Mistress of Bones by Maria Z. Medina - XXIV. Sergado De Gracia

XXIV
SERGADO DE GRACIA

De Gracia had a reputation for being congenial, for his witty remarks, for his interest in anything from music to nature to philosophy. Any other time, he might’ve lamented not earning a more dangerous edge to his fame, but for now, all he lamented was the lack of a mace to shatter every bone in the man in front of him.
The man wore a mask, because of course. De Gracia hated those things. There was something suffocating in using them, and something extremely vexing in being unable to read the expressions of those wearing them.
They stood, he and the mask-wearing fool, alone in one of De Zoilo’s small parlors. The same one, he had been assured, where Azul should be waiting.
Instead, this.
“I’ll need proof that you have her,” De Gracia said nonchalantly, “before I go anywhere with you.”
“Of course,” agreed the man. “Would you like a finger or an ear?”
“Her earring will suffice,” replied De Gracia smoothly. By the end of the week, he would make sure the man had no fingers and no ears.
The man sneered, as if De Gracia had proved to be the gutless fool he believed him to be. “Wait here for my return.”
“And before you go,” De Gracia added, “know that your employer has made an enemy today.”
A shrug, because it didn’t concern him, and then the man left the room.
De Gracia sat on the single settee, every movement cautious, every muscle tight.
The masked man took his time in returning, and when he did, he carried a simple golden hoop in his hand.
De Gracia wanted to laugh. How much of an idiot did they think him? Judging by the fast flicker of the man’s eyes toward the rapier hanging by De Gracia’s hip, not that much. The sneer had deserted the man, his back grown stiff.
Gone. Azul was gone from wherever they had stashed her. She was his sister, after all, a woman who didn’t recoil from sneaking around at night or looking at paintings of stripped flesh and bones.
“Right.” De Gracia took the hoop and ran it up and down his finger like a ring. “Take me to your employer.”
A masked woman flanked them after they left the building. They took no horses, no carriage. They didn’t go far.
The Countess de Losa awaited in one of Cienpé’s innumerable parlors, this one resembling a prison cell rather than the airy rooms De Gracia was accustomed to. It didn’t bother him, since he spent many of his days underground at the ossuary anyway.
The woman stood by the grated window in a gray stone wall bereft of paintings or tapestries. The old, heavy furniture in the room added to the effect—that of De Losa seeking to treat him like a fortress owner might have treated their peasants a few hundred years before.
She waited for the heavy door to close.
Then sputtered when De Gracia ran her through with his rapier.
The problem with rooms made to look like cells, he mused, wiping the blade with a cloth before returning it to its sheath, was that there was nobody to hear you die.
He knelt by the woman. De Losa lay in a pool of skirts, a trickle of blood running from her gaping mouth and another from the puncture below her breast.
De Gracia scowled. That might be a problem. The wound was too low, the dress too light a color. He cleaned the blood with the same wipe, then placed a hand against her collarbone.
Power thrummed from his chest, down his arm, into the bones under his palm. Like lightning arching from cloud to cloud, it spread from bone to bone.
And the Countess de Losa opened her eyes.