Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
CALEB
Rome was even more beautiful at dusk.
It was also really fucking dangerous.
The third time a scooter brushed my hip going a million miles per hour, I asked Jesse what he had against Uber.
He smiled, looking annoyingly hot. “Now where’s the fun in that?”
“I’d have a lot more fun with all ten of my toes.” We had forty minutes until our “audience” with Carlo. Jesse had suggested going on foot so we could take in more of the city.
“You’re walking too close to the edge of the sidewalk,” he said.
My scoff drew stares. I gestured to the slow-moving river of traffic on the street next to us. “In case you haven’t noticed, the scooter guys drive on the sidewalk.”
Before he could respond, a Vespa whipped past us, mounted the curb, and threaded between a knot of people without slowing down.
“Okay,” Jesse said. “You have a point.”
“Thank you.”
He caught my elbow and pulled me into a faster walk. “But you have to admit”—we rounded a corner—“this is a better view than anything we’d get in the back of a car.”
Oh.
“Shit…” I breathed, my head going back…and back as I took in the Colosseum. I’d seen pictures. Everyone had. Pictures absolutely did not do it justice.
The arena soared above the city, enormous and patient, its sun-bleached stone unbothered by the modern world swarming around its foundation.
“It’s bigger than I thought,” I said, which was possibly the dumbest thing anyone had ever said in front of the Colosseum. But Jesse didn’t laugh. Instead, he laced his fingers with mine and stared up at it with me.
“It always is,” he said.
We stayed put, just sort of…basking in history.
Letting the weight of the ancient arena hang over us.
My mind traveled back to every stadium I’d played in, from summer rec leagues to DIII playoff games.
They had all looked like this, an elliptical bowl with seats ringing the space where the performance happened. The design never really varied.
Because the Romans had perfected it. Here, motherfuckers, they’d said, and planted the prototype of all prototypes in the middle of their city.
A car horn blared, jerking me from my slack-jawed architecture gazing. A group of teenage girls took photos of a cat rolling around on a patch of stone at the base of the statue across the street. On the corner, a vendor sold a selfie stick to a woman with a crying toddler.
The sun had slipped below the horizon, and the last bands of lavender in the sky deepened to indigo.
I bit the inside of my cheek and looked at Jesse.
“What?” he asked, bemusement in his eyes.
“Nothing.” I squeezed his hand. “Thanks for showing me this.”
His expression softened. “Still worried about your toes?”
“Honestly, yes.” I gave him another squeeze. “But you’re right. It’s worth it.”
The toddler on the corner released a wail that turned heads on both sides of the street. His mother tucked the selfie stick under her arm and dug crackers from her backpack.
Jesse looked at the sky. “We should get moving. It’s another ten minutes to the opera house, and we don’t want to be late.”
I must have looked disappointed because he lifted my hand and nipped one of my knuckles. “We’ll come back and do a proper tour.”
“You’d do a tour?” I tried to imagine him walking in a group of humans armed with iPhones and zero understanding of personal space.
He grinned. He’d sworn he couldn’t read minds, and I believed him, but he’d obviously guessed my thoughts. “I’d do a tour for you.”
Damn. Why did I want that so much? Stupid, cliche shit that involved selfie sticks and Instagram highlights? The answer came right away.
I wanted them because I got to do them with him. I wanted everything with him, even the dumb stuff. Maybe especially the dumb stuff.
We kept moving, passing restaurants and the entrances to ancient temples.
A marble fountain with a headless statue stood in the center of a roundabout, its water splashing into a huge basin and filling the night air with mist. Crows pecked at the ground and perched on the backs of nearby benches.
Couples walked hand in hand. Car horns mixed with the sound of a thousand conversations.
Two women in cocktail dresses spilled from a door and linked arms, laughing.
The thump of bass followed them onto the sidewalk.
The door swung shut, muting the music. The women’s breath puffed in the night air, which had dropped at least ten degrees since sunset.
I leaned into Jesse and pitched my voice low. “So the whole vampires-and-sunlight thing is true?”
He nodded. “They’re less vulnerable as they age. The most ancient masters can tolerate sunlight for a few hours, but it weakens them. Most won’t do it for that reason.” He glanced at me. “They use pets for any business they need to conduct during the day.”
Disgust was a bitter taste in my mouth. “What about scent? Can you track vampires the same way you track wolves?”
“No, and that makes them dangerous. Their bodies are dead. There’s nothing living to produce a scent.
Their pets slowly shed their human signatures as they grow more addicted to vampire blood.
It’s imprecise, but it can give me a rough idea what kind of pet I’m dealing with.
When a master only uses them to feed, they’re weak and almost scentless.
The favored pets don’t have much scent left, either, but their master has given them enough vampire blood to make them stronger than an average human. ”
I wasn’t sure I was ever going to bring myself to say “pets.” Maybe Jesse was right, and some humans served vampires because they wanted to, but I couldn’t get past the addiction. If going cold turkey on vampire blood ended in death, was servitude ever truly a choice?
We were probably going to meet some of Carlo’s pets tonight—people who’d traded freedom for the promise of something that, according to Jesse, they were unlikely to receive.
He glanced at me. He’d done it throughout the day while we puttered around the rental house waiting for the meeting.
Every time he thought I wasn’t watching, his expression went from worried to resolved and back again.
He thought I couldn’t handle myself in front of Carlo, and he was bracing for a repeat of our meeting with Sterling.
“I can’t stress how important it is that you let me do the talking,” he said now. “Carlo might run an opera house for humans, but he’s still the same Italian nobleman he was four hundred years ago. Master vampires don’t have a sense of humor.”
“I know.” A gap between the buildings ahead of us caught my eye. It looked like an alley, the entrance tucked back from the street.
Jesse tossed me a worried look. “I’m serious, Caleb.”
“I won’t mouth off.”
“Something that might seem completely innocent to you could be a grave insult to a man like—”
I grabbed his arm and pulled him sideways into the alley. I got a glimpse of widened brown eyes before I smashed my mouth to his.
For a beat, he was slack in my arms. A half-second later, the world spun and my back hit the alley wall. He caught my jaw and loomed over me, his bright gold irises cutting through the gloom around us.
“That’s a dangerous thing to do, college boy,” he said. “Jumping a bigger, badder wolf.”
Every nerve ending in my body became a sparkler on the Fourth of July. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I held his stare—fully aware that I only managed it because he let me. Which made my dick come alive like one of those one-man bands with all the drums and cymbals and a bicycle horn.
“Guess you’ll have to do something about it later,” I said.
“Count on it.”
A sane person would have backed down or begged for forgiveness. But I’d never once been rational when it came to Jesse. Three cheers for consistency.
Even as desire rocked me, a second emotion tugged at a spot behind my sternum. It was just a hint, like a song playing in another room. The words were muffled, but I’d heard them before.
I’d heard them all day while Jesse pretended he wasn’t panicking about me sitting down with Carlo Gesualdo.
I put a hand on his chest. “Are you doing this on purpose? Letting me feel you?”
He sighed, a rueful smile touching his lips. “Not intentionally. But our wolves are more tightly bonded than most mates. It’s like we’ve been together for decades instead of months.”
My heart thumped faster, and my mind carried me back to my first shift. The moment I’d transformed, I’d realized something my wolf had known from the start: the mate bond was by no means a casual thing.
The air in the alley changed. Or maybe just the air between us. Awareness hummed, and I didn’t need the mate bond to tell me what Jesse was thinking.
“Like we’re married on four legs?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he said, fingers splayed over my jaw. “Your wolf proposed, and mine said yes.”
I swallowed. “Guess we’ll have to register somewhere. You can never have enough towels.”
Jesse dropped his gaze to my mouth. “Would you want to be married on two legs?”
My knees loosened. “Yes,” I said, and somehow my voice didn’t crack. “If a nice man ever asked me, I’d definitely consider it.”
His lips curved in a slow smile. “Do you have anyone in mind?”
I pretended to think about it. Looked toward the mouth of the alley, where two tourists fought a losing battle with a rental scooter.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ll find an eligible bachelor in Rome.”
He pressed me more firmly into the wall, and his low growl vibrated the stones beneath my feet. “I don’t recommend it. I’ll put your eligible bachelor in a matchbox.”
The threat probably should have pissed me off—or frightened me or prompted any number of sensible reactions. But as he was fond of pointing out, we were werewolves. The ordinary rules didn’t apply to us. And maybe I’d feel the same if he ever looked sideways at another guy.
The second the thought landed, my wolf sat up in my mind. Rage kindled, a Molotov cocktail of jealousy waiting in the wings for me to lob it.