Page 28 of Misadventures with a Duke

One of us is subscribing to the wrong truth.

I hate the increasing surety that it is me.

I fight the sensation by picking up the rectangular box and shaking it. I turn it end over end, struggling to comprehend what I am looking at. It must be a trick of light and mirrors, but there are no hidden latches or doors to lead me to those intrinsic secrets.

“Max,” I demand past locked teeth. “Damn it! Talk to me! How do I get you out of there?”

That has to be the substance of it. No matter the diabolical methods they have utilized, mysterious wretches have taken my brave brother captive. Perhaps not so mysterious. Are Marquette and Alonzo behind this? Have they found more ways to betray our family? Or is this the work of someone else in the insurgents’ ranks, who has unearthed the deep secret—and likely truth—about Maximillian’s heritage? That he has the king’s own blood in his veins?

That would make him quite a prize to keep under glass. ’Twould also explain why his hair has been markedly shorn. Why he is not wearing so much as a scarf around his open neck, let alone a cravat. Why his shirt, striped with a bizarre red and blue pattern, is so plainly tailored. Most notably, why it is tucked into a pair of full-length pantaloons, with a thin black belt around his waist. But there is no constraint attached to that. Perhaps that means he has somehow escaped his jailors. Perhaps that is why he waves at me again. I have no reasoning for his wide smile—which might not be that at all. He is so small. How can I truly tell?

“I need more information, brother. I know not what you need me to do! Maximillian?”

My absorption with the box is so consuming, I have not heard the approaching footsteps at my back. When Magique—or whoever the hell this is—appears at my side, it is too late to render any reaction.

“He can’t hear you,” she says with entirely too much patience. “It’s a video box.”

“Pardon moi?” I roll my head in more random patterns. “But it is not vide, my sweet. Not empty.” I wave the box before her. “You see this? What is inside this? Who is inside this?”

Her tranquility does not garner the same from me. How can she be so calm about this? There is a man—my brother—trapped inside this deranged detention! “Let me play with it for a sec?” she asks. “I think I can make him talk. Or at least light him better, so you can see—”

“The hell you will.”

I draw on well-practiced instincts to put a lot of the room between us in a few seconds. My speed is spurred by a gut-wrenching conclusion.

Perhaps she has been right all along.

Maybe she is not my Magique but a shell only appearing as such. Another part of the elaborate illusion that has put Maximillian in a box that fits beneath my arm. In a place that makes it possible for her to reference his torture as if she merely plans on changing the straw in his cell. I can make him talk. Light him better.

I cannot bear to envision what she actually has in mind.

So why does her new approach not chill my blood and raise my defenses? Why, even now, does my breath quicken and my groin harden? Why does my gaze latch on every expressive angle of her face and my imagination liken her light freckles to wildflowers in a fairy glen?

Magical. She is still so magical.

But she is not my Magique. She was the first to tell me so. And now I must force myself to believe it…

But I cannot. I refuse. If Magique is gone, what else is there? What do I have left to believe in?

Not the rest of what she has told me too.

There has to be another way. Another explanation. Another reality.

But not here. Not in the same space in which I can see her, smell her, feel so much of her.

“No. Not here.”

It is a croak on my lips but a roar in my spirit. A rally cry in my senses, waking up the rest of me. I have to get out of here. But where is here? And does it matter? The chamber possesses a door. Whatever lies on the other side cannot be as complicated, conflicting, and chaotic as this. The first step has to be getting away from her.

As far and as quickly as possible.

Chapter Seven

Raegan

“Bastien! Wait!”

An extra whomp of adrenalin provides extra power for my shriek, not that the apartment’s new fugitive is paying attention.