EIGHTEEN
Dante spits into a basin for several minutes. Even then, he continues to wipe his mouth to rid himself of her blood as best he can. “It tastes curdled,” he moans. “Decades of dark magic holding her together. Disgusting stuff.”
I am well-acquainted with disgusting at the moment.
Skeptical over her death, I make short work of shattering the witch’s disfigured, stony corpse.
Much to my revulsion, there were even more fleshy bits beneath the surface.
I gradually feeding the pieces into the fire, grateful at the very least that I do not have to taste her.
As I’m finishing up with the final chunks of the corpse, Dante crouches beside me, grimacing as the cloying odor of sulfur and burnt flesh hits him.
“Smells like shit,” he groans, covering his nose and mouth with his hand.
“Rather looks like it, too. Still, better her than us.” I wipe my hands on the front of my tattered nightgown and steal a sidelong look at him, rocking back on my heels.
As a beat of silence stretches between us, I debate whether to say anything at all.
But I must know. “Why didn’t you take the deal? ”
His gaze roves me, unreadable in a way that leaves me feeling like I’ve missed a step in the dark. I catch a glimpse of that hungry depth again, something I’ve only seen in fleeting moments, like when I roused him from the nightmare.
Whatever it is, he’s losing his grip on chaining it back.
“I promised you a favor in return for supping at your neck,” Dante says quietly, broad shoulders pinching in a shrug. “Consider us even now.”
He pats my cheek with a lopsided smile that doesn’t quite meet his eyes—an utterly patronizing move that should make me want to smack him across the face. But instead, my skin tingles where he’d touched me.
For whatever reason, Dante protected me, and he could have paid a dear cost for it.
He touches the shards of the bottle on the floor. The stain of the potion is barely visible, already drying into a shimmering glaze on the warm terracotta tile.
“Doubtful she has another,” he murmurs, dragging a hand over his face.
“It wasn’t the cure,” I tell him. “It couldn’t have been. You know that, don’t you?”
He stares hard at the floor. “Do I?”
“She was lying. If you’d said your heart’s desire was to sprout another head to keep you company, she would have conjured some tale about having that exact potion in her stash. For all we know, this is horse piss.” I lean forward to catch his eye earnestly.
“Of course. I suppose you’re right.” The corner of his mouth lifts, but it’s brief.
Averting his gaze to watch the witch’s smoldering remains in the fire, Dante’s face clouds in thought. A slight tremble disrupts his breaths, reaching all the way down to his fingertips.
“Are you alright?” I ask.
He stands abruptly, making me flinch. “Never better. I just…need a moment.”
He heads to the table and sinks into the first seat he comes across. Dropping his face into his hands, he sighs and kneads his fingers through his hair.
Clearing my throat, I stand slowly. “You’re not paying any mind to her drivel, are you? She was a mad, revolting strega. Nothing more.”
“And yet… Alessandro would say there was wisdom in what she said about me needing a master,” he says with a bleak chuckle.
“Don’t—”
“No, really. Perhaps that’s simply the way of things. My whole life I’ve been robbed of autonomy. Goddamnit, do I really reek of it?”
His shoulders are slumped, the strong line of his back motionless. Cautiously, I cross the room to take the seat next to him.
Dante’s expression is hollow as he extends a hand over the candle set at the center of the table.
He flexes his fingers, teasing the tongue of flame, before flattening his palm directly through its center.
I suck in a little gasp as his flesh begins to sear.
I know it hurts him, but Dante’s expression stays empty.
After a minute of this masochistic display, he pulls his hand from the fire, inspecting the hideous line of red, mottled flesh. He watches with a clench to his jaw as his own skin begins to heal up immediately, gradually erasing any evidence of the injury, stitch by stitch.
Dante smiles humorlessly. “I didn’t want to be this cursed thing between vermin and a god.”
His words hurtle me back to our bedroom at the inn, when his shout had rattled me to my core. Though distance has diluted its impact, our argument from earlier still curdles the air between us, an unspoken thing acknowledged only in fleeting glances.
His vulnerability chafes against me like a knife because it’s all wrong. In a world festering with monsters, I’m called to be strong at any cost, molded with the knowledge that any shred of weakness means a shameful death.
I suppose this disarming display is stranger still because it’s him.
Dante turns his hand over, the skin nearly healed over entirely now, and stares at it blankly like he’s gazing across an ocean of time. Like I’m barely here at all.
The crackling firelight paints half of his face in a warm glow, his chin length hair haloed like messy strands of gold silk, while the other half is cast in deep shadows.
He’s a vision of a man caught between light and darkness.
Something about the shadows is chillingly predatory, but I can’t look away.
It dawns on me that he’s pretty the way the sun is.
A cruel twist for a man who’s been forced to live under moonlight for over a hundred years.
I hesitate, but something about his story doesn’t add up.
“It’s uncommon for a vampire lord to turn someone without their consent,” I offer. “There are rules, ancient things, that most of them seem to abide by. There’s usually some kind of…invitation.”
“My father consented for me,” Dante answers, his deep voice low and ground-down. “A conman's loophole for that little stipulation. Both my parents thought Alessandro a mysterious healer, a man of faith passing through on good fortune. They promised him anything to cure me.”
And cured he was of any illness—becoming something else entirely.
“I didn’t know—none of us knew…” Dante trails off with ragged breath, kneading his eyes with his palms. He shudders, lifting his bleary gaze. “And how I repaid their hope…”
Dante clenches his jaw, breathing labored.
Seeing him like this sets me on edge. I knot my hands in what’s left of my skirt, tilting my head at him to try and catch his eye. “They were ill, Dante. You couldn’t control that, only God can.”
“No.” His voice jumps into a harsh snap, and I flinch.
He swallows hard, seeming to wrestle himself into looking at me.
His next words come like every syllable is hot bile on his tongue.
“They weren’t sick. I was. It was brutal and rare, and I was dying.
I was the reason they were desperate enough to invite a monster into our home. ”
For a moment, I forget to breathe as his haunted, bloodshot gaze bores into me. And I see it—the horror of the truth. Dante’s family gathered around his bedside as Alessandro brushes sweaty locks from his pale face. Confusion as the bite happens instead of a mystic blessing.
And then the turning.
“You killed them,” I whisper. Tears well in my eyes, stinging and blurring.
It only takes minutes for a vampire’s gift to take hold. The earliest stages are the most feral and dangerous—stronger, faster than even centuries-old of their kin, but at a cost. For up to three days, they are mere animals in the heat of newfound hunger, lost to themselves. Incapable of reason.
Dante’s lip trembles. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even remember—not for years. I tore them apart, drained them to nothing. All of them—Father, Mother, the servants. Even Cecilia.” His eyes shutter, grimacing. “She begged me, pleaded with me. I can’t get it out of my head.”
I imagine the screams echoing off grand stone walls. Blood sinking into tapestries and floorboards. Alessandro’s watchful eye, pleased at his fledgling’s first hunt.
And Dante—feasting on the bodies of the people he loved most, empty milky-white eyes not even registering what he’s done.
Silence sits heavily, a crushing weight on my chest.
Vampires lie.
But he’s not. Not right now.
For whatever reason, Dante is trusting me. Maybe because he’s overcome with anguish, maybe because he’s still planning to kill me if Callistia is a myth, and he knows any confession will be nulled.
“I can’t imagine that weight,” I admit carefully. “But Alessandro orchestrated that, not you.”
“And I was still his perfect little soldier for a hundred years,” Dante rasps. He drags a hand over his face, glancing darkly in my direction. “Look, I don’t need your pity.”
That venomous tone might’ve had grown men pissing themselves where they sat—and maybe I should be frightened. Instead, I find my heart squeezing.
“I know,” I answer softly.
I recognize that shattered look on his face, remember what it feels like to run from pain—masking it time and again, until it catches up and seizes you by the chest with a clawed hand. The strangling weight of bearing it alone, because it’s simply not safe to trust someone else.
I don’t press him for more. I don’t leave, either—even when the intensity of his renewed stare makes me want to squirm and avert my gaze. I just sit there in patient silence while my words hang between us.
Some of the heated tension spiking the air dissipates as Dante studies me, a crease deepening between his eyes.
Waves of anger still ripple off his lean frame, but I know it’s not directed toward me.
His shoulders slump slightly, and he gives something of a nod, lowering his gaze back to a point on the table between us.
“From the moment I was reborn, he had a place for me. A role,” Dante says, his voice wavering as he tries to wrestle emotion out of it.
“I was taught to procure victims for the Family alongside Marco and Clémence. And of course, to seduce any matter of fuckers to further his authority in Venice. A duty I was exceptionally good at, as you might imagine.”