Page 95 of A Betrothal So Bloody

“I simply can’t reward such behavior. The girl must die. No way around it.” His eyes barely skate over me on their way to Dante. “Pity.”

“What if I come back?” Dante blurts, his voice breaking. “Without fuss. Without a word of complaint. I will never try to run again.” Each word lands upon me like the stab of a blade. “I… I’ll be as loyal as a dog and kill whomever you point me at.”

“No,” I whisper, clawing at the front of Dante’s tunic.

“But not her,” Dante lays in over my plea. “Never her. Let her live. Let her have a life, and I will be the perfect son. Yours to command until the end of time.”

I expect another laugh from Alessandro—or perhaps another burst of rage followed by a compulsive command for Dante to drown me, strangle me with his bare hands. But he has gone unsettingly still, looking at us with odd curiosity.

Alessandro rubs his jaw in thought. “I can foresee decades of outbursts should we kill the girl, I suppose,” he muses. “Do you truly wish to enter this bargain, boy? This slayer girl’s life—a nobody, who’s killed so many of our kin—for your unwavering obedience?”

I pull at him harder. “No!”

“Yes,” Dante says at once.

Alessandro’s frown deepens as he disappears into his thoughts for a long stretch of silence. “I have never seen you like this, my son.” Finally, he dips his head in a nod. “Very well. It is done.”

“Please,” I whisper to Dante, my voice riding on a frantic whimper. “You can’t—you can’t do this. You got away. You were so close—you can’t agree to such a thing, I won’t let you—”

He shushes me and ducks closer, whispering into my hair. “It’s alright. It is.”

“They’ll hurt you,” I croak, shaking my head like an adamant child.

He rocks me slightly, head resting against mine. “Never forget that I can find a shadow in the darkest night. I will find you.”

But it feels like a placating lie. Alessandro will never let him go, and I understand with agonizing clarity that Dante will do anything—even lose himself—to keep me safe now.

He pulls back to look at me, offering a broken, flickering smile. He traces my face with his gaze—those pretty, storm-blue eyes that had ever so briefly been mine.

“Save a dance for me. Perhaps not stepping on my feet next time, if you can manage it.”

My laugh catches into another sob.

Dante gently places me against the wall and presses one last kiss to my lips—and I’m too overwrought to memorize the feeling. He presses his forehead to mine.

“Goodbye, stellina.”

Alessandro gives Clémence and Nico the order to bring him—at last, it is time to return home. I grip Dante’s hands with all my might, as though I might be able to keep him here, keep him from being torn away. He is wrenched up to his feet, and though he’s all but dragged away, he’s not fighting back. Dante walks between his siblings of his own accord, trailing behind their father and leaving me behind.

It takes me several minutes to get on my feet. Shock and pain and grief war so thoroughly, I’m almost paralyzed. Leaning heavily against the damp wall, I stagger after them with sobs wracking me. But the tunnels are already vacant, and my calls for him go unheard.

He’s gone.

I fall to my knees and stare into the darkness with only the slow drip of water for company.

But one thought roars above the suffocating quiet—Venice.

11 MONTHS LATER

My final letter to Mother Superior is to fake my own death.

Even with the fresh bitterness of the revelation about my parents’ demise, I expected to feel more guilt in lying, but all I feel is…numbness. Perhaps, with the storm of emotion I had endured in those weeks, there was simply no room left for remorse. Or perhaps Dante had rubbed off on me more than I cared to admit.

Fuck duty. His words rang through me with every stroke of my quill against the parchment.

I practiced his looping scrawl for nearly a full day before sending it off via courier. Mother Superior would unfold a damning letter from Dante himself, claiming to have caught onto Catarina’s and my plot from the beginning and killed me mercilessly—and to not test him again, if they should ever cross his path. I make sure to pepper in every heinous word and crude phrase I can think of. It’s only fitting, after all. A severed lock of my hair enclosed within the folded parchment and a smear of my blood across the final words will be enough proof for them to confirm my fate.

Ironic, I suppose, that the impact of the letter will be precisely what Mother Superior intended when she carted me off to the D’Agonisto villa. I’m a martyr to Corvus now, and undoubtedly my honor will be the cry to embolden my sisters for years to come—bringing more fire and fight to every vampire they hunt. They’ll raze the villa in Florence to the ground and scour the surrounding villages for months to avenge me and eliminate the vampire who took my life.