The Promise Read Free

you to another. I cannot.” His voice dropped to a heavy whisper. “I could not bear it. I would rather die first.”
    His eyes changed, became hard, unreadable.
    “I would rather see you die first,” he hissed, and as he spoke, his hand slipped to her throat. He squeezed, hard.
    The madness had won.
    She struggled, desperate with fear and pain, while he choked the breath out of her and bright starbursts flashed in her eyes. She clawed and kicked at him, but her slight form proved no match for his powerful frame, and she knew with great certainty she would die tonight.
    Suddenly, he jerked and made a gagging sound, his eyes wild. He dropped his hands and staggered backward, trying desperately to reach behind him. When he reeled away, Alonsa saw her father standing there, his weathered face mottled with rage, his golden eyes filled with fury.
    Uncomprehending, Alonsa slumped against the wall, gasping for air. Miguel spun and dropped to his knees, and Alonsa saw the jeweled hilt of a dagger protruding from between his shoulder blades.
    Papa’s dagger. Papa had stabbed Miguel. He had saved her life.
    Miguel fell, face forward, onto the hard cobblestones below. Her throat on fire, Alonsa could not move, and her father stood still as stone, watching, waiting …
    Miguel’s laugh suddenly tumbled into the obscene silence, and both she and Papa jumped. Her father moved toward him, prepared to finish the task he had started. Miguel did not move, however, but kept laughing with a horrible sound. He turned his head, his black eyes shifting to hers as blood trickled from his mouth.
    “Listen to me, miro-chi,” he rasped. “Listen well. I loved you. Now I curse you.” His eyes glowed with fire. “When he loves, death will follow.”
    With that, the light in his eyes died, and he laughed no more.

CHAPTER TWO
Ten years later, in the Lombardy Region, just outside the city of Pavia
    “I NÉS, MAKE HASTE! ”
    Alonsa shouted to the market woman handling the reins of Alonsa’s merchant cart on the God-cursed, thrice-damned byway the Lombards thought of as a road. Clenching her teeth, she tried to urge the cart, laden with her goods and wounded betrothed, faster by sheer force of will.
    Tight-lipped, Inés glanced over her shoulder. Her gray eyes darkened for a moment, touching on the soldier’s shivering form lying prostrate beside Alonsa in the back of the cart.
    “SÍ, Señora” Inés gave the reins another sharp snap, and the dray horse increased its pace.
    Alonsa felt Martin Dietrich move, his body jerking in concert with each bump and sway of the cart over the rock-studded road. She stared into his eyes and touched his brow, stroking his dark hair away from his solid square face. His heavy lids drifted down as though he had received from her hand a benediction, and not a curse. She knew she would always live with the haunting memory of that look.
    The eyes of her betrothed … and the eyes of her last victim.
    There would be no more.
    Even as she pressed the makeshift bandages soaked in healing herbs against Martin’s side, she swore it to herself. While the cart bounced across rutted country paths, she swore it to God. Lips trembling, she laid her hand upon the case containing the emblems of her family’s trade: blades of the finest quality, handcrafted in her father’s artisan shops in Toledo. She took her oath upon them as though they were a relic of the Church.
    It ends here. No matter what else is to come, it ends here.
    They passed through empty farmland dotted with bare-branched trees, the air filling with the footfalls of several hundred women, children, and merchant men in the baggage train escaping to safety. Murmured voices carried above the snorting of the horses, and the rumble of wheels dragged across open land. Far ahead of them, as well as taking up the very rear, a few ranks of soldiers marched in ragged flanks, guarding them as best they could.
    The families of the soldiers and the merchants who