Page 3 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

ARTHIE

The streets of White Roaring were in turmoil.

Shouts, screams, protests. Arthie had heard it as she’d wavered in and out of consciousness over the past several days.

She remembered waking up in a bed in Matteo’s house, then flashes of a carriage.

Now she was in a room she didn’t recognize, not until a pang of sorrow shot through her when she caught the faint whiff of a cigar.

The Athereum.

“You’re awake.”

She looked toward the sound of Matteo’s voice as he entered the room.

He snapped the book he was carrying closed and quickly pulled a pair of dark specs from his eyes almost guiltily, as if she hadn’t already seen him wearing them.

He’d been a hospitable host during her horrible bouts of pain, as death tried desperately to pull her back into its depths.

“And as stunning as ever, of course.”

She didn’t feel stunning. She opened her mouth.

“Ah.” He wagged a finger, quickly turning serious. “Before you ask, yes, they’re alive. Both Jin and Flick have been found. Not together, but they’re close enough.”

Relief and guilt stirred inside her.

“I never thought I’d set foot in the Athereum again. What’s happening out there?” she asked, nodding to the walls that rumbled from the people out on the street.

“Unrest,” Matteo said, and pursed his lips. “It reminds me of—” He stopped and screwed his eyes shut for a moment, as if to regain his composure. “They’re calling it the Great Press Massacre.”

How original.

“The Athereum’s our only refuge. It may be all but besieged, but no one can get in and it’s better than my house where we have to worry about the Ram appearing on my doorstep in search of the ledger or our heads.

” He sighed. “I’m sorry to bombard you the moment you open your eyes. How are you feeling?”

It turned out, her magical pistol known as Calibore—the one Laith had shot her with—was far more lethal than she’d imagined. Unlike a regular weapon, Calibore could harm vampires— kill vampires. She knew that, but she didn’t know it affected one’s recovery too.

Where a newly turned vampire would be up and walking in moments, it had taken Arthie days before she could think straight. That fateful night echoed in her ears. The slaughter, the screams. The loss. She had died , and somehow, that was the least of her concerns.

Because she had failed.

She didn’t know how to feel. She could summon so little of her pain, so little of her rage.

She rubbed her knuckles over her heart, where the skin was still stitching over the wound left by Calibore’s bullet, and sank deeper into the covers.

The red silk of her sari had unraveled in the dark sheets, undulating like wisps of blood in the sea.

It reminded Arthie of when she’d fled Ceylan on her own, leaving her parents bloody and lifeless at the shore. She had been helpless. Hopeless.

She could all but hear Jin’s voice saying Until you found me, of course . He wasn’t wrong.

He still wasn’t wrong. Because she’d lost him now, and she felt it. Deeply. She’d kept a fundamental truth from him, throwing it at him when he was breathing his last, when she was extending her fangs and turning him into a vampire.

The sari felt right at the time, when she and Jin and Flick were on the cusp of changing the future of Ettenia. She’d felt powerful, wearing an echo of the traditional gown her mother wore proudly to her death. In the end, Arthie had done the same.

And now she felt ridiculous.

She had failed Spindrift, she had failed her crew, but more than anything else, she had failed her past.

Matteo lit the lamp by her bedside table, then the other. The light glided over his tongue as he ran it across the points of his fangs, his eyes crimson from just having fed.

She was a full vampire now. The parts of herself that she’d refused to accept for a decade had overtaken the humanity she’d clung to for those ten years. A decade of refusing blood, subsisting on dwindling stores of coconut. It was Laith’s fault. He’d shot her.

“I can’t tell what you’re thinking,” Matteo said. He set down the book he was carrying on the bedside table, barely restraining a growl at a sudden uproar outside.

That was what she was feeling: frustration. At Laith for killing her, and if she was being honest, frustration at Matteo for saving her—even if she was the one who had asked it of him.

“I’m not thinking. I’m tired,” Arthie lied.

Matteo tilted his head and drew closer to the bed, the intensity in his eyes making her feel as though he were sorting through her thoughts. She looked away.

“No, you’re not,” Matteo said. “You’re a newborn vampire—you’re not tired. I almost want to assume you’re angry, but something about that emotion is different on you too.”

Because that anger wasn’t directed at the world anymore. She closed her eyes.

She’d kept the truth from Jin only to see his distrust as she turned him, worse than any of the destruction they’d seen that day.

She’d sent Flick to summon her mother, unaware that Lady Linden of the EJC was the very same masked monarch of the country.

She’d assumed she had a handle on Laith before he’d killed Penn and then her.

The Athereum had lost their leader. The country had lost scores of their press. The crew had lost their home. They’d failed jobs before. It was the nature of a con. Sometimes one was conned right back. But this—this had failed on every level, and Arthie could only blame herself.

The mattress dipped with Matteo’s weight, and Arthie opened her eyes. He was framed in the crimson drapes of the canopied bed, as distinguished as one of his paintings, and she was reminded of the night he turned her.

He hadn’t thought she would remember, and rightfully so, as vampires rarely recalled those tumultuous moments before and after the shift from life to undeath.

But when had Arthie ever fit into a mold?

She couldn’t remember all of her turning, but she remembered enough—bits and pieces that made her neck feel hot.

Perhaps that was why her hand moved before she could stop it.

Her fingers brushed his, stealing his attention.

His gaze softened and slowly, carefully, as if she were a cat poised to run, he intertwined his fingers with hers.

It sent a thrill through her arm, sharp and charged.

She had touched his hand countless times before, but this was different.

Everything between them was different now.

“You were my first,” he said distantly.

“First what?” she asked, and as she asked the question, something inside her seemed to settle, giving him her full attention. As if she’d been running her entire life only to realize she’d been going nowhere.

He wore a freshly pressed shirt, and when he shifted to face her better, the vee of white framing the smooth lines of his chest spread wider. A hazy memory rose to her mind: her hands running up the plains of his chest, her nails digging in, her back arching.

“I’d never turned anyone before,” he said, pulling her back to the present. “It was a cruel joke, having it be you. I didn’t—I didn’t like seeing you dead.”

This was the perfect moment to thank him for saving her, but she couldn’t summon the words, not when she wasn’t particularly happy to be alive. Or undead. Fully undead. She cinched her jaw tight.

“I’m alive now,” she managed to say.

Matteo leaned back. “Ah, so that’s what it is. You’re blaming yourself.”

And now she was becoming easy to read. Splendid.

Still, a part of her leaped at the words, the opening, the invitation to bare her soul to him in a way she’d never felt the desire to before. Not with Jin, not with anyone. Was it because he had turned her, forging a deeper bond between them? What was wrong with her?

Images kept resurfacing in her mind: his fingers brushing back her hair with a gentleness she’d seen him demonstrate time and time again, but never on her person, never on her body. The vulnerability in his eyes as he leaned toward her, the same exuding from her own near-death state.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he goaded.

“No, you don’t,” Arthie said, cursing the breathlessness in her tone. Which was an extra level of ridiculous when she didn’t need to breathe.

He propped an arm behind him and leaned back, tilting his head as if he was a king about to be hand-fed grapes. She knew to expect his cocksure drawl before he even opened his mouth.

“Admit it, darling, you feel the sudden urge to kiss me, don’t you?”

She flicked her eyebrows, ready to tell him off before another idea struck. She dropped her gaze to his mouth. “And if I do?”

Matteo straightened, startled by her response. She bit back a laugh. Why had she never responded to his antics this way before? She could have shut him right up many times over.

Because I never wanted to kiss him before.

The thought alone shocked her.

She’d had little interest in love. Then Laith arrived, breaking down her walls bit by bit as he tried to get closer to her pistol, even as she did the same while attempting to decipher his secrets.

There hadn’t been time to build those walls back up again.

What did Matteo want from her? It wasn’t as though she could open her mouth and ask him, not without injuring her pride.

He looked down at their fingers and brushed his thumb along the back of her hand. Perhaps it was because she was hurting, or perhaps it was because she was newly turned, and by him at that, but Arthie could think of nothing but kissing him.

She remembered when his lips were stained dark with her blood, the cords in his arms strained from the night’s battle—or from holding her down.