captured her breast in his kiss, laving the pebbled, rouged tip with his tongue until she added her hoarse moans to the others of the house. That hazy, hot passion descended on her again like a grey cloud, and she felt so weak, so warm and yet shivering. Through that fog, she felt him reach down and grasp her hem, drawing her skirt up.
The cold draught on her bare leg brought sanity crashing down around her. Non! He could not see her dagger, or all would be lost. She pulled away, laughing. “I said we had all night, signor! We don’t have to rut against the wall.” She drew him toward the small cot tucked beneath the room’s one window. Later, when her task was done, she would escape through that portal, vanishing over the rooftops of Venice. Not to any fairy kingdom, but to a curtained gondola where “Bella” would disappear for ever.
She lightly pushed Nicolai, unresisting, on to the sheets, standing above him for a moment, studying him in the moonlight. His golden hair spilled around him on the rumpled, dingy linen. So handsome—so unreal. He smiled wickedly up at her, a fallen angel.
“So, we can rut on a bed like civilised beings?” he said.
“Exactly so.” She leaned over him, tracing the muscled contours of his chest with her fingertips. The arc of his ribs, the flat, puckered discs of his nipples. So glorious, like a map of some exotic, undiscovered country. She felt the pace of his heartbeat, racing under her caress. “We can savour each moment. Each—single—touch.” She kissed his nipple, tugging its hardness between her teeth, tasting the salt of his skin.
Nicolai shivered, and she felt the pull of his fingers in her hair, the shift of his body under hers. He was so hard against her hip, his whole body taut as a bow string. Oui, he was under the spell of desire now. She couldn’t let herself fall prey to it, too.
“How much will this cost me?” he said tightly.
Marguerite eased up his body until she lay prone atop him, pressed close. “Your soul,” she whispered.
Then she acted, as she had before. As she was trained to do. She drew up her skirts and snatched the dagger, in the same smooth motion rising up from his chest and lifting the blade high. She had a quick impression of his eyes, silver in the moonlight, his body laid bare for her to claim. She had only to plunge the dagger down into that heartbeat, and an enemy of France would be gone.
But those eyes—those inhuman, all-seeing eyes. They watched her steadily, not even startled, and she was captured by their sea-like depths.
Only for an instant, one quicksilver flash, but it was enough to lose her the advantage. Nicolai seized her wrist in a bruising grip, tightening until her wrist bone creaked and she cried out. Her fingers opened convulsively, and the dagger clattered to the floor. He swung her beneath him, pinning her to the bed. No lazy, debauched, lustful actor now, but a swift, pitiless predator. Just as she was.
Marguerite was well trained in swordplay and the use of daggers and bows, in courtly fencing and rough street brawling. She knew tricks and dupes to compensate for her small size and feminine weakness. Yet she also knew when she was truly defeated, and that was now. She knew what it was she saw in those eyes. It was doom.
As she stared up at him now, she felt strangely calm, as if she was already hovering above her body, watching the scene from the rafters. Her victim became her murderer, and it was no less than she deserved for her sins. This day had been long in coming. If only she could not die unshriven! She would never meet her mother in heaven now.
But she did see her avenging angel, rising above her in the darkness. He scooped up her dagger, examining the blade while he held her firmly down with his other hand, his strong body. She felt the full force of that lean strength; the smooth, supple muscles that held him on a tightrope or in a backflip now held her easily in place.
He stared at the dagger, so thin and perfectly balanced. So lethal. The small emerald embedded in the hilt gleamed. “Why me?” he said roughly. “Why try to kill a poor actor?”
“You are not a poor actor, Monsieur Ostrovsky, and we both know it,” she said in French. “You have secrets to equal my own.”
“What are your secrets, mademoiselle?” he answered in the same language.
Marguerite laughed bitterly. “It hardly matters. I have failed in my task, but I take my secrets to the grave.”
“Do you, indeed? Well, that might be a long time from now, mademoiselle. I have the feeling that fairies, like cats, have many lives. You are young; I’m sure you have some to go.”
Marguerite stared up at him, baffled, but his face gave nothing away. He was as beautiful, as cold, as the marble statues in the piazza. Her passionate lover was gone. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, mademoiselle whatever-your-name-is, that this is not your night to die. Nor mine, though you would have had it otherwise.” The dagger arced down, but not into her heart. It sliced into her skirt, cutting away thick strips of silk. Holding the blade between his teeth like a corsair, he bound her hands and feet tightly, with expert knots.
“What are you doing?” Marguerite cried, bewildered. This was not how the game was meant to be played! “I would have killed you! Do you mean you won’t kill me? You won’t take your revenge?”
“Oh, I will take my revenge, mademoiselle, but not on this night.” He tied off the final knot around her wrists, so firm she could not even wriggle her fingers. “It will be some day when you least expect it.”
Once she was trussed up like a banquet goose, he leaned down and pressed one gentle kiss to her lips. He still tasted of herbs, ale and her own waxen rouge. And he still smelled of an alluring summer day. Quel con!
“I just can’t bring myself to destroy such rare beauty,” he whispered. “Not after your fine services, incomplete though they were. Adieu, mademoiselle—for now.”
He tied the last strip of silk over her mouth, and opened the very window Marguerite had planned for her escape. As she stared, infuriated, he gave her a wink, and with one graceful movement leaped through the casement and was gone.
Marguerite screamed through her gag. She arched her back and kicked her legs, all to no avail. She was bound fast, caught in her own scheme. And the cochon didn’t even have the decency to kill her! To follow the code all spies and assassins adhered to. At least French ones.
“Have his revenge,” would he, the beautiful, arrogant Russian pig? Never! She would find him first, and finish this task, no matter what. No matter how far she had to go, even to the frozen wastes of his Russia itself.
For the Emerald Lily never failed.
Chapter One
Venice—1525
Oh, yes. He was really dead.
“Madre de dio,” Julietta Bassano whispered, leaning close to examine the man’s corpse, sprawled across the rich silk cushions of his gilded bed. It had not been an easy death, nor a pretty one. His face, so florid in life, was turned a dark, mottled purple-blue, his black beard matted with bile and spittle and blood. The wide, staring, sightless eyes were dotted with tiny spots of red, and his stiffening limbs were thrown wide in abruptly frozen death throes.
No—not an
