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“I want to listen to the work of a genius individual, not an unintended collaboration.”

“But that’s the entire point of music! It’s part of humanity that we can touch and change that transcends time!”

There was a pronounced silence. My shoulders were drawn up like a cat with raised hackles. I had beenyelling.Heat spread over my cheeks.

To my surprise, Duca de’ Medici tossed his head back and let out a soft, short laugh. With an impish grin, he lifted the candle to his face. “Aren’t you a peculiar one? Interesting enough to keep around.”

The appraisal struck me as similar to the way Pa would talk about a strange cat that had wandered onto our farm.What a weird-lookin’ critter! That one’s interesting enough to keep around.

I had absolutely zero idea what a reasonable response to this would be, so I said, “Thank you?”

Another chuckle. “It’s a pleasure to have you as my guest tonight, Signorina Bowling.”

“Um, it’s a pleasure to be here, Duca d—” I paused. “Signore.”

There was a softwhoosh, and the candlelight vanished, immediately followed by the sweet ringing of a bell.

“I’ve summoned my butler. He’ll show you to your room. Doctor Ntumba will talk to you tomorrow about future steps.”

“Future steps? What—” I squinted my eyes into the darkness, but the vampire was already gone. “—future steps?”

Did this mean I had passed the interview? The reality of my situation struck me: I hadn’t expected to get this far. I hadn’t even thought they would let me in. And I’d been so desperate to find some sort of solution to my problems that I hadn’t considered what it would entail.

I had barely left the room when a towering man with a neatly groomed beard and combed hair greeted me. He gave a small bow and introduced himself, but my mind was swimming with too many thoughts to absorb any information. I’d have to get his name from Doctor Ntumba tomorrow, I reminded myself.

“How was the trip? Was the driver agreeable?” he asked, leading me down the hall.

With my head so full, even answering this was a challenge. “Um, good, I guess,” I managed. Then, with a bit of effort, I added, “I’ve researched this area a lot, but . . .”

The butler wasn’t listening and didn’t seem to notice when I trailed off. It was only when the silence became painful that he probed again. “Where are you from?”

“I lived in London before this, but originally, I moved around several small towns in Appalachia. Er, that’s a mountain range in the United States. What about you?”

“Florence.” Such a simple response, yet it sounded as though he had to wrench it out. Clearly, the man was not interested in disclosing much about himself.

That made two of us.

Neither of us made any further attempts at small talk. He led me through the abbey in silence and brought me to my room: an old monk’s cell with appropriately minimalistic furnishing. There was a single cot across from a window and a small altar beneath it. The stone walls were almost entirely undecorated, save for a cross on the wall and a simple shelf. A rosary dangled over its edge above a Bible. The sight gave me chills.

I imagined a monk clutching those beads a lifetime ago, whispering to himself in Latin. The vision was so unnervingly clear, his breath heavy in my ear. I wondered if his body was resting in the catacombs below, along with his brothers and dozens of locals.

“Sorry we don’t have something better to give you,” the butler said behind me, jolting me from my thoughts. “You see, we’ve seen many people come through these halls over the past few weeks. A few have gone past Doctor Ntumba, but none any further. Who was I to guess Duca de’ Medici would permit a guest to stay the night?”

My brow quirked. I hadn’t registered that other interviewees had walked through these very doors. Were there others, like me, who wanted to comb through family trees and catch fleeting sights of the heir of a famous vampiric family? I had a hard time imagining any other reason someone would willingly sign up for such an unusual job square in the middle of nowhere. Unless, of course, you were me.

Unfortunately, he perceived my expression in the worst way possible. “It seems I have already spoken out of turn. My apologies, signorina.” He sighed softly, forcing his manner to return to the stuffy tone of servitude from before. “We will have the abbess’s suite prepared for you to move into by tomorrow evening.”

I couldn’t help but grimace. Every ounce of this interaction had been awkward, if not downright painful, and there was little point in trying to salvage it. Maybe tomorrow we could start again, and I could pretend I was comfortable talking with strangers.

“Thank you, sir,” I replied, my lips tightening. “Good night.”

With a small bow, he was gone, leaving me alone.

I took off my shoes and placed them by the door, which was a cloth curtain. I shuffled through my bag in search of a change of clothes, shoving aside a rabbit’s foot and my trusty binder. Most of my bag’s contents were old work, snippets of information I had scrounged together from old textbooks and university archives. The final section, however, was stuffed with all my research on the building I was in.

There wasn’t much information on the abbey to be found online, only that it was built shortly after the 1693 Sicily earthquake by a Spanish noble whose name I couldn’t place. Only a short walk away from his equally magnificentpalazzi, the abbey stood proudly on the summit of a cliff, distantly overlooking the then-bustling city of Poggioreale. For a time, the Abbazia di Santa Dymphna was adored by the town and lovingly maintained by the locals. When the earthquake of 1968 struck, the town itself and even the noble’spalazzifell into ruins, yet the Abbazia di Santa Dymphna stood entirely untouched. With no priest, no monks, and no congregation to attend, locals and the church alike abandoned it.

How Duca de’ Medici had funded such a venture wasn’t hard to fathom. The Medici were a rich family of bankers who had practically patronized the entire Renaissance, funding the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and even the invention of the piano. If the family had even a fraction of their historical wealth—they would have been a dynasty full of billionaires in contemporary times—then the cost of this abbey was mere pennies to them.