Chapter 6 Secrets of the Nunnery （Part I）
SECRETS OF THE NUNNERY (PART I)
Florence, the morning after All Hallows’ Eve
The dawn I once feared facing without her now hides behind the clouds. Perhaps even it can’t bear to look upon what I’ve become without her, despite her return.
A mercy, perhaps.
Florence lies quiet under the hush of early light. The streets are empty of last night’s revelry, masks and confetti littering the cobblestones like the remains of a hedonistic dream. Somewhere, a church bell tolls for matins. Mortals rise.
They have no idea that death walked among them last night…or that it still lingers here, pacing the upper halls of a palazzo overlooking the Arno.
I haven’t slept.
There’s blood on my shirt cuff and the thick traces of her scent still on my skin—lilies and candle wax and perfume and cum, threaded with something new.
Fear.
Elation.
Magic.
She’s alive. She’s real. She’s here.
And still, I don’t understand.
The fire in my study burns low, the last embers cracking as I lean against the mantel, a glass of blood-wine untouched at my side. The taste of her lips and cunt still linger, sweet and tart and maddening. I can’t stop replaying it: the tremor in her voice when she said she did it for me.
She saved me, she said.
But at what cost and really, how dare she?
I know, deep in my millennia-old bones that is what infuriates me the most. That she would sacrifice herself for me, throw me into the purgatory of living without her…for me.
I glance at the closed door leading to the adjoining chamber, her chamber because yes, I’m a fucking monster, but no, I will not fuck her to death on the first night she returns to me.
I’d insisted she stay here, in the east wing of my palazzo, under guard and ward alike. She didn’t fight me on it.
Maybe she’s too exhausted.
Maybe she knows better than to provoke me again.
Or maybe she’s still deciding if I’m worth saving a second time.
I laugh under my breath, a harsh, hollow sound.
After last night, I should feel victorious. Vindicated.
The ghost I chased for centuries now breathes in the next room. But victory is a strange, thin thing when it comes tangled with confusion.
If she’s telling the truth, then every act of vengeance I committed in her name was a sin against her. Every witch I slaughtered, every temple I burned, each was punishment dealt to the wrong enemy.
If she’s lying…
Then she’s even crueler than I ever imagined.
My fingers tighten around the glass until it fractures. The blood inside drips through the cracks, dark as rubies against my palm.
A soft sound breaks the silence. Fabric against stone. The creak of a door.
I look up just as Elara steps into the doorway.
She’s barefoot, wrapped in one of my shirts, the hem brushing her thighs. Her hair spills loose down her back, scarlet against white linen.
For one suspended heartbeat, all I can do is look.
No mortal woman could wear centuries and still look like that.
Unaged. Untouched. Untamed. Utterly breathtaking.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks softly.
I don’t answer. My gaze drops to her throat, to the pulse fluttering beneath the delicate skin. I remember biting her there once, hard enough to feel her life force on my tongue, in another lifetime. I remember the way she’d gasped, whispered my name, begged me to never stop.
Now, when I look at that spot, I see only the invisible mark of her absence.
She steps closer, wary but not afraid. “Lucien—”
“Don’t.” My voice is sharper than I intend. “Not yet.”
Her lips part, but she closes them again.
Good. Let the silence stretch.
But I’m the one to break it.
To let the first of a thousand questions spill from my furious tongue. “Where was that place, Elara? The one I saw in your memories. You claim not to remember the night we…parted. But surely you remember where you’ve been all this time?”
I expect confusion. But she nods, stunning the blood faster in my veins. “I know where I was. The coven…they didn’t keep that from me.”
I wait, nostrils flared, rage chewing through me. “Where?” It barks out of me.
“Beneath the Convent of Saint Obscura,” she whispers.
The next thing to bark out of me is laughter.
Harsh and searing and obscene. Because how many times did I stride past the holy convent in Rome, how many times did I breach its doors, seek out its secrets to no avail?
“You expect me to believe,” I say slowly, “that you vanished into a holy tomb for centuries, right under my fucking nose? Do you have any idea how many times I visited that place? How many of those infernal nuns I interrogated?” And killed because I knew they were lying to me?
Her eyes flash. “They were spelled by the coven. Every inch of that place was spelled.” She moves with ethereal grace and I can’t help but stare, agog, at the smooth lines of her supple legs, the hypnotic sway of her hips and breasts as she closes the distance between us.
“And, Lucien, you weren’t supposed to look for me.
You were supposed to die and, failing that—because I dared to hope you would defy death—you were supposed to live. ”
My fists clench and the ravaged monster inside me itches to strangle her just for daring to say that to me. “Yes, indeed, despite your every effort, I did. Barely.”
She flinches. “You call this living?” she whispers. “A palace full of corpses and ghosts?”
I turn away before I can break something else.
“The corpses deserved it. Every last one of them. As for the ghosts…” I turn back to her, rake my gaze from her magnificent red hair to her pink tipped toes and every lush curve and valley in between.
“I think we’ve proved conclusively that you’re very much alive.
Living and breathing and very much able to have sent word.
A dream. A whisper. Anything. And don’t tell me you weren’t powerful enough. I know you are, Elara.”
Which means…which means…
I strangle the thought because I can’t bear to finish it.
She reaches out but her arm falls back to her side. And I want to curse her all over again. Because I yearn for her touch. But I force myself to listen.
“I tried,” she says again, voice shaking. “Every spell, every plea, every drop of blood I spilled in the dark—you never heard because they sealed my name away. The nunnery was more than stone, Lucien. It was a prison woven from silence.”
I glance back at her, searching for the lie. “A fucking nunnery.”
“Yes. At the heart of Saint Obscura is a cloister of witches sworn to holy vows stridently enforced by the coven.” Her mouth curves in bitter irony. “They guard the veil between life and death.”
She exhales, a shudder running through her as if even speaking it reopens an ancient wound. And I don’t have time to snarl that I don’t need a refresher of the past before she’s reciting it, reliving it for the both of us.
“We broke the sacred law, Lucien. The one written in blood before either of our kinds learned to speak. No witch may bind her essence to a creature of the dark. No vampire may share his blood with a witch, except in hunger.”
Her voice falters, quiet but unflinching.
“I took your blood in love under the full moon. You took mine at dawn with a vow of forever. For one breath, we were neither mortal nor immortal, neither witch nor vampire. We were something new, something the coven feared could unmake the balance they swore to protect.”
She lifts her gaze to mine, eyes bright with pain and defiance.
“We laughed and fucked and feasted as we reveled in the forbidden. And, perhaps that’s what angered them most. They said we’d tainted the boundary between life and death. That our union was blasphemy. So they came to cleanse it with your ashes and my silence.”
The words hit me like fangs to the throat.
I take a step forward. “And during that fucking and laughing and feasting, we also made an oath, Elara. To spend eternity together or not at all. So how can I not think you chose to leave me?”
“Because I was a coward in the end, Lucien. I couldn’t…
couldn’t bear to see you perish, even if I perished right alongside you.
So yes, I chose to save you,” she announced, defiant and beautiful chin aloft.
“And I chose to save countless others. Because if they’d killed you, your kind would’ve unleashed hell on the living. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“And so you let me think you betrayed me.”
“I didn’t let you. I couldn’t reach you.”
I stare at her, every muscle in my body strung tight. “You think that makes it better?”
“No,” she says quietly. “But it’s the truth.”
Her calm infuriates me. That unshakable stillness, the same one she used to wield when she knew she was right.
I want to tear it apart. I want to shake her until she breaks and tells me what I really need to hear—that she suffered, that she missed me, that she dreamed of me through every endless night.
Instead, she stands there in my shirt, smelling like lilies and ruin, and looks at me as if she can still see the man beneath the monster.
“I dreamed of you,” she says suddenly, voice barely above a whisper.
I go still. And yes, she’s a witch so it speaks to reason that she reads minds now, too.
“Every night,” she continues. “In the dark, I’d see your face. I thought it meant the spell hadn’t erased me entirely. That some part of you might still remember.”
“I remembered,” I say hoarsely. “But not kindly.”
“I know.”
Her honesty is worse than her silence.
The fire crackles and pops.
Outside, the first slant of morning light cuts through the clouds, slicing across her bare legs. I watch her flinch as it touches her skin—old instinct, even if the spell has altered her now. She learned to love the dark but she never suffered in the light.
I step closer, slow, deliberate. “Show me,” I say.
She blinks. “What?”
“The spell. The marks it left.”
She hesitates. Then, wordlessly, she lifts her shirt. Drops it. Then she pivots slowly on the balls of her feet.
The breath leaves my chest.
First, and always, at her naked, exquisite body. Then, once she mutters beneath her breath—a revealing spell, I expect—I see it.
Across her lower back, curling up and around her spine and disappearing beneath her hair. It’s a pattern of sigils burned into her skin, faded, yet still faintly glowing like embers under her flesh. Ancient runes. Binding magic of the highest order.
I recognize some of the words: vow, silence, sacrifice.
“They sealed me in,” she murmurs. “A spell of stillness and sleep. My body was preserved and my magic was drained to keep the veil intact. I slept and dreamed but I only half-woke when the wards weakened. The seal needs seven witches to strengthen it every seven years but two elders of the coven perished in the last six months and they haven’t found powerful enough replacements. ”
I reach out, trace a finger along one of the sigils before I can stop myself. Her skin is cool, smooth, and when she shivers, I feel the tremor in my bones.
“What freed you?”
Then she looks over her shoulder, her gaze meeting mine. “You did.”
My head jerks up. “Me?”
“Would you know anything about the death of two witches in New Orleans recently?”
I shrug. “I told you, sweet witch, every corpse beneath my feet deserved it.”
“Well, the night you destroyed two powerful witches, the circle grew weaker than it’s ever been in centuries.
Their spell won’t remain weak for very long.
But when it faded enough to wake me properly…
” She swallows. “I did a blood location spell. I didn’t know if it would work because I didn’t know if you were alive or dead.
But… I followed when it led me here. To you. ”
My mind reels. Every act of vengeance I committed—all of it—was the reason she’s standing here now. My hatred resurrected the woman it was born from.
The irony cuts so deep I almost laugh.
Instead, I step back, letting her shirt fall. “So, you were my punishment and my salvation.”
She nods. “Seems the gods have a sense of humor.”
I pour another glass of blood and drain it in one swallow. “And what do you expect me to do with this truth, Elara? Fall to my knees in gratitude? Pretend over two centuries of hell never happened?”
“No,” she says softly. “I expect you to decide if you still love me enough to have choose to forgive me for saving you.”
The words hang between us, sharp and impossible.
Love.
That old, unkillable thing.
I can’t answer her. Not yet.
Instead, I cross to the window and stare down at the city. The morning mist rolls in from the river, softening everything—statues, rooftops, even the gravest sin.
“I can’t lose you again,” I say finally, without turning.
“The coven won’t kill me. They need me. And for as long as I have breath, you won’t lose me.”
It’s too roundabout of a promise. And I’ve gambled long enough not to trust it. “Don’t promise what you can’t keep.”
“I never have.” Her voice trembles slightly, but the steel beneath it remains. She turns to leave, then pauses at the doorway. “There’s more you need to know. About the nunnery. About what’s coming.”
“What’s coming?”
Her eyes darken. “They know I’m free and they’ll come for me. They’ll come for you, too. The coven that made the spell wasn’t destroyed, Lucien, only the chapter you burned.”
A chill moves through me.
“Let them come,” I say, quiet but lethal. “I’ve never hidden from them. I’m not starting now. And this time I will destroy every last one of them.”
Elara’s gaze softens, full of some emotion I can’t name. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
She walks away before I can reply, the scent of lilies fading in her wake.
They know I’m free and they’ll come for me.
Good.
Let them.
Because I’ve been waiting two and a half centuries for something meaningful to kill—and I just remembered why.
For the greatest love ever to exist.