Page 53 of A Betrothal So Bloody

“Hm.” He reaches up to brush some gore from my cheek. “This is a wonderful look on you,” he purrs. He finds the fresh wound on my shoulder from the final hunter and gently touches the edge before proceeding to suck my blood off his thumb. His voice lowers a decibel as he leans closer. “Can’t say no to dessert.”

“Are you seriously aroused right now?” I ask, tethering back a low, skeptical scoff of laughter.

He lifts his eyebrows. “You’re not?”

I nearly smile back, our earlier argument somehow softened by this temporary alliance.

My gaze travels the corpses around us until I find the only headless one. I wince. “About your brother…”

“If you apologize, I will end you. Please. You did the world a favor. He was a dickhead and an idiot—but I suppose I shouldn’t expect much more of an Englishman. I thought of murdering him countless times back home, Alessandro’s wrath be damned.”

His chuckle dissolves into a hiss. He turns urgently toward the window—the sun has risen higher, the shaft of light brightening and filling more of the room. He brushes past me, cowering into the only shadowed corner.

Shit. Under other circumstances, we could patch the curtains to give him darkness, but the fact is that we cannot stay any longer.

A scream rings from the ground outside—someone must have found the body Thomas had thrown from the window. There is further clamoring through the inn, and it won’t be long before the whole damn village is upon us.

“We have to get out of here,” I say.

“It’s too late for that,” Dante snaps, sounding more distressed than I’d ever heard him. He stares at the window, chest heaving.

A knock at the door makes us both jump.

It has to be the innkeeper—or another hunter. The door is broken, barely hanging on. There is no need to be so polite about requesting to come in—and a second knock sends a chill down my spine.

“I’m afraid we’re indecent!” Dante calls, voice cracking. “Sorry about the noise—newlyweds, you know!”

There is no time to hide the bodies on the floor or the weapons in my hands before the door creaks open.

seventeen

An old woman enters the bedroom, her silvery hair piled in a messy bun at the back of her head. She walks with a slight hunch in her back and leans heavily on a knotted walking stick as she shuffles across the floor, now made slippery with blood. A severed bit of gore sticking to the east wall falls to the floor with a little splat.

With pursed lips, she surveys the carnage, her expression more like a nursemaid inspecting a child’s room than a civilian walking in on a pile of fresh corpses. It’s her eyes that make me stiffen in alarm: a striking, icy blue. Identical to the unsettling little girl we had last seen fleeing into the alley.

Strega. There’s no question about it; we are looking at a witch.

“What a delightful mess you’ve made,” she remarks, clicking her tongue. She cocks her head at Dante, lips curling as she drinks him in. “If it isn’t my gallant hero. Come, dewdrop. Unless you’d prefer to become a pile of ash.”

She beckons the two of us with a bony hand, turning back for the door. I exchange a wide-eyed look with Dante, both of us caught between what the hell is happening and what other choice do we have?

In tandem, we spring into motion—him toward the doorway in pockets of shadow, while I scramble to grab our belongings. Weapons, clothes, anything we can’t spare. I sling both heavy bags over my shoulders and stuff my bare feet into my boots before racing into the hallway after them.

For a woman with a cane, the witch moves with shocking grace. We are forced to hasten to keep pace with her. Dante snatches the bags from me as we bolt down the last few stairs, effortlessly slinging them over one shoulder—allowing me to move quicker.

On the first floor, what appears to be the entire kitchen staff is filtering into the main room—faces ashen and alarmed, whispering about the body in the street, the broken window. They shout as we pass, hackles raised.

“Look away,” Dante says, distractedly lifting a hand toward them, scarcely losing momentum. The energy of his hypnotism is like flickering static this time. He’s not focused fully, his eyes darting with vigilantly to every pocket of light creeping across the floorboards. “You’ve seen nothing here.”

He doesn’t stop walking as he makes fleeting eye contact with the civilians, and I don’t get a chance to see if his authority has taken its usual sway on them. The witch marches us into a storage pantry behind the bar, shoving aside a crate of produce with a grunt. Beneath, a weathered hatch is set into the stone floor, the iron handle long since rusted over. She hefts it open, hinges whining.

“In you go, sweetlings.”

I step up to the edge, peering down. It’s a short drop down, but it connects to a passage that’s unfathomably dark. My stomach does a flip as I wonder what might be waiting there, unseen. But the witnesses will be coming out of their stupor soon, joined by half of Terralta no doubt. Dante seems to read my racing thoughts. He leaps down, forgoing the ladder altogether. The witch gestures to me, expectant, as the clamor in the adjoining room heightens.

Fuck me. With a silent prayer, I climb down the rickety ladder after him.

When the witch joins us and shuts the hatch behind her, it’s pitch dark. I can’t even see my own hand in front of my face until I hear the old woman whisper, and a tongue of fire ignites over her palm.