Page 31 of Bound in Blood (Vampires of Boston #1)

Chapter

Nineteen

ONE WEEK LATER

MATEO

I t was raining.

The kind of rain that was cold and biting. The kind that threatened to become snow, but wasn’t quite there. Mateo, for one, was just glad he wasn’t human, so the worst of the chill wouldn’t affect him.

Water slicked down the back alley walls in long, lazy streams, pooling near the storm drain as he and Marco watched from the shadows, waiting for… well, Mateo wasn’t sure what.

The baby faced feral to wander up to them with an apology and a promise to never hurt anyone again?

Not likely.

Mateo shifted his weight, rolling his shoulders beneath the collar of his coat.

The rain may not have been freezing, but it was starting to soak through the fabric in a way that bordered on uncomfortable.

Mateo might have been becoming too domestic, because in that moment all his stupid mind supplied was ‘At least Logan is inside and doesn’t have to deal with this. ’

“I hate this city,” he muttered aloud, not really directed at anything.

“No, you don’t. You hate being wet,” Marco replied, just behind him, voice low and even.

“Same thing. It rains like half the year here,” Mateo grumbled, knowing full well he sounded a bit like a child having a tantrum. “I don’t know how the book vampires handle living in Washington.”

“Well, for starters, they’re not real.” Marco poked at Mateo’s shoulder. “And we need to focus.”

Mateo sighed and rolled his eyes, though it didn’t have quite the same bite when Marco was right. It never did.

They fell quiet again. The sound of rain filled the space between them.

It pattered against the trash cans and the dumpster beside them, trickled down the rooflines, hissed as it hit the still-warm bricks.

The alley smelled like wet cardboard and old grease, and Mateo hated that he could identify that scent now.

“How long do you think we wait before calling it?” he asked eventually, his voice quieter now. “Midnight? One?”

“Logan doesn’t get off work until nearly three,” Marco reminded him. “And you used to be much better at doing the whole quiet-stalking-through-back-alleys thing when we were human.”

“What can I say? Immortality has made me impatient.” Mateo blew out a breath. “He’s probably not even here. If he’s got any sort of conscience like Logan says, he’s probably run far, far away by now.”

They moved deeper into the alley, boots barely making a sound against the wet pavement.

Even after all these years, Mateo still marveled at how easily they could vanish into the dark now.

As boys, they used to cross the street when alleys looked like this.

Now they were the ones people should probably cross the street to avoid.

Mateo huffed a quiet laugh, mostly to himself.

Marco caught it anyway. “What?”

“Just think it’s interesting how full circle this has all become.” He shook his head, blinking water from his lashes. “How we’re the ones stalking people in alleys now.”

“Interesting isn’t the word I’d use,” Marco replied. “ Ironic, maybe. Like if there is a god, they’ve got a sick sense of humor.”

“ Fratellino, if you believe in a god after all we’ve been through, I can’t help you.”

The rain had slowed slightly as they rounded another corner, somewhere between Vik’s bar and Logan’s old apartment, but it was still steady enough to curtain their vision.

A haze of streetlight flickered over the slick pavement.

Somewhere in the distance, a car passed, tires hissing along wet asphalt.

“It hasn’t been all bad,” Marco argued finally. “Mostly bad, yes. But there have been good things.”

Mateo nodded, willing to play along so long as it made the night move faster. “We made it to America. Saw the end of the war.”

“We’ll never have to worry about growing old. About one of us dying before the other,” Marco said quietly. That had been a constant fear of theirs as children, being without each other.

“And Logan,” Mateo added, a little softer this time. “We have him now.”

Marco didn’t reply right away, but Mateo didn’t need him to.

The warmth that pulsed through the bond in quiet agreement was more than enough.

It was strange, how easily someone could slip into your world and become part of it.

How quickly Logan had taken up space they didn’t even know they’d left empty.

“I didn’t believe Isabella, back in the day,” Marco admitted. “When she said a mate would improve your life in ways you didn’t know needed improving.”

“I never listened to her long enough to hear her say any of that.” Mateo waved him off. “But I suppose she was right.”

“Thank God he didn’t meet us seventy years ago,” Marco said, huffing out a laugh.

Mateo exhaled a slow breath in quiet agreement, tipping his head back to stare at the sky.

The clouds above were low and heavy, lit from beneath by the amber wash of city lights.

The rain had gone misty now, drifting more than falling.

It clung to their coats and lashes, made the world feel hushed and far away.

They moved in silence for another block, weaving through shadows, cutting behind dumpsters and broken fences. Mateo kept his senses wide open, listening for the faintest scuff of a boot, the rustle of fabric, the telltale rush of blood.

And then he stopped cold.

“Do you hear that?” Mateo asked, voice barely audible.

Marco had gone still beside him, head tilted slightly. “Yeah.”

Somewhere up ahead, at the edge of the alley where the dim glow of a motion-activated porch light flickered to life, a shape darted past.

Too fast for a human. Not fast enough for one of them.

He took a step forward, and then another, ignoring Marco’s quiet warning behind him. Just enough rain clung to the light above them to blur the figure’s outline, and Mateo needed to get closer.

“Mateo, we promised if we saw him we’d call?—”

“We don’t know if it’s him yet.” But somewhere deep inside Mateo, he knew. That if he got closer, he’d catch the familiar stench of stale blood, see the pitch-black eyes of ferality. So he had to get closer.

Mateo took another step.

The figure was just ahead now, paused at the mouth of the alley like it hadn’t expected to be seen. The rain veiled him like static on an old TV, but the next time lightning flashed—brief, distant, silent—Mateo caught a glimpse of his face.

Logan was right. He looked young. Like the college kids that flocked to the clubs in the area. But there was something old about him, too. Something nagging on familiar, but Mateo just couldn’t?—

Lightning flashed again, and this time the boy made direct eye contact with him and Marco, his face twisting up in what Mateo could only describe as pure terror.

The feral boy lifted his arms up in a protective pose, like his base instincts told him only to feed and save his face… when Mateo saw it.

The scar.

And suddenly, the familiarity made sense.

A big, jagged scar, like something—or someone—had taken a chunk of the boy’s flesh. Because someone had.

Mateo had.

The air left his lungs, even though he didn’t need to breathe. His body reacted on instinct. Shock flaring. Denial rising. Memory pressing up from the depths like a hand reaching for his throat.

And then the boy ran.

Not at them. Not toward Logan’s bar. Just away.

“Mateo?” Marco’s voice snapped him out of his trance, “Mateo, he looked just like?—”

Mateo didn’t respond, he just stood watching the space where the boy had just been.

And suddenly, he wasn’t in a rainy alley in Boston anymore.

He was two weeks shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, hiding in the shadows of a narrow alley in northern Italy.

And those same black eyes were staring straight at him.