burrowed in against Nicholas’s chest, letting herself slip back into the foggy haze.

When she woke next, she was dimly aware of her surroundings for the first time in what felt like days. She was in bed in her chamber in Nicholas’s villa. Pale peach light filtered in through the windows. Dawn? she wondered. Or was that the soft glow of twilight? Her gaze skirted the room, then came to a stop as she saw Nicholas.

He was slumped over in a small chair that had been pulled up next to her bed. His eyes were closed and his breath was low and even, as though he had just dozed off. As she studied the chair—a fragile, feminine chair that had been upholstered in an apple-green silk damask—it occurred to her that he must be uncomfortable. If he wanted to sleep, surely he would be more comfortable in bed with her. She lightly tapped his knee to wake him and tell him so.

His ebony eyes instantly snapped open. He straightened in his seat, his gaze searching her face with somber intensity. “Welcome back,” he said, then he gently asked, “How do you feel?”

“As though I’ve been run over by a team of wild horses,” she replied honestly.

A hint of a smile touched his lips. “I would imagine so.”

“What time is it?”

He pulled a watch from his pocket and gave it a cursory glance. “Nearly five.”

That hardly helped. “Morning or evening?”

“Morning.”

She nodded. Her speech, she noted, was slightly slurred; her tongue felt thick and heavy.

He reached for her hand and held it in his. “Do you remember what happened?” he asked.

Katya found she had to concentrate intently in order to reply. Her thoughts seemed to tumble through her mind in a completely random manner, tossing about from one point to the next with no coherence whatsoever. But despite her mental disarray, a feeling of vague alarm and foreboding hung over her. There was something very important she needed to remember, something fundamental, but it hung just out of her reach. The more she tried to focus on that elusive memory, the more it skirted out of her grasp.

Letting the thought go for the moment, she struggled to summon a reply to his question. “I was onstage,” she said slowly. “Something went wrong.”

“You were performing the Silver Bullet, do you remember?”

The Silver Bullet. Yes. She remembered standing onstage: the audience, the curtains, the music. She remembered hearing the drumroll that always accompanied her finale as Hubert pointed the gun at her. She remembered feeing a sharp, searing pain in her chest. Then nothing. Blackness. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I remember.” She struggled to sit up, but found to her irritation that her arms were too weak to support her.

“Easy,” Nicholas soothed, reaching forward to assist her into a sitting position. He propped a pillow up behind her. “Better?” he asked.

She nodded. Her limbs felt like rubber, her chest ached, her head was pounding, and her thoughts were totally muddled. But given her circumstances, she felt remarkably well.

“Dr. Ellwood examined you last night,” he said. “All things considered, you were damned lucky. Evidently there was a live bullet in the chamber. Fortunately it ricocheted off the bowl you were holding. Although it didn’t penetrate the bowl—or you—the force of it was hard enough to knock you off your feet. You have an awful-looking bruise right here,” he paused and lightly touched his fingertips to a spot just over her heart, “but there doesn’t appear to be any swelling and your ribs aren’t fractured. You hit your head when you fell and gave yourself a pretty nasty bump, but that appears to be the extent of your injuries.”