Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
JESSE
My rage could have powered all of Rome.
My wolf shoved at my bones as the pets forced Caleb onto the operating table. I yanked at my restraints hard enough to make the anchors groan. The silver held. Smoke wafted from my wrists, and blood ran down my forearms in warm ribbons.
Terror wrapped around my throat and squeezed.
Carlo had been torturing werewolves. The proof had been lying in a cell when the pets dragged me past: a blinded man curled on stone with silver where his eyes should have been, his beard torn out in patches, old burns layered over new.
Carlo had built silver into his dungeon walls and worked his prisoners over with more of it, which explained everything I’d failed to sense.
No wolf scents in the opera house. No wolves anywhere in Italy.
The silver smothered their signatures, and the layers of stone underground swallowed whatever leaked through.
I’d walked Caleb into a slaughterhouse.
He fought on the table, trying to throw punches, but he was weak, and the pets subdued him easily. He was young, his wolf untested. If Carlo hit him with more silver, he’d probably lose consciousness.
And I couldn’t reach him. Couldn’t shield him. The only weapon I had left was my voice, so I forced my beast down far enough to use it.
“Don’t fight, baby,” I called, my wolf rumbling under the words.
The pets cinched the straps over his chest and thighs. The pet Carlo had called Alonzo smiled as he winched them tighter. Caleb cried out, and the last of the color bled from his skin. More silver in the restraints.
My wolf howled in my head. It gnawed at my bones, desperate to claw free.
I looked at Carlo. “What do you want?”
A stupid question. He wanted our blood. He’d obviously taken Ulfrik’s. And he’d already fed from me once. The first time I’d surfaced from unconsciousness, I’d been covered in silver chains, the links pinning my naked body to the floor of my cell.
“Just a taste,” Carlo had said, smiling as he settled on top of me. “Anger makes the blood spicy. Did you know?”
I was going to enjoy ripping his head from his shoulders.
Caleb sagged under the straps, his chest heaving. His groan filled the operating room.
“Better,” Carlo said. He drifted toward me, the candlelight flickering in his glassy eyes. “I’ve never bottled a wolfseeker. Your blood will fetch a high price.”
I threw my weight against the manacles. The wall at my back groaned, and little stones pattered down around my bare feet. The restraints held.
“Who are you selling it to?” I asked. “Besides Pyotr Zarins?”
Carlo turned away and motioned to the pets. “Start a collection. I want to run tests.”
The men sprang into action like he’d fired a starter pistol. The one with the buzz cut pulled a metal cart to the operating table. Alonzo spun a rolling chair to Caleb’s side, sat, and ripped open an alcohol swab.
The sharp scent cut through the smoke and wax. Caleb roused and rolled his head toward Alonzo.
“You know what you and that alcohol swab have in common?”
Alonzo narrowed his eyes.
“You’re both about to get nowhere near my arm.”
Carlo motioned to buzz cut. The pet slapped Caleb hard across the face.
I surged against my bonds. The wall groaned behind me, and a handful of stones pattered down around my feet. “Get your fucking hands off him!”
Caleb stared at the pet with murder in his eyes.
Alonzo grabbed his jaw and forced Caleb’s gaze to his. “Stay still or I’ll knock you unconscious.”
My control slipped another inch. Colors swirled at the edges of my vision, my beast clawing up my spine and flooding my head with static.
The silver was a double-edged sword: it riled my wolf into a frenzy and blocked the shift at the same time.
If I lost myself to my beast, I’d leave Caleb unprotected.
“It’s okay, Caleb,” I said, wrestling for control. “Everything is going to be okay.”
Carlo tipped his head to the side, the gesture quick like a bird’s. His round eyes went thoughtful. “I thought it would take a great deal of effort to make you turn rogue.” He slid his gaze to Caleb and back. “But you’re smitten with the boy.”
Alonzo hung a collection bag on the IV pole. The empty plastic swayed, catching the candlelight.
The pet with the buzz cut looked at Carlo. “How much do you want us to take, signore?”
“Two units to start.”
Caleb lifted his head off the table. His eyes had gone the icy shade of his wolf, and he snapped his teeth at Alonzo with an audible click. “Get a needle anywhere near me, and I’ll eat your face.”
Alonzo paused, needle in hand, and looked at Carlo. “I won’t be able to draw with him struggling, signore.”
Time. I needed to stall. Carlo had no intention of letting either of us live.
I had to keep him talking. Flattery and curiosity were my only currencies.
He was running a sophisticated operation that had clearly taken a great deal of planning.
Maybe he’d confess how he’d accomplished it—and why he’d ended up with vials of Ulfrik’s blood.
Every sentence he spent performing for me was a sentence his pets weren’t spending on Caleb.
And a sentence I could use to find a way out.
“What are you doing with the blood?” I asked.
Carlo offered a thin smile. “You want me to brag about the cleverness of my operation, van der Meer?”
“Call it whatever you want. What are you doing with werewolf blood? You bottle it and sell it?”
Caleb thrashed against the straps, setting the table rocking.
Carlo looked at Alonzo. “Shock him.”
My heart stopped.
Alonzo grabbed a stun gun from the instrument table and pressed it to Caleb’s ribs. The crackle filled the room.
Caleb screamed, his spine bowing off the table until only his shoulders and heels touched the steel.
My mind started to splinter. The colors at the edge of my vision bled inward, my wolf throwing itself against my ribs. Hot tears ran down my face. I threw myself against the restraints so hard the wall cracked behind me and dust rained down on my shoulders.
“Take it from me!” I bellowed. “Whatever you want, take it from me. Please. Not him. Not him. Jesus, not him.”
Alonzo stared down at Caleb with bright, hungry eyes. Then he looked to Carlo. “Ancora?”
Again.
Carlo nodded.
Alonzo delivered another shock. Caleb’s spine bowed. His mouth stretched on a silent scream and flayed me down to nothing.
“You’re right!” I shouted at Carlo. “I love him! He’s the love of my life. You know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”
Carlo went still.
Slowly, he turned from the table. And something passed through his eyes—a flicker there and gone in the space of a candle guttering. But I’d seen it.
Grief.
For the briefest moment, Carlo Gesualdo looked human.
And I had my opening.
“You loved your wife,” I said. “You’re not the first man to lose control because you saw the woman you love in the arms of another man. You’ve spent centuries regretting what you did. Bad circumstances took her from you.” I held his stare. “Don’t take Caleb from me. Don’t make the same mistake.”
He was in my face in less than a second.
His hand clamped my jaw, cold as the stone at my back, and when he spoke, his voice was low and dangerous.
“You’re missing a critical part of that story. Maria didn’t just fuck another man.” His fingers tightened. “I walked in on her fucking a werewolf.”
My breath caught. Pieces shifted in my head, four hundred years of history rearranging themselves.
Carlo gave a slight nod, obviously reading my face.
“That’s right. One of you disgusting animals seduced her.
Fucked her in my bed. He would have bitten her.
Turned her and made her into an animal just like him.
That’s what she wanted. She was vain, my Maria, and she wanted to keep her beauty forever. ”
“So you killed her,” I said.
He stared at me, unblinking and unbreathing, a corpse wearing a man’s outrage. “And I made sure they were both dead.”
The historical accounts scrolled through my memory. Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, hacking his wife and her lover apart in their bed. Leaving the palazzo. Telling witnesses he didn’t believe they were dead, then going back in to finish the job.
He’d made sure.
“That werewolf took Maria from me,” Carlo said, releasing my jaw. “But I’m going to get her back.”
The hair lifted on my nape.
He sounded like Philippe. The same conviction. The same refusal to veer off course. Philippe had bent himself around the idea of a man who no longer existed. Maria was four hundred years dead. Like Marcus, she’d gone somewhere Carlo couldn’t follow. Nothing and no one brought back the dead.
Carlo wasn’t merely cruel. He was mad. And madness was far more dangerous than cruelty because cruelty could be bargained with.
“You don’t believe me,” he said, making it a statement. “It doesn’t matter what you believe. I’ve seen it.” His nostrils flared, the closest thing to a breath I’d seen from him. “I’ve seen magic you can’t even dream of.”
“What kind of magic?”
“I spent hundreds of years hunting your kind. I had to be careful. Discreet. Your Council would have noticed if too many of its wolves went missing.” His lip curled, showing the tips of his fangs. “I took my revenge in flesh and blood.”
Ice slid through my veins. How many werewolves had he killed?
The man who stood before me was the same man who’d ordered his servants to whip him in his final years as a human, penance squeezed from his pores.
He’d taken what he’d learned about pain and turned it outward.
Every wolf in his dungeon had paid the debt he thought the world owed him.
“And you took magic,” I said.