“Run,” I said, and leaned forward to lock gazes with my friend. “Take the money you’ve been paid for the gold and jewels thus far, pay for passage to some friendlier place, and take Tomasso away. There is a way out, Mercutio. You must take it.”

“Now you thieve for me, instead of your whims and honors?” He laughed softly, and shook his head. “I might steal away, but Tomasso—he is too afraid, I think. Verona is all he knows, all he loves besides me. I have begged him to go; we could be pilgrims on the road to perdition, but he will not have it. You have a generous heart. I love you for it, but my own heart is bound here, too.”

“Then refuse,” I said. “Refuse the girl. Refuse the wedding.”

“I would ruin her more by doing that than if I blooded her,” he said, “and you know it. A marriage promise broken stains the girl, not the man who refuses her. She would be doomed. It would destroy her, and her father’s honor.”

He was right. We lived in a world that lived and breathed honor, and a promise was a bond that we broke only with dire consequences. A lesser man than my friend would not care a fig for the girl, or her family, but Mercutio wasn’t so shallow. The world was a bundle of spikes and razors, and any move he made would cut deep. Better to sacrifice Tomasso, and a love that could never be acknowledged, than to make the innocent suffer.

That did not make it any less painful.

“If you change your mind,” I said, “my gold is yours. You know this.”

“I know,” he said, and clapped hands with me, then embraced. “I know.”

I kept company with him until just before dawn, then slipped away in the gray. I came home to a bed well warmed with hot bricks, and a sleepy servant who put it about that I was abed with a summer’s ague, to buy me the morning to rest.

I slept ill, and dreamed of blood and a woman’s wet kiss, and candlelight gleaming on skin and shadow. Dark eyes that challenged as much as they welcomed.

Rosaline.

The next day brought fate, and doom, and death with the dawning.

•   •   •

The first I knew of the trouble was a hammering on my door. I’d slept a bare two hours, perhaps, and Balthasar even less; he went yawning and red eyed to admit Romeo.

“Sir, your cousin is not well—” Balthasar tried to stop his onward rush, but Romeo simply swept him aside.

“It’s Mercutio,” he blurted, and threw the covers back on my bed. “He left me in the market after mass, and I saw him being followed, and I think the servant was from his own family’s house. Get up, Ben. Get up!”