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As he says it, the threshold melts away, and in a single stride, Sabine is in the foyer, and has him up against the nearest wall.

Blood pounds beneath his skin, and she is still deciding whether to tear open his throat or use his little life for leverage when he is out from under her grasp, twisting behind her, as fluid as a banner in the wind.

By the time she turns, there are two lengths of steel against her skin, the first a blade beneath her jaw, the second a pistol just below her ribs. Sabine looks from the weapons to his azure eyes, so full of life.

Matteo hasn’t moved. He simply stands there, looking on, amused.

Then, as easily as he was on her, Alessandro steps away, the weapons vanishing into a holster at his back. And Sabine must admit, she finds herself impressed. Or at the very least, intrigued.

“Well,” says her host, “now that you’ve met . . .”

And with that, he strolls off into the house, leaving them both to follow.

Sabine trails Matteo up the palatial stairs, which give way onto a wide hall, studded with open doors. He gestures to the first one on the right. “This room, I think, has the most extraordinary views.”

He leads them into a salon, high-ceilinged and marble-floored, lit by an ornate chandelier.

A massive multipaneled window fills one wall, and paintings fill every other, some portraits, and others scenes of life, and while Sabine has never taken much interest in the arts, she can see the talent in the movement of brush, the light that seems to bloom behind the canvas.

Alessandro gestures to the red splashed across his front, and excuses himself so that he can go clean up, while Sabine drifts to the windows.

Her host was right about the view. From here, all of Venice seems to stretch out at her feet.

At the same time, if she turns her head just so, she can see Matteo, ghosted in the glass, the good mood dropping from his face.

“I meant what I said, Sabine. This is my home. And I will not have you make a mess of it.”

He drifts forward as he speaks.

“If you wish to stay, then you may do so as my guest, and I will be your gracious host. But you will live as I do, by a certain set of rules. There will be no skulking about in shadows, no victims stolen from the street and cast in the canal. I will show you how to savor every soul you take. How to claim space, and bend minds, how to enthrall, enchant, and masquerade. How to be the last one they think of when the bodies go missing.”

His hand settles on her shoulder.

“I will show you how to live, better than you ever have before.”

Sabine lets her gaze slide back to the water, the bridges, the city’s sculpted buildings like shadowed prints against the sky, a handful of windows lit even now by candlelight.

“A rousing speech,” she muses dryly. “But if I refuse your patronage?”

Matteo sighs and reaches past her, rests his hand against the window glass. Beyond, the first light has just begun to tint the sky.

“Then you best go now,” he says, “and be on the road to Rome by dawn.”

There is neither hope, nor menace, in the words.

As if he does not truly care which path she takes, only that she takes one.

As if the choice is hers. And it is—at some point, the spectral hand has vanished from her back, and Sabine knows then that if she turned to go, there would be nothing to impede her.

Matteo withdraws as a shape twitches in the doorway.

Alessandro has reappeared, dressed in a clean open-collared tunic, the paint scrubbed from his hands and face, the skin there pink from scouring. Matteo goes to him and lays a kiss gently on his shoulder, a gesture at once so simple and so intimate.

So unlike Sabine, who found the shape of her own urges in the dark and thought that was the only place a truth like hers could live.

That it was something to be shrouded. Yet here these two men are, together, and she does not need the ability to feel Matteo’s mind to know that there is more than simple lust between them.

She sees it, in the way her host’s expression softens, the way his gaze lingers on the other man.

Love.

As terrible and bottomless as hunger.

She wonders what it’s like.

“Good night, Sabine,” says Matteo absently as he and Alessandro slip into the hall, but his voice, soft as it is, wafts back toward her as he goes. “If you do decide to stay, it is a spacious house. I’m sure you’ll find a room that suits you.”

Moments later, she hears a heavy door swing closed. An old lock turn.

And she is alone.

It is nothing—she has been alone a hundred years, has managed well enough, forgone every chance, when it arose, to fall in step with others like her. And yet, she lingers at the window, watching dawn creep forward as she considers what to do.

Whether to stay, or go, or spite him. She should go, of course. Her curiosity is piqued, but she is not one to bend beneath the weight of other people’s rules. Least of all a man’s. And who is he to be making such demands on her ? To drag her here and then deliver ultimatums?

But the air —in the end, it is the air that sways her. The way it bent around her in the street, turned solid as a door. The way she was forced back, over a threshold that wasn’t even there save for his whim, his will. Sabine wants to know how Matteo did it.

I will show you, he said, and she will hold him to his word.

And then, she will do whatever pleases her.

After all, he exacted no oath, made her promise nothing.

Besides, she thinks, as she turns her back on the glass and crosses the elegant salon, fingers trailing over curtain and molding and painted wall, she has only just arrived in Venice, and does not have a place to stay. At least, not one as fine as this.

She finds three bedrooms, besides the one whose doors are locked, the one with a human heart beating beyond, and chooses the largest at the end of the hall.

Its walls are stamped with wild vines, their edges filigreed in gold, its curtains thick enough to blot out every trace of light.

And a four-poster bed seems to grow straight out of the floor, dark wood branching at the top into a kind of canopy. It is extravagant. Ornate.

It is exactly to her tastes.

Sabine slips off her boots, and lets her bare feet caress the silk rug, kiss the marble floor.

A small plume of dust rises around her when she sinks onto the lavish bed, but she does not care.

And by the time the sun rises, she is not on the road to Rome, but instead buried under fine sheets, and dreaming of doors that all give way beneath her touch.