In the last chapter, Corinna saw Erik walk back into the Inn with Anisha. He had yelled at Corinna when she was concerned about him.

Ch 18

Erik stared at the door Corinna had slammed shut. Anisha continued to stroke his arm until she managed to intertwine her fingers with his. He pulled away almost immediately, reaching for the handrail to avoid her touch.

"Am I that alarming?" Anisha whispered against his shoulder.

Erik made no reply. He turned and stood in the foyer again.

"What is there to fear?"

"You must return to your room."

Anisha smiled and sauntered toward Erik. "A man such as you lacking experience surprises me."

"I am here to build a house and nothing more."

"Do you want more?" Anisha asked. She glanced at him from over her shoulder as she walked toward her room. Dressed in a red sari, she looked like a crimson apparition gliding down the darkened hall.

Erik's mind and body centered on the one thing he wanted most. All he had to do was nod and follow her to her room.

Anisha unlocked her door and turned to smile at Erik. "I am a Patel. I am accustomed to having what I want when I want it. You have disappointed me. See that it never happens again. Go suckle the infants. I'm tired of you, Monsieur Levesque."

Anisha disappeared into her room and Erik wasted no time in walking up the stairs. Long after Anisha had disappeared into her own room he still smelled her perfume and felt the warmth where her arm had rested against his. It reminded him of the phantom pain his father had described from his missing hand.

Erik stood before Corinna and Ursula's door and listened for a while. Even though he didn't understand their words, he understood the sound of tears.

He had never felt so low. He slumped down to the floor in the hall and sat staring at the darkness until he heard Corinna and Ursula rustle beneath their sheets and go silent for the night. He climbed to his feet, entered his own room, and stood staring at his reflection in the silvery moonlight. He removed his shirt and turned his back to the mirror, examining the scars which had caught Corinna's attention.

She doesn't know what cruelties you devised, he thought to himself. She didn't know what screams followed him into his nightmares, what accusing eyes appeared in the dead of the night. Her father had demanded that he keep Persia his secret.

Their agreement had begun to kill him inside. Erik wondered if he would feel so guilty if Catholicism had not been his faith. He needed to tell someone, anyone, what had happened.

Corinna would listen. Would have listened, he corrected himself. She would undoubtedly suspect something lecherous in seeing him walk Anisha back to the Inn.

Erik covered the hideous scars on his torso and parted the curtains. He saw a couple lost in a tryst across the street. Hand in hand, they walked back toward the Inn. Their copulating was of no interest to him though he could hear their whispers to one another even after he sat on the end of the bed to remove his shoes. The front door opened and their giggles filled the hall before they disappeared into a room on the first floor.

Erik rubbed his hands over his face and sighed. His thoughts were tinged with jealousy. Anisha was right. No one would have known if he had kissed her, if he had returned to her room with her. No one would have suspected a thing.

His blood still pulsed hot with desire. She was statuesque; a beautiful young woman offering him everything he wanted for a night. But his mind was elsewhere.

Erik couldn't stop thinking of Corinna.

Eventually, he changed for the night and lay down in bed. He closed his eyes in the darkness and wished her father had not asked him to watch over her. There were limits to his duties, limits he found far too confining. The longer he lay in the dark quiet the more confining they became.

He was alone again, as he had been for the past three years in Persia. He had purposely kept to himself while in the Sultan's service. In France he had always felt distinctly separated from the rest of the boys his age. He was consumed by music and architecture while the rest of the young men nudged each other in the ribs and bragged about what girl they had taken down by the creek. He had watched from a distance, barely noticed by his peers.

"You're a freak," he muttered to himself. "A lonely, miserable freak."

Numbness turned to restless sleep and eventually nightmares.

There were always nightmares.

Three weeks had passed since the Sultana had seen Erik rip up her final plans. He had purposely stayed in the rock quarry from sunrise until sunset. The workers joked that by the time the palace was completed his skin would be as dark as theirs.

The invitation to join her for dinner in her apartments had caught him by surprise. Erik re-read her note several times, hands shaking and breaths turned to shallow pants of despair. He felt for the comfort of the knife at his side, the dagger he had concealed against his hip.

She was going to kill him at dinner. If he refused the Sultana would take it as an insult. If he accepted she would either slit his throat or poison him.

He was going to die. There was no doubt about it. The knife would buy him time.

Erik paced through his apartment and looked around the room. He could take the secret tunnels he had devised for the Sultan. He could disappear into the night and hope he went unnoticed.

There had not been time to decide. One of the Sultana's servants came and fetched him from his room.

Thecorridors had seemed so narrow as he followed the servant. Each step he took echoed off the walls. He felt what the men he had helped kill had felt. He knew the gut-wrenching dread that came with each step forward, each breath that neared the last. All other thoughts disappeared the moment the door to the little Sultana's apartment opened.

"How kind of you to join me," the Sultana said.

Erik looked from one mirror to the next. A thousand Sultanas greeted him.

Erik gasped and sat up in bed with a start. The sheets were damp with sweat, his pillow soaked and his hair plastered to his head. His eyes flitted from the dresser to the chair to the desk, confirming he was not in Persia.

He was not near the Sultana, but she was near him.

The Sultana had known he would be expecting his death. She had allowed him to live through dinner. Though he remembered little of the conversation, he knew that she praised the work he had done on the palace for her husband. Not once had she mentioned her favorite designs. The chambers of death and the gardens where she had executed over five hundred men and women in less than three years never entered the conversation.

She had toyed with him. The mental torture had begun over a seven course meal somewhere between picking grapes off the bunch and sprinkling salt on the leg of lamb.

Erik swung his legs to the floor and stared out the window. Another pale dawn approached. The last thing he wanted to do was hunt tigers. The last thing he wanted to do was spend another day in India.

He would write home before sunset and beg his mother and father for forgiveness. He would admit his mistake in traveling far from France. He would grovel at their feet if it meant they would take him back.

I have been broken, Erik thought. Like a beaten horse, he would accept the bit and carry the weight of his father's expectations.

Once Mr. Desai returned, Erik would have him give Mr. Patel the wages he had retained from Persia. All he needed was enough money to return to France. From there, he would do as his parents had wanted and follow in his father's footsteps. The foolishness would come to an end.

Joseph DeChantel knocked on the door an hour before lunch. He was dressed in a black sherwani with intricate silver detailing along the hemlines. "You ready to bag a trophy?" he asked with a grin.

Erik rubbed at his eyes. "Joseph, I don't know…"

"The wife, your two young ladies, and several other young women are already downstairs. Dine with us. Come on, Erik, you and me and a table of beautiful women."

Erik solemnly nodded. He didn't much care one way or another who was at the table. He needed contact. He needed something to rip away the loneliness and despair was suddenly smothering him.

"I'll meet you downstairs in twenty minutes," Erik agreed.

Once Erik shaved and dressed, Joseph led him to an open courtyard where the women were feeding breadcrumbs to the peacocks and peahens. Lilian greeted her husband and Erik with a warm smile and introduced her to two of her friends, whom Erik recognized as the two women who had attempted the Indian dance the previous night.

"Their husbands are joining us on the hunt," Joseph commented.

Erik was the only one of the four dressed in European garb. Even the women were wearing saris for their holiday.

"This is Anna VanCott and Gertie Robberson. They are missionaries with our church," Lilia explained.

Erik attempted to be as polite as possible. His gaze continued to switch from the new faces to Corinna and Ursula, who had not yet noticed him.

"We hear you are an architect," one of the two women said. She was the petite young woman with light brown hair parted down the middle and pulled into a tight braid. Erik thought her name was Anna.

"Yes."

"What have you designed?" she asked. She purposely placed her hand against her face to show off the henna designs painted along the back of her hand.

"A…palace," he said. He glanced around and wondered where Anisha had gone for the morning. He hoped she had taken a ferry back home to Dareesh. The last thing he wanted was Ravi storming into Chandernagore and confronting him.

Both Gertie and Anna clucked in excitement and attempted to ask more questions, but Erik excused himself.

Corinna noticed him from her seat on the edge of a stone fountain. She merely glanced at him before she continued to toss breadcrumbs to the two peahens and the peacock strutting around the courtyard.

"May I speak with you? Somewhere private…with Ursula, of course."

Corinna continued to stare at the birds. "I'm quite comfortable sitting here in the shade."

Erik nodded. She was going to make it difficult and he couldn't blame her. "May I sit beside you or would you prefer I stand?"

"I would prefer if you said whatever you wanted to say and went back to the French elite. Or would you prefer to yell at me like a child again?" Corinna looked up at him, her tear-filled eyes betraying her disinterest.

"There are shade trees across the street," Erik replied. "Only for a moment."

With a sigh Corinna relented. She spoke briefly to Ursula before turning to Erik. "She'll watch from across the street."

Erik followed Corinna to a stone bench across the street. She sat down, faced away from him, and hugged her body.

"When your father said there would be a man escorting you back to India, what did he tell you?"

"He said you were French."

"What else?"

Corinna looked over her shoulder at him. "What else was there to say?"

"When he found me…"

"Levesque!" Joseph DeChantel yelled.

Erik held out his hand, begging for more time. Corinna turned around on the bench, brow furrowed. "What is it?"

"I promised your father," Erik started. He glanced across the street at Joseph and the two other men heading toward him. All three of them had rifles over their shoulders. "I can't keep my promise. I need to tell you something."

"What are you talking about?"

Corinna rose to her feet but the two other men stepped in front of her.

"The ladies are eating now. We'll catch up with them later," Joseph explained.

"I'm in the middle of a conversation," Erik said through his teeth.

"It can wait. The tigers are ready."

Erik looked from Joseph to Corinna. She had turned away from him. He sighed in disgust. "I'll be across the street in a moment."

Joseph had stopped listening before Erik began talking. Without another word to Erik, all three men started across the street with their rifles proudly slung over their shoulders.

"Will you speak with me later?" Erik asked. "After this…this damned hunt."

"You're hunting?" Corinna asked.

Erik's shoulders slumped. "They want to hunt a tiger. I have no interest—"

"Why are you going then?"

"To send out a warning shot to the tiger," he answered under his breath.

Corinna half-smiled, which Erik considered a good sign. "Teatime," she said. "Once the men are done, there's a café down the street called Petit Belle."

Joseph started shouting again. He hoisted his rifle in the air and motioned for Erik to join them.

"Petit Belle," Erik repeated. "For tea."

Before he had even crossed the street, a gunshot tore through the quiet afternoon.