Page 60 of Thus with a Kiss I Die

With a hand on my shoulder, Cal broke into my despair. “I partially shut the window and sent them both away.” Going to his grandmother, he leaned over the bed and smoothed her hair back from her forehead. “I don’t understand how this could happen. She’s not one to allow a thief to harm her.”

As I stepped back, I saw the thing I hadn’t noticed before. Her cane with its heavy head rested close to her hand. Inspiration’s lightning flared around me. “What if it’s not a thief?”

“What?” Cal was clearly startled. “What?”

I gripped his arm. “I hadn’t thought . . . I was in such anguish. . . But only last night, we held the séance and hoped the word would spread that we were investigating Elder’s murder. The word has spread, indeed.”

“How do you know that?”

“Lysander. He heard it this morning in the kitchen of the Marcketti. Oh! And Friar Laurence also knew.”

“So soon!”

“Could we have frightened the killer so much that he watched until Pasqueta left to make her a poultice, entered Nonna Ursula’s chamber, and—”

“You’re saying he was within the palace? He didn’t break in, he . . . broke out?”

CHAPTER32

“Her cane rested on the bed with her, close at hand. She didn’t grasp it and land a blow because—”

“She did indeed know her attacker,” Cal finished my sentence. His face cleared of all emotion.

I began to understand him. He wouldn’t reveal emotions or thoughts until he’d contemplated them, worked through the possibilities in his mind—and maybe not even then. I added an important component to my theory. “Her serving maids say nothing is missing.”

He strode to the window and looked out once more to the damage on the bars.

I joined him. “Could a man have got in through such a small hole?”

“Perhaps. But a man couldn’t wriggle in.”

“Perhaps a boy. Or a woman?”

He nodded, a bare movement of the head, but he had observed the surroundings and he’d decided the intruder had invaded and attacked from within. “She knew them all. My guard. Our household. She believed them loyal, and she believed she was indestructible.”

“That makes sense. That’s why whoever it was, was able to hurt her . . .” My voice wavered.

Cal, bless him, gathered me close. Not a heated embrace, but one of comfort, and I put my forehead on his chest and my arms around his waist and gave back the solace in equal measure. I had so much family—so many boisterous, emotional, loud siblings and grandparents and uncles and cousins—and Cal had so few people he cherished. Like the men, he had never had a time when Nonna Ursula hadn’t been a force in his life, and he loved her, would have given her anything to keep her happy until the natural end of her days. He’d failed in the most basic way, and while I longed to reassure him, I knew nothing I could say would change his unwavering sense of responsibility. His love for her made him all the more bound to her safety and happiness, and I’d do anything to help bring her back to us.

Yet if there was a way, not even Friar Laurence knew it.

Trying to give comfort, I tightened my grip on Cal, and felt him flinch. Pulling back, I observed him more closely. Exhaustion ringed his eyes, and his mouth had a tightness I hadn’t observed before. The tightness of pain.

“Now that we’re alone”—except for an unconscious woman and her ghost son—“I can ask, what injuries have you amassed in the battle?”

“I’m uninjured.”

Yeah, sure. “Uninjured as those men were out there?”

He flexed a shoulder in what might have been a shrug, but wasn’t.

I reached up to the seams of his jacket. “Let me see.”

“It’s nothing.”

“I wasn’t asking. Let me see.” He was on the verge of refusing, and I didn’t want to push him into that corner. Hastily I said, “Must I undress you? For I tell you, my prince, I’ve wrestled many a reluctant three-year-old sibling into clothes, and wrestling an injured, full-grown man out of his garments provides no challenge to me.”

My mostly proper prince shook his head. “We are unchaperoned.”