Because it's been a few days, here's what happened last:

Corinna, Ursula and Erik made it to Chandernagore. Ursuala warned Corinna not to get too close to Erik but Corinna couldn't help but want Erik to notice her.

Ch 11

"You remind me of a man."

"Excuse me?"

Erik laughed. He sat on the ship stairs and stared up at Corinna, shading his eyes from the sun by leaning into her shadow. The sun was starting to set over the Mediterranean Sea on the third day they had known each other. In sheer boredom, he had decided to tease Corinna the way he had teased some of the girls back in France. He wasn't accustomed to going more than a few hours without conversation. Three days of polite nonsense left him craving light-hearted banter.

"No, no. You say 'What man?'"

"Why?" Corinna asked. Ursula asked her something and Corinna shrugged.

"Just say it."

Corinna relented. "What man?"

"The man with the power."

"What are you talking about?"

"You're ruining my fun. Just repeat what I say. Make it a question, though."

Corinna turned away. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"Say 'what power.'"

"Are you mocking me?"

"No! It's just…it's just something absurd, but no, I'm not mocking you."

She sighed. "What power?"

"The power of voodoo."

"Voodoo?"

"You do."

"I do what?"

"Remind me of a man."

Corinna stared at Erik for a moment before she walked away shaking her head. He heard her laugh as she walked through a door and headed below deck.

Finally he had heard laughter, the true sound of mirth. For three years he had heard sinister chuckles, dark, foreboding sounds. Hearing Corinna laugh meant Erik had left Persia for good.

Erik smiled to himself at the memory as he removed his waistcoat and shirt and tossed them over a chair.

Brows furrowed, Erik stared at his reflection in the mirror. There was a trailing scar along his stomach that had been there as long as he could remember. He traced the thin marking, following the jagged line as it dipped beneath his naval and disappeared beneath his trousers. He didn't recall the original injury hurting. He remembered the fall from a peach tree with terrifyingly vivid recollection but nothing of what happened afterward.

The mark on his lower back was different. Erik shuddered and forced himself to turn and look in the mirror. He needed to make sure the wound had stayed closed. It had been days since he had looked at the healing scar for signs of redness. Two weeks had passed since he had found a streak of blood on his shirt.

The flogging had only been the beginning. He was supposed to have had his eyes removed. He was supposed to have been castrated.

He was supposed to be dead.

Erik had been uncertain when Mr. Desai had said he wanted Erik to take Corinna and Ursula from London back to their second home in India. He would have preferred to hand Mr. Desai the floor plans to the Sultan's palace than journey anywhere.

But he had nowhere to go except the executioner's block.

He couldn't return to his home in France. The ties to his parents had been severed beyond repair. The little Sultana had left a bad taste in his mouth and several painful wounds on his back. Both were enough to keep him far from the land that had once been his dream.

India.

The more Erik thought about it, the better it sounded. He would find refuge in India.

He needed solace.

The Sultan had been impressed with the concept of his palace. He had been delighted in his discovery of such young talent. With a nod from the shah-of-shahs, Erik was given permission to build a palace of mystery and misery, of sliding walls and hidden places. The seventeen-year-old Parisian had devised a labyrinthine world where the Sultan could spy on his odalisques through two-way mirrors.

In the end, Erik had even impressed himself. Two years of spending afternoons with Monsieur DeChantel had refined Erik's natural talent. The completed palace had earned him praise and the promise of his own harem, which had sounded better than money to a man who had just turned twenty.

A month after the project had been completed Erik expected he would receive payment for his three years of diligence. He had planned to leave Persia, design his own opera house and pursue his second love: music.

Instead, four men came to his chambers and arrested him by order of the little Sultana, the Sultan's favorite wife.

She had come to witness the arrest. Beneath the veil he had sensed her smile. Her eyes, her sparkling jade eyes, had shown the same interest in his detention as they had in the Steel Forest he had designed.

Erik knew why she had convinced her husband to take him into custody. The warrant stated he had become too dangerous. The Sultan had purportedly said he didn't want his designs in the hands of another king.

The Sultana's eyes had shown the real reason. Revenge.

For three weeks Erik waited in the solitary confinement cell he had designed. His final moments would be spent in a space barely big enough to sit down, a windowless hole with dirt floors and iron bars.

The night before he was scheduled to die, the daroga, the Chief of Police, had come with the skeleton key and an Indian man named Sanjeev Desai.

"Take your daughter and her companion to…where did you say?" Erik had questioned as Sanjeev helped him out of the prison and into the night-darkened streets. The Chief of Police strode ahead of them with his ruby-hilted saber in his hand.

"Dareesh. A city north of Calcutta. You will find employment there," Mr. Desai had whispered.

"What sort of labor?" Erik had panted as they made their way through shadows to the shipyards.

"Design, not labor, Levesque. My wife's brother is in need of an architect." The older man had stopped abruptly and pulled Erik into the darkness of a doorway. He stood with his face inches from Erik's and waited for two men to walk past the alley. "I warn you, Mr. Levesque, when you are in Dareesh, say nothing of your travels to Persia."

Erik had silently agreed. His back had been warm and wet from a mix of blood and sweat, his legs fatigued and his head pounding. As he stumbled onto a fisherman's small boat, Erik had been thankful to see the indigo night sky and the pinpricks of stars.

His battle had been far from over. Fever had hit somewhere around the Straight of Gibraltar, and for three days he had done nothing but sleep. His back had become infected where the skin had split open.

"Even a wounded tiger sits proud," Mr. Desai had told him as they took a carriage to the small flat in London where Corinna and Ursula had waited. The fever had finally broken and the wound had sealed. "Show no weakness, my boy. Strength, you must believe in your strength, in your power."

The next morning, Erik, Corinna and Ursula set sail first to Egypt, then to India's west coast.

Erik lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He could barely breath, barely think, barely register the room around him. He ran his hand over his face. Each time he closed his eyes he saw the small cell, the dirt floor and iron bars.

The Sultana's eyes.

Erik sat upright again and stared at the wall. In the adjacent room, the reason why he still breathed was resting in her bed.

Twenty kilometers north, her cousin was without a fiancé.