Chapter 17 #2
“I know you want to protect me and keep me safe. But I’m literally walking a hundred yards to the vending machine, and I don’t think the vending machine is part of an evil plot to kill me, okay? Plus, I need some air. I need a break. Don’t make me sneak out again.”
I lift her hand to my face and kiss her palm.
Even that small touch makes her pulse race, and I do it again just because I can.
She’s right, of course. I could keep her here.
I could tie her up again—this time not for pleasure.
I could hold her prisoner. But how would that make me any better than her family?
Than her enemies? Besides, she’d simply do as she’s threatening and sneak out.
She’s strong, resourceful, and clever. She would find a way.
I nod and step aside, careful to avoid the searing blast of sunlight that floods the room when she opens the door. I tell myself she’ll be fine and throw on some clothes.
In the adjoining room, Pietro lies in a crumpled heap under the sheets. Time to feed the asshole again.
His eyes are open and far more alert than before. He sees me looming above him and grunts. His breathing comes more easily, and I can sense the oxygen flowing through his veins. He’s getting better, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.
“I heard you last night, you vamp bastard,” he says, his voice a croaky whisper. “I heard you fucking my sister.”
“Yeah?” I tear into my skin and shove my wrist over his mouth. “Were you jealous? Do you think that should be your job?”
He struggles against my grip, but I hold onto his hair and ram his mouth over the wound.
“I have no problem with letting you die, you twisted fuck. In fact, I’d enjoy helping you on your way. But for some reason, Rosa still loves you, and she gives a damn about keeping you alive. And as long as that’s what she wants, that’s what she’ll get, you hear me?”
He chokes on my blood, and I enjoy his panic until I let him go. His head falls back onto the pillow, red splashes spilling down his chin as he splutters.
He tries to lift a hand to his face to wipe it away but fails. His body is still too damaged. He stares away from me and waits for me to leave.
I decide to disappoint him. “I heard things too, last night.” I grab his chin and twist his face so he’s looking at me. “She thinks you regret it. That you’re sorry. She thinks you want to help her. Is any of that true?”
“All of it,” he snaps. “All of it is true. I tried to kill myself, for fuck’s sake, so I couldn’t ever be used against her again.”
I let go of his face, leaving bloody fingerprints on his skin.
“I’m not so sure about that,” I say, tucking his sheets around him as though I give a shit.
“I think you threw yourself off that balcony because you couldn’t face yourself in the mirror.
You have no backbone. No integrity. No honor.
You’re a weak, spineless, cowardly piece of shit. ”
He’s furious. It goes against everything he thought his family stood for to be lectured on morality by a vamp.
He was raised believing they were the good guys, and it must be a mind-fuck to realize he could be wrong.
Tears shine in his eyes, and if I thought I couldn’t despise him more, I was wrong.
Now I want to torture him for all eternity.
“You might be right,” he mumbles. “But thanks to you, I’m a cowardly piece of shit who’s still here. So maybe I can also be of some use to you. To her. You know she’s not safe, right? You know that while he’s around, he’ll still want to use her?”
“What happens when one of your families loses their Seer?” The Don described the Seers as the heart of each Vecchissime family, but nobody has better insight than a member of one of those families. “Why do they matter so much?”
“They matter because they are everything. Without them, we’re any other old bloodline.
Some of us are good at Making, some of us are Healers, but it all started with the Seers.
The women who stood between human and vampire.
In the time before the Bargain, they were in charge.
They called the shots and made us who we are.
After the deal was signed, well … Things changed.
Vamps were more under control; the witches saw to that. The world moved on.”
“And the men took over,” I fill in for him. “The Seers became a useful tool, and nothing more.”
“Yeah, that’s about the size of it. With the vamps behaving, the Makers and Healers came to the forefront.
But they’re still … They’re still special.
Seers have the power, if they choose to use it, to take it all back.
To rule. At least that’s what I’ve pieced together.
You’ve been around forever—why don’t you know? ”
He has a point, but I remember nothing from before I was transformed, the day the Bargain was sealed.
Since then, I’ve lived for centuries and seen so much.
Wars, space travel, tiny computers you carry in your pocket.
TikTok. A lot of change. But when you’re living it, when it is simply everyday life, one week, one month, one year at a time, that change feels gradual, not cataclysmic.
“I just don’t, Pietro. That’s why I’m asking. Are you telling me the Seers are more powerful than the other Vecchissime?”
“I think so. It’s not like Tomasso shares this shit with me, you know? It’s what I’ve pieced together, but I could be wrong.” He sounds exhausted, his head flopped sideways on the blood-stained pillow.
I should let him rest. I’m not going to. “So I’ll ask again, what happens to Vecchissime when they lose their Seer?”
“It’s only happened a couple of times. Most recently with Anna Lombardi.
Partly it’s grief, partly it’s … I don’t know, something seems to break.
It might have happened to us when Serena died, but we had Rosa—the first-ever twin Seers.
The Lombardis didn’t have that, and they’re done.
Folded. They live on an island in the middle of a fucking lake in Italy and never see anyone.
They shut down, retreated. The other Seers picked up the slack, and the other families took over their business concerns.
So that’s what happens, okay? It’s a fucking disaster. ”
“Can’t there just … be a new Seer? Other members of the family?”
He scoffs. “No.”
“Why not?”
His response explains the frustration in his expression.
“I don’t know, okay? It’s complicated and mysterious, and nobody really understands it.
But it seems like once there’s been a Seer born to a family in a generation, that’s all we get.
So if we lose them … Well, they remain lost. Hence my grandfather’s obsession with Rosa producing heirs. ”
“With you, her own brother,” I add. His eyes close, and I relish his pain and shame.
“And Tomasso? Your precious old nonnino? You think he was part of that? Because I do. I believe he had Anna Lombardi killed, and I think he’s the one behind everything that’s happening to the Seers right now.
If what I suspect is true, he wants to kill them all, apart from the one he wants to control.
He wants to rule the world, and he’s making sure no Seers will be able to challenge him. ”
Pietro’s eyes widen. He didn’t expect such insight from a big, stupid monster who kills to live and lives to kill. “I think you’re right,” he murmurs. “That’s what he wants.”
“And what if he gets his way? If he becomes the leader of the only family left standing, and Rosa is under his thumb?” More to the point, I realize, if he gets his way and Rosa produces a new Seer, he won’t need her at all. He’ll kill her once she’s not useful to him.
Pietro shakes his head, and there’s a spark of something other than self-pity in his eyes. For the first time, I see a man with a sharp brain, trying to unravel a mystery. “I don’t know,” he says quietly.
“Well, don’t worry about that.” I stand and pat him on the cheek. “Because it’s never going to fucking happen.” I stare into his eyes and push my will toward him. “Now go to sleep, fuckface. And dream of being a better man.”
His lids close immediately, whatever ability he had to fight off a charm lost between his feeble state and the fact that he’s pumped full of my blood.
Rosa passed the window a few seconds ago, and we need to talk.
“Hi honey, I’m home,” she calls, walking in as I close the door to Pietro’s room behind me. She dumps an armful of candy bars and potato chips on the bed. I really need to start paying better attention to what she eats, especially if she’s feeding me.
“How is he?” she asks.
“Good. Improving. He managed a few words, and now he’s sleeping.”
The joy in her expression makes keeping him alive worthwhile, and I marvel again at how she can be genetically related to the other Capellis.
Maybe she was switched at birth. Or witched at birth, if Minnie’s thoughts on the subject hold up.
I really need to talk to Rosa about that, but not until I know more.
She has enough to deal with already, without me dumping a load of maybes on her.
She thinks she has no illusions about Tomasso, but he’s still her family, and if Pietro and I are right, I don’t look forward to breaking the news of the depths of his conspiracy to her. Most of all, though, I need to get her somewhere safe, and I won’t allow anything to delay that.
“We’ve stayed off-grid thanks to your bundles of cash—which, by the way, well done—but we should get moving.”
She finishes devouring her chocolate bar and shrugs.
“A girl’s got to be prepared. And I think you’re right.
We do need to get moving. From what Donatella said—before we were so rudely interrupted,” she adds, giving me a pointed look.
“Tomasso has put out the word that I’ve been abducted.
He’s probably at least partway to figuring out who you are by now.
If he has this Kurt dude on the books, he probably has other vamps.
There will be people he can question—the staff at the hotel, at my building.
Anyone we didn’t manage to persuade you were actually a doctor. ”
She casts her eyes over me, and I know how I look. I look big and brutal and bad, and the idea of me being in medical school at any stage of my life is frankly ridiculous.
“I like the thought of you as a doctor,” she says, her gaze lingering on my hands.
My cock immediately springs to life, and I shake my head in mock disapproval. “Much as I’d love to give you an internal, Ms. Capelli, we need to make some plans. We need to talk, not fuck.”
She nods, pulls a face, and starts on the next candy bar.
“Yeah. I know. So here’s what I think: My grandfather was responsible for the death of Anna Lombardi and the attempt on Paola and for all the other messed-up shit.
I think it’s a power play. Kill the Seers, destroy the families, take full control of the lot.
He’s been planning it for decades, all the while pretending to be the dignified elder statesman. ”
I stare at her, at this slender woman curled up on my bed surrounded by potato chips, and think yet again how easy it is to underestimate her.
She’s been through hell and is on the run from the only life—the only family—she has ever known.
She’s stuck with a blood-sucking monster who belongs to the ancient boss of a criminal supernatural organization, and she’s gone from seeing vamps as the enemy to seeing me as someone she trusts enough to bite into her femoral artery while I finger-fuck her.
That’s a lot of change. A lot of movement, a lot to take. Yet she’s got it all figured out. She put the pieces together as quickly as I did, and now she’s sitting here, calmly talking about it as though it’s another day at the office.
“I suppose the question is,” she says, licking chocolate from her fingers, “what the fuck are we going to do to stop him?”