Page 1 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

PROLOGUE

The colors Matteo Andoni used in his paintings often reflected his emotions. For years now, they were darker, more despondent, as he had long associated color with beauty, and it was hard to see beauty in a world that was so destructive.

A destruction he had both witnessed and experienced. And inflicted himself.

See, Matteo hated guns. He hated weapons. He hated violence altogether, but it had taken many years to reach that point. To brush paint across canvas with a delicate touch. To hold a paintbrush and not immediately see it as a weapon, and thus see himself as despicable.

Yet he had indulged in carnage tonight. If one were to walk through the Athereum’s meeting hall, it would look as though someone had gone oopsie and knocked over several cans of paint on the well-polished floors, spattering it across the damask-patterned walls, across the bodies that had been dressed in their absolute best.

In the deepest, darkest red. It was silky, glistening, delicious.

One could ask if indulge and delicious were the right words coming from someone who loathed violence, but there was no other way to put it.

Matteo lived on the edge of ferocity. He might happily wield his brush and partake in the humdrum of high society, but a single event such as tonight’s could send him off, swiftly unlocking the cage where the vampire in him was waiting with bated breath.

And the vampire in him was most ardently pleased this night.

When the Ram’s men came for those reporters, the selfless, brave men and women who were drawn to upholding the truth, Penn held off as many as he could using the strange and wicked power with which he had been bestowed.

Until he fell.

And then Jin fell. Flick screamed.

By that point, there were very few people left alive, very few who would have noticed Matteo’s fangs extended, the blood trickling down his chin, the nails that had sharpened to claws at his fingertips. And soon, no one was left to tell the world the truth of what Matteo Andoni really was.

He never cared if anyone knew he was a vampire. But he’d lived a life so removed from true relationships that his undead-ness inevitably remained a secret. Even if word did get out, no one knew the extent of it.

For he did care about that particular bit.

Some twenty-odd years ago—he didn’t like keeping count—his world turned inside out when the Wolf of White Roaring stalked through the latter hours of the night, tearing through streets and limbs with equal disregard.

The Wolf was ravenous, and not for food.

He was empty and hurting and hollow, and wanted so badly to fill that void, but chaos was all he knew.

Savagery became the only language he spoke.

He did not drink from those he mutilated.

He was trapped in memories, in cruel imagery that he’d tucked away since his childhood.

His mother’s face contorted with pain. His father’s whip lashing across his back.

Fangs, breaking the skin of his throat against his will. Draining him. Feeding— poisoning him. Transforming Matteo Andoni into the beast that he became:

The Wolf of White Roaring.

Eventually, bloody and beat, he had found himself in front of the lawn of a house on Imperial Square, which had been so meticulously trimmed that he had laughed at the mundaneness of it, just before he heard his name spoken with great dubiety.

“Matteo?”

He blinked back into the present. It was Penn who had spoken his name then, decades ago, but he was gone now.

Now it was the girl in his arms, shivering and barely conscious.

She was bleeding from a gunshot wound gaping beneath her breast. Matteo was no doctor, but she was so small and light, and her wound was so large.

There was far too much blood drenching his front that he could scarcely believe it had bled out of her alone.

He threw open the front door of his house to the aghast face of Ivor. The butler stared from the bloody handprint on the door to Matteo, framed in the doorway.

“Sire? Wh-what has happened?” Ivor stammered out, already eyeing the trail of blood spattering the floor. “Is that the Casimir girl?”

“Yes. Not now, old boy.” Matteo pushed past him and into an empty room, nearly snagging the end of her sari when he kicked the door closed.

He gently set her on the bed.

She said his name again.

“I’m here, Arthie,” he replied. Eternally.

He meant that, even if he’d never say it aloud. He would goad her and tease her. He would stomach ashy tea for her and kill a thousand men for her, despite his loathing of violence. He could only hope his actions were telling enough.

“You came for me,” she said softly.

“Ouch, darling. Don’t sound so surprised now.

” He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and swept his thumb across the soft bump of her chin.

It didn’t matter that the windowpane was as dark as the skies outside; she was vivid.

She was the color that he had not seen in years—from the violet-gray of her hair to the bronze-brown of her skin, the deep red of her sari and the deeper red of her blood.

“How?” she asked with a wet cough. “Where are we?”

She was dying. Fading with the night.

“Hold this,” he ordered, grabbing whatever cloth was close and pressing it against her wound to uselessly staunch the bleeding.

If anyone doubted the difference between half and full vampires, they only had to look at her now: Every inch of her body was fighting to stay alive. Holding on to the remnants of what made her human.

“We’re at my house. After Penn—” Matteo stopped as his throat closed. There were many threads that connected Arthie and Matteo, and Penn was the strongest, wrapping around and around until their bond was irrefutable, even if Arthie had never known of it.

Penn had been the one to take him in when Matteo had stumbled onto his porch on Imperial Square. Penn was the one who calmed Matteo down, who cleaned the blood from his fingernails and taught him how to retract his fangs.

He was a father to Matteo in a way Matteo’s own had never been.

“There were the gunshots,” Matteo continued, “and you turning Jin, and when I saw you pick up Penn’s revolver and run after Laith, I couldn’t let you go alone.”

“He shot me,” Arthie whispered.

He . Laith. From the moment Laith had walked through his front door, Matteo had his qualms about the Arawiyan turned high captain of the Horned Guard.

But Arthie, brilliant and whip-smart, sounded as though she’d never seen it coming.

Shock coated her every word. She was bleeding, dying .

She’d seen Laith kill Penn in cold blood, and she still couldn’t believe it.

As if the two of them had formed some sort of bond of their own when she’d drunk his blood. Or long before then.

“Yes,” Matteo said, winding his pain tight inside the word. “And he killed Penn.”

“I know.” Her eyes fluttered closed and then opened again. She almost looked guilty for a flash of a second.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

She wasn’t asking about Penn. Was Matteo imagining the emotion in her voice? The hope that he was alive, the fear that she might have killed him?

Between the Ram barging through the doors of the Athereum’s meeting hall to this moment, Matteo remembered very little. It was as if the blood he drank had crowded his vision, narrowing it and shrouding everything in a hazy, dreadful red.

But he did remember Laith.

The boy had been slumped against the wall, crimson blossoming over his white robes, a lot like the flowers he kept shoving in Arthie’s face.

He wasn’t moving. There was clearly a hole in his chest, but Matteo didn’t know if it was lethal.

Truth be told, only she would know if he was dead, even before she’d fired the revolver.

“Did you want him dead?” Matteo asked.

Because if Arthie had wanted him dead, he would be.

“Does it matter?” she asked, not answering the question.

It did, but he couldn’t say that without sounding selfish. He watched for her reaction, trying to decipher if the pain he was witnessing was physical, emotional, or both. Her jaw quivered. Her breath stuttered, and a soft sound of anguish escaped her.

“Your wound is fatal,” he said. It didn’t matter if Laith had been trying to kill her or not—she was too petite for the bullet not to hit anything important.

She laughed dryly. “You don’t say.”

Arthie Casimir might have been dying, but that mouth had never been more alive.

He froze when she looked into his eyes and said, with utter conviction: “I can’t die.”

Matteo knew what she asked of him. It was what he wanted to do. Desperately. Why else had he taken the precaution to rush through the night after her? Why else had he bundled her in his arms and brought her here?

It would cost him nothing to turn Arthie into a full-fledged vampire, but it would cost her everything.

He looked at the ghost-white pallor of his skin.

He closed his fist, still unused to the strength of his undead bones years later.

He exhaled, knowing full well that even the act of breathing was something he’d selfishly held on to for no reason other than as a reminder that he’d once needed to breathe.

Matteo had spoken to Arthie about accepting herself, but there were days in which he wondered if he’d ever done the same.

She was half vampire, yes. She still had to drink blood like a vampire did; she still had almost every undead limitation placed upon her.

But she was still half human. To be a vampire meant a life that went on forever.

To be human meant cherishing its temporariness.

There was value in such a thing, a certain bittersweet longing that persisted with each passing day.