Page 59 of A Betrothal So Bloody

I suppose this disarming display is stranger still because it’s him.

Dante turns his hand over, the skin nearly healed over entirely now, and stares at it blankly like he’s gazing across an ocean of time. Like I’m barely here at all.

The crackling firelight paints half of his face in a warm glow, his chin length hair haloed like messy strands of gold silk, while the other half is cast in deep shadows. He’s a vision of a man caught between light and darkness. Something about the shadows is chillingly predatory, but I can’t look away. It dawns on me that he’s pretty the way the sun is. A cruel twist for a man who’s been forced to live under moonlight for over a hundred years.

I hesitate, but something about his story doesn’t add up.

“It’s uncommon for a vampire lord to turn someone without their consent,” I offer. “There are rules, ancient things, that most of them seem to abide by. There’s usually some kind of…invitation.”

“My father consented for me,” Dante answers, his deep voice low and ground-down. “A conman's loophole for that little stipulation. Both my parents thought Alessandro a mysterious healer, a man of faith passing through on good fortune. They promised him anything to cure me.”

And cured he was of any illness—becoming something else entirely.

“I didn’t know—none of us knew…” Dante trails off with ragged breath, kneading his eyes with his palms. He shudders, lifting his bleary gaze. “And how I repaid their hope…”

Dante clenches his jaw, breathing labored.

Seeing him like this sets me on edge. I knot my hands in what’s left of my skirt, tilting my head at him to try and catch his eye. “They were ill, Dante. You couldn’t control that, only God can.”

“No.” His voice jumps into a harsh snap, and I flinch. He swallows hard, seeming to wrestle himself into looking at me. His next words come like every syllable is hot bile on his tongue. “They weren’t sick. I was. It was brutal and rare, and I was dying. I was the reason they were desperate enough to invite a monster into our home.”

For a moment, I forget to breathe as his haunted, bloodshot gaze bores into me. And I see it—the horror of the truth. Dante’s family gathered around his bedside as Alessandro brushes sweaty locks from his pale face. Confusion as the bite happens instead of a mystic blessing.

And then the turning.

“You killed them,” I whisper. Tears well in my eyes, stinging and blurring.

It only takes minutes for a vampire’s gift to take hold. The earliest stages are the most feral and dangerous—stronger, faster than even centuries-old of their kin, but at a cost. For up to three days, they are mere animals in the heat of newfound hunger, lost to themselves. Incapable of reason.

Dante’s lip trembles. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even remember—not for years. I tore them apart, drained them to nothing. All of them—Father, Mother, the servants. Even Cecilia.” His eyes shutter, grimacing. “She begged me, pleaded with me. I can’t get it out of my head.”

I imagine the screams echoing off grand stone walls. Blood sinking into tapestries and floorboards. Alessandro’s watchful eye, pleased at his fledgling’s first hunt.

And Dante—feasting on the bodies of the people he loved most, empty milky-white eyes not even registering what he’s done.

Silence sits heavily, a crushing weight on my chest.

Vampires lie.

But he’s not. Not right now.

For whatever reason, Dante is trusting me. Maybe because he’s overcome with anguish, maybe because he’s still planning to kill me if Callistia is a myth, and he knows any confession will be nulled.

“I can’t imagine that weight,” I admit carefully. “But Alessandro orchestrated that, not you.”

“And I was still his perfect little soldier for a hundred years,” Dante rasps. He drags a hand over his face, glancing darkly in my direction. “Look, I don’t need your pity.”

That venomous tone might’ve had grown men pissing themselves where they sat—and maybe I should be frightened. Instead, I find my heart squeezing.

“I know,” I answer softly.

I recognize that shattered look on his face, remember what it feels like to run from pain—masking it time and again, until it catches up and seizes you by the chest with a clawed hand. The strangling weight of bearing it alone, because it’s simply not safe to trust someone else.

I don’t press him for more. I don’t leave, either—even when the intensity of his renewed stare makes me want to squirm and avert my gaze. I just sit there in patient silence while my words hang between us.

Some of the heated tension spiking the air dissipates as Dante studies me, a crease deepening between his eyes. Waves of anger still ripple off his lean frame, but I know it’s not directed toward me. His shoulders slump slightly, and he gives something of a nod, lowering his gaze back to a point on the table between us.

“From the moment I was reborn, he had a place for me. A role,” Dante says, his voice wavering as he tries to wrestle emotion out of it. “I was taught to procure victims for the Family alongside Marco and Clémence. And of course, to seduce any matter of fuckers to further his authority in Venice. A duty I was exceptionally good at, as you might imagine.”