Chapter 9 - The Blood on the Threshold
The winter broke on the second night of December.
A warm wind—the Föhn—came roaring down from the Alpine valleys, melting twelve inches of snow in six hours, turning the vineyard stone paths into red mud streams that ran down toward the river.
Mara woke at three in the morning with a sharp, heavy pain that felt as if an iron band had been clamped around her hips and pulled tight with a winch.
She sat up on the edge of the brass bed, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps, her hands gripping the white linen sheets until her knuckles turned yellow.
"Not yet," she whispered to the dark room. "Not yet, you fool... it's two weeks early..."
A second pain hit her three minutes later—longer, harder, accompanied by a sudden, hot gush of fluid that soaked through her nightgown and ran down her ankles onto the rug.
Her water had broken.
She tried to stand, but her knees gave way under the sheer, crushing weight of the contraction. She fell sideways against the small table, knocking the brass lamp to the floorboards with a heavy clatter that shattered the glass chimney.
She was alone.
The cottage was three hundred meters from the main house. The wind was howling through the eaves, rattling the oak shutters so loud that no shout from her window would ever reach the guard house at the gate.
She crawled toward the door.
Inch by inch, her fingers digging into the gaps between the stone floorboards, her sheepskin coat dragged over her shoulders like a dead weight.
She reached the threshold.
She pulled the door open.
The warm, wet wind hit her face, carrying with it the smell of melting snow, wet earth, and the faint, sweet scent of the cedar shavings down at the stables.
She looked down the dark path toward the valley.
The lights of the main house were dark, save for a single yellow square on the third floor—the window of the study where Cristiano Vicari sat reading his leather ledgers.
"Cristiano," she tried to call out.
Her voice was barely a whistle in the roar of the wind.
She dragged herself onto the porch steps, her knees slick with blood and fluid, her fingers locking around the stone balustrade.
Then, from the darkness of the vineyard below, came a sound that made her lift her head.
A bugle.
May you like
High, sharp, and clear as a brass trumpet across the storm.
El Rey had broken his box latch.
