Page 40 of Vengeance in Venice (Murder in Moonlight #6)

C onstance filled her lungs to scream.

“Don’t,” Pellini said casually. He was pointing a pistol at her heart.

For a moment, she stared at it, her mouth closing, a sense of unreality washing over her. After the first jolt, she didn’t even seem to be frightened.

“So you have come to kill me,” she said in Italian. “Why?”

The question seemed to surprise him, but in fact, she really wanted to know, although keeping him talking was also a reasonable tactic to extend her life. He advanced upon her, the pistol steady in his right hand.

“You don’t know, do you?” she said pityingly.

“You just do what Lampl says, regardless. He won’t even care that you hang for it.

You are a loose end he will need to tie off for his own safety.

If he survives. Do you want to die? Because you will, if you shoot me.

Whoever let you in, my other servants will break down the door so fast that you will never escape. ”

That didn’t trouble him. He shrugged. “I leave by the window.”

So he would talk. That was good. “But how long would you remain free? A hunted man? Neither the Venetians nor the Austrians will stand for blatant murder. It is idiocy to shoot me.”

“I don’t want to shoot you,” he admitted, and the first, dangerous sparks of real hope ignited within her.

Too soon, as it happened, for he was taking something else from inside his coat. She remembered the feel, the smell of that coat when he had dragged her through the streets, his powerful fingers crushing her arm…

She blinked at the flask in his left hand. What on earth…?

Understanding iced her blood, even as he grinned at her, and she took an involuntary step backward.

“You are right,” he said. “I don’t want to shoot you, though I will. I want to have a drink with you.”

Somehow, she recovered her dignity and curled her lip. “Don’t be his dupe. Everyone knows I was poisoned before. If I die now, they will know it was murder. Let Lampl do his own dirty work. As he did before.”

“You’ll feel different once you drink,” he mocked. In a practiced movement, he unstopped the flask one handed and closed the distance between them.

Pride kept her still, her chin tilted in supreme contempt. “I will not drink.”

“You will,” he said with chilling certainty, and seized her round the neck with his left arm, the flask bumping against her jaw, while the pistol was pressed to her head, paralyzing her.

“Face it, signora. One way or the other, you die, and I don’t care which.

The drink is easier on everyone, and that’s my instruction, but… ”

Is this it? Is this where it ends? Without Solomon… Oh, my poor Solomon…

While the wild, pointless thoughts flashed through her mind, she had shut her mouth tight, like a child refusing food, her whole body stiff with resistance, straining against him.

It wasn’t bravery, it was mere instinct, and if it caused her to be shot—surely that was no less messy than dying from whatever filthy poison he would force down her throat…

And suddenly she didn’t care. If she had to die, she would do it fighting to the end so that Solomon was proud of her, so that he would know she’d tried to stay alive, for him.

Her resistance irritated Pellini. Despite his somewhat terrifying strength, he had too many things to hold on to—her wriggling head, the flask, the pistol.

He needed two hands to force the contents of the flask on her with any efficiency.

He hadn’t thought this through, she realized, but relied on fear of the gun to make her compliant.

In fact, her fear of the poison was probably greater, though her body was certainly reacting without her permission.

And there were footsteps, voices outside the drawing room. Someone knocked.

Pellini swore beneath his breath, and the pistol slid off her temple while he tried to wrestle the lip of the flask back on to her mouth. The pistol didn’t fire. No projectile ended her life in an instant.

Quite suddenly, she realized the pistol was only a threat. He needed her to drink.

“Signora!” called a servant from behind the door. The handle turned and rattled and the voices grew frightened.

But Constance knew she had to save herself. She struggled and strained even harder—but only for an instant. She went suddenly limp in Pellini’s hold, forcing him to support her entire weight, and as he desperately adjusted his grip, she snatched the flask from his fingers and wrenched herself free.

She staggered backward away from him, just as something crashed against the door and hurtled inside to the distinctive sound of splintering wood.

Inevitably, Pellini turned to face the new threat. Constance whipped back her arm and hurled the flask with all her might.

It struck Pellini somewhere near his right ear. Liquid splashed over him and over the carpet as the flask fell and bounced on the floor. Pellini stumbled. One knee buckled, and the pistol fell from suddenly nerveless fingers. Several people rushed on him at once.

Constance blinked. They were her manservants. All of them. And straightening from among them, Sebastian Kellar met her gaze and gave a wry yet satisfied smile.

“So sorry to intrude upon you at this hour,” he said politely, sidestepping the scramble between them. “I saw you from my boat, at the window, and had the feeling something was amiss.”

Constance had the insane desire to laugh.

Below, the front door slammed, and more footsteps clattered across the tiled foyer.

“Constance!” Solomon shouted, and stupidly, unforgivably, though at least silently, she began to cry.

She blundered past everyone, and abruptly he appeared in the doorway, disheveled and panting.

In one bloody hand, he carried a jeweled, long-bladed dagger.

None of that mattered because the chest she threw herself against was solid and strong.

Fear was still fading from his face as she gripped it, gasping, between her hands to be sure.

His arms enfolded her in warmth and reality, and just for an instant, nothing else mattered.

*

“What an eye,” Kellar said, his face alight with amusement and admiration as he gazed upon Constance. “Quite deadly accuracy, I assure you.”

It was an hour after Pellini’s capture, and the would-be assassin had been taken away by Foscolo’s men, who had turned up very shortly after Solomon.

Solomon had washed and changed, and Constance had dressed his wounds.

The cut to his fingers was long, but not deep enough to need stitches, so he now sat beside her on their favorite sofa looking more or less his usual, elegant self.

His bandaged hand added a touch of dash.

Whatever had been in Pellini’s flask, it had been well scrubbed from the carpet and a chair it had sprayed over on its way down.

Constance could no longer smell it, possibly because the windows were wide open and she was desperately interested in all everyone had to say.

Giusti, who had arrived with Foscolo, had told his tale, and so had Solomon, partially, at least. Kellar had just finished his.

Foscolo eyed Solomon. “You should be careful.” He was only half jesting.

“Oh, I am.”

“I’m sorry,” Foscolo said abruptly. “It never entered my head he would try to use that to kill you too.” The dagger lay on the low table between them, winking in the splashes of sunlight that came and went through the clouds. “Perhaps it should have. I think it was symbolic.”

“The way he ran at me,” Solomon said, speaking for the first time about the fight, “I thought he meant to impale himself on it. That would have been symbolic, too.”

“I received word while you were changing,” Foscolo said.

“Lampl’s body was pulled out of the Grand Canal.

He is indeed dead. It will all be covered up, of course, and there will be someone else to take his place.

But his guilt is known now, all over Venice.

The Austrians will not deny it, just make the point that he acted alone and against their law. ”

“So you will be safe?” Giusti asked.

“Yes, I think so. Anything else would be too much of an embarrassment for the government.” Foscolo turned to Constance. “How did Pellini get in here?”

“I think we have a spy in the household who let him in—possibly with reluctance, for all the servants helped capture him in the end.”

Foscolo sighed. “It was not a great plan, was it?”

“It did what we intended,” Constance said, prepared to be kind now that the danger was past. “If not quite how we intended it.”

“You are generous,” Foscolo said moodily.

“She is,” Solomon agreed.

Foscolo rose to his feet and lifted the dagger from the table. He wrapped it in the cloth Constance had found for the purpose and hid it beneath his coat. “A less public progress through the streets, this time.”

Solomon’s face darkened along the blades of his cheekbones, and Constance realized with astonishment that he was blushing. He must, in fact, have looked a demented and terrifying figure, rampaging through the streets, quite unaware of the dagger still clutched in his bloody hand.

“I thought I might show it to Signora Savelli,” Foscolo said. “She deserves to know the outcome of all this.”

Giusti glanced up. “Are you going there now?”

“On my way back to the office.”

Giusti stood up, almost but not quite casual. “I’ll come with you,” he said.

Constance smiled.

When they had gone, Kellar picked up his wine glass, twisting the stem absently in his fingers. “What will you do now? Shake the dust—or the water!—of Venice from your feet and move on?”

Solomon’s good fingers wrapped around Constance’s hand, and she smiled because she understood. Somehow, the magic was still there, and they would not waste it. “Oh no. It is too soon to leave.”

Kellar’s lips quirked. “You are a rare and brave couple. Don’t get into any more mischief while I am gone.”

“You are leaving Venice?”

“I am required in Rome. At the Vatican. I depart tomorrow.” He finished his wine and set down the glass in a decisive sort of way.

Still, he hesitated, before speaking with unusual diffidence.

“After that, I shall be on leave. I had thought of a visit to England. I wanted to ask you—would it be…advisable to call upon your mother?”

How to answer that? He was the first man Constance had encountered who had ever looked on her mother through a lens of romance and respectability.

How would he face the reality of Juliet, colorful and unbowed but nevertheless damaged by drink and by men?

More to the point, how would Juliet face him?

Constance’s instinct told her it would be cruel to inflict such painful humiliation on her mother.

But that was not really her decision to make.

Solomon took several visiting cards from his pocket and selected one, which he passed to Kellar. “Why don’t you call on us? Whatever Juliet decides, we will be delighted to see you again.”

Constance regarded him with considerable respect, as Kellar inclined his head before taking his leave.

“You really are wonderful,” she said to her husband as they stood on the balcony, waving to Kellar in his boat. “I didn’t know what to say to him.”

“Oh, I am wonderful in so many ways,” he said with light self-mockery.

She gripped his hand. “You are. But no more plans that keep me safe .”

“It does seem that you are only safe under my eye,” Solomon agreed.

“I would not go that far.”

He smiled and leaned on the balcony rail. She leaned on him.

“Do you think Elena will marry Giusti in the end?” she asked.

“Probably. If they learn to put each other first at least some of the time.”

“I think they will. I think they have. Like us old married people.”

Beneath them, the water rippled and shone, and boats glided by in the sunshine. In the distance, a gondolier broke into song. Closer by, a shopkeeper and a tradesman were quarrelling and gesticulating. Tranquil and vital, Venice endured. And so did they.