Page 4 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

Arthie tugged gently on their entwined hands.

An invitation. A question. A fire roared to life inside her.

He obliged, still surprised by her initiation, leaning in and propping his arm on the covers beside her.

Arthie caught a whiff of his scent and wondered why she’d never smelled him before: the rich, nutty warmth of the fresh walnut oil he used in his paints and something sweeter, like a blend of leather and chocolate.

She hadn’t tasted chocolate in years.

It reminded her of home. Of her father bringing back rare treats that she and her mother shared because he never had much of a sweet tooth himself.

Arthie pursed her lips. She hadn’t thought of home that way in a long time—only the violent fragments.

The chaos as the soldiers stormed the Ceylani shore.

Her mother’s red sari. The bullet holes. The blood.

“Arthie.”

Matteo spoke her name on a hesitant sigh and pulled back.

He must have seen the turmoil in her eyes now that she was so damned readable.

She ran her tongue along her lips, trying to bury her memories again.

Trying to bury the present and her past and everything that existed outside this room and this bed.

His eyes narrowed to slits, and with it, some part of him closed away. “There’s something we need to talk about.”

She waited.

“It… has to do with how you arrived in Ettenia,” he finished, flinching when somewhere outside the window, glass shattered and people roared.

On a boat. Full of blood. Right. She’d forgotten that he knew. She’d forgotten that no one could fathom being close to a girl capable of such brutality.

Arthie wrenched her hand from his, her anger surging— there it is —battling with whatever raw thing was tearing through her. It was a selfish sort of pain wrapped with embarrassment.

He was rejecting her, while she was lying in this bed, looking up at him.

Everything about this moment had her positioned to be weak.

How had she allowed this to happen? She was Arthie Casimir.

She rarely trusted anyone, and she’d been right not to: When she’d gone against her better judgment and trusted Penn’s plan and sought out the help of the press, every last one of them had ended up dead.

What about Jin? asked a little voice in her head. She buried it deep.

She scoffed. “I know exactly how I arrived in Ettenia. There’s nothing more you need to tell me about it.”

The blood on her sari had dried, matting to her skin. She had no reason to stay here, not when he was spewing words like that .

“You misunderstand,” Matteo said quickly as she began to stir.

“No, you think you understand,” Arthie said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “No one does. No one, but—”

She stopped herself. Of the innumerable stories and secrets she’d collected in Ettenia, only one came close to hers.

There were other half vampires, of course, other bouts of killing, but only one story showed her what she could have been, had her incident been on land instead of a boat stranded at sea.

She might have even been worse.

“The Wolf of White Roaring?” he asked, a stillness in his voice.

Yes . She gathered her sari and sat up straight, swaying from the blood loss, from this new version of herself. How much did he know of her? How much did he know of what had happened on that boat when she was just nine years of age?

“Wait, Arthie. Please. He’s exactly whom I wanted to speak about.”

“Oh, and why’s that?” she asked, her back to him. She scanned the room for her pistol, searching for some semblance of herself, her past self. But then she remembered: It was still lying on the floor of the Nimble Street apartment, in a pool of blood with Laith.

“Because,” he began, and she had the sense he was bracing himself for his next words, “he and I are one and the same.”

Arthie froze, certain she hadn’t heard him correctly.

Matteo was the Wolf of White Roaring? He was the one who had exposed vampires to the public’s fear and wrath, and in so harsh a view because of a rampage in which he brutally turned the streets red?

That didn’t make sense. He—he was as much a murderer as she was.

The number of bodies she’d mutilated was far less, but had there been more than three people on that boat, when would she have stopped?

No , a voice reminded her, for she’d killed others too, at Penn’s house.

Perhaps she was worse.

She turned back around to face him, regarding him anew. The delicate structure of his bones, the soft pout of his lips. The compassionate green of his eyes, now that the crimson had faded. He looked nothing like what she thought the Wolf would look like.

“But you—”

“Paint? Draw?” he asked. He laughed softly. “Come now, Arthie. You know better than that. I’m certain the evil Ram waters the peonies in her garden. Many well-mannered wives dip biscuits in their tea while dreaming of butchering their husbands. We contain multitudes.”

He was prattling like he hadn’t just tossed at her one of the biggest secrets she’d ever learned.

She sat back down on the bed. Once, she would have leveraged such a thing in every heinous way she could.

Was this why Penn had encouraged her associations with Matteo before his death?

Was this why Penn had been unafraid and unaffected by her nine-year-old acts of violence?

The Ram had done this to him. That much she knew. Penn had said as much, but he hadn’t given any indication that it was Matteo . She was struggling to catch up. “Penn—Penn knew it was you.”

Matteo nodded. “I somehow ended up on his doorstep that night. I didn’t know where to go, where to turn. He took me in, knowing I was a half vampire, and eventually turned me into a full one.”

Arthie saw the way his gaze flickered. Pain, shame, regret.

She could not imagine Matteo in a place so low. He was too quick to smile, to jest. He was lauded and praised; his paintings sought after by the masses. He was flourishing . She never would have guessed that he of all people would be the Wolf of White Roaring.

A little part of her was in awe of him, yet another emotion she rarely felt.

He’d assimilated a lot better than she ever could, but she would be naive to blame it on herself and not the social standards that praised the color of his skin.

Arthie had long believed the Wolf of White Roaring attack had been fabricated—not the attack itself but the circumstances surrounding it, and Penn had confirmed as much himself. He’d also told them who was responsible: the Ram.

“Why did the Ram choose you? Were you ill?”

Had the Ram wandered the beds of a hospital and chosen Matteo for her needs?

Arthie could think of nothing else. She had been ill when the Ettenians came to her home country of Ceylan and her parents had taken her to the one “doctor” who could help, unaware that his cure would wreak a permanent change to every fiber in her being.

“Ill?” Matteo asked, and then laughed when he realized what she meant. “No. I was of perfect health, really.

“My father only ever cared about how well I was doing with my tutors, and my mother was always more concerned with how he felt than how I ever did. So I spent much of my time elsewhere. Wandering the streets, sitting under trees with a pencil and a pad. One day, back smarting from my father’s lash, I took a walk through the woods and found some sort of facility, tucked into the autumn trees.

It looked like it had been placed there for me—I had walked that route a thousand times and never seen it before. ”

He picked at the lint on the covers. “I heard… cries from inside and knew I shouldn’t be there.

Instead of trying to help, I was thinking of myself, thinking of how I should run.

Before I could, men rushed out of the building, grabbed me, took me in.

I remember that distinct smell of a hospital ward, and something sharp pierced my neck before I was fed what I now know was blood.

The last I saw was the Ram’s mask, and then I woke up on the streets. ”

That was nowhere near how Arthie was turned into a half vampire herself.

“There have been other rampages, you know,” Matteo said. “Never to the same scale, never publicized and made into propaganda either. She turned me and dropped me in the middle of a busy street for her own selfish agenda.”

He sounded tired. He met her eyes, and the torment in his gaze was so great that if Arthie wasn’t as grounded as she was, she would have imagined she was there with him just now. Back in his past, reliving that haunted memory. Arthie knew it could not have been easy to tell her any of this.

“Why you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Matteo said. “Perhaps I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

No, there was more to it than that. Arthie knew how certain people worked, and as elusive and secretive as Lady Linden was, she was the sort of person who did nothing without a reason. There was always a why . She wouldn’t have decided to turn Matteo at random.

“And mind you, she wore that mask before she was even crowned. She was protecting her identity, playing this game of duality, before the Council gave her what she wanted. I just don’t know how she knew of vampires when very few did.

I certainly didn’t. But turning me was a reckless, risky move, and she had to have had a good deal of vampire knowledge in order to do it. ”

“We know that people in search of power and status will use anything to get what they want,” Arthie said. But why vampires when there were so many other ways to achieve what the Ram had? That, Arthie didn’t know.

Matteo scoffed. “She certainly found both.”