To Love Again - Bertrice Small [21]
Brenna stumbled over something in the dim atrium. Bending down, she recognized with shock the face of her son-in-law. It was blue, and he was dead. She began to shake. With great effort, she pulled herself to her feet, and then, heart pounding, she ran to her daughter’s bedchamber. Kyna lay naked, sprawled amid a tangle of bloody bedclothes. Brenna crumpled to the floor, not even realizing that she had been hit.
“The old woman was certainly easy,” Cato remarked nonchalantly.
“But the younger one was more fun,” his companion said. “What a good fight she gave us. The girl will be best of all, however. Let’s dice for who takes her maidenhead and who gets the leavings before we kill her.”
Titus and Flavius Drusus Corinium, coming home very drunk with honeyed mead, never saw their assassins. They were easily ambushed, quickly throttled, and then dragged along with their father’s body into their parents’ bedchamber, where Cailin would not stumble over them.
The two Gauls waited. The minutes slipped into an hour, and then another.
“Where the hell is that girl?” the shorter slave grumbled.
“We dare not wait any longer,” Cato said. He pointed a finger through the window. “The sky is already lightening with the false dawn. We must fire the house so that it seems like just another Beltane fire, and be gone from here before the servants return. The girl isn’t worth our getting caught. Do you think Quintus Drusus will save us if we do? A man who would murder his own stepsons so they could not inherit from him, and who would murder his cousin’s family to gain lands, is not a man who would help us in our hour of need. Indeed I suspect he would kill us too if he could. The gold he promised us is in a hiding place beneath the statue of Juno in the alcove. Get it, and let us be gone. I do not trust that Roman scum to give us several days’ lead. He’ll be after us by tomorrow. We’ll fool him, though. We’ll not take passage for Gaul, but Ireland. They’ll not suspect we’ve gone in that direction.”
Brenna lay quietly, absorbing his words. She prayed they would not realize she was still alive. When they had gone, she would somehow escape to warn Cailin of the carnage. She stifled a groan, almost biting through her lip with the effort. Her head hurt fearfully. She suspected she had lost a great deal of blood, but if the gods would just grant her the power to remain alive long enough to avenge Kyna and the rest of her family, she would never again ask them for anything.
Brenna smelled the smoke of the burning bed and the gauze window hangings. Heard footsteps moving away from her. Saw the two pairs of boots as the murderers went out the door, leaving it ajar in their haste. She did not move. She needed to be certain that the two men had gone.
Soon the bedchamber began to fill with thick smoke. Gasping, her lungs burning with the acrid smell, Brenna realized that she could no longer lie where she was. Slowly, painfully, her head spinning dizzily, she crawled toward the open door and out into the atrium. There was no furniture to burn here as in the other rooms. Although the atrium was filling quickly with thick, black smoke, she knew her way to the door. Nausea almost overwhelmed her, and using a pillar for balance, she retched, racked by dry spasms, but she pulled herself to her feet. With an iron will Brenna stumbled across the atrium to the main entrance of the house. Pulling on the door handle, she staggered out into the cool, damp night air and collapsed several feet from the villa.
There was no one in sight. The assailants had gone. Brenna gulped in the clean air, noisily cleansing her lungs of the foul-smelling smoke. Above her a full moon beamed down placidly on the scene of the slaughter. She had to find Cailin!
Instead, Cailin found her. She came running down the lane, her long hair flying, but seeing her grandmother on the ground, the girl stopped and knelt down.
“Grandmother! The house is on fire! What has happened? Where are Mother and Father? My brothers?” She grasped the older woman by her arms,