Page 40 of Cursebound

Without a word, she throws open the back doors, and I lay Pietro in there, amid dust sheets and paintbrushes and the smell of sawdust. I climb into the front next to her, and she shoves the keys in the ignition and starts the engine.

She pauses and turns to me, eyes glowing green. “Thank you,” she says simply. “Again.”

CHAPTER 16

ROSA

We’re in a motel off the highway right across the Pennsylvania border, where we’re enjoying the luxury of our own leaky shower and a TV that only seems to show reruns ofHill Street Blues. We’ve driven for eight hours, and everything I’ve eaten has come from a vending machine or a fryer.

All things considered, it could be worse.

Pietro is in a connecting room with Luca, who has been feeding him blood every couple hours since we ran from Chicago. He’s still alive, and there’s been a flicker of movement from his eyelids that I’ve been working to convince myself is voluntary. I have no idea if he’ll recover, but for the time being, I will settle for him not being dead. It’s more than I could have hoped for when I saw him take a swan dive off my balcony.

Whenever my mind goes back to that horrifying moment, it short-circuits—like someone shoved my brain into a microwave. I’ve been around a long time and faced a lot of different situations, but nothing prepared me for how to react when my evil rapist brother begged for forgiveness, then tried to kill himself before my very eyes.

To say it’s complicated would be an understatement, and there’s a lot to unpack, but for now, I’m focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. The bottom line is that when I thought he was going to die, I was devastated, and I let that emotion take over. Eventually, I might decide to kill him myself, but for now, I’m grateful to have him in the room next to me, still breathing.

Not as grateful as I am for an empty bladder, the warm water that washed away the last several hours, and the flat surface I lie on, finally resting. Look at me—Rosa Capelli: A walking advertisement for a positive mental outlook.

It’s approaching dawn, and Luca has patched over the motel room windows with those foil screens you put in your windshield on sunny days. We picked them up at a gas station in Kalamazoo, along with candy, potato chips, and caffeine drinks, all gone now. All consumed by me, obviously. Luca needs to feed too, but our options have been limited, and I can tell he’s cautious about the whole dinnertime thing around me.

Maybe he thinks I’ll go all Vecchissime Seer on his ass if he grabs a snack—and it’s not like he hasn’t had opportunities. We stopped at an all-night diner a few hours back, and the waitress there was eating him up with her eyes. Brushing her boobs against him as she poured his coffee, giggling as she flipped her hair. Literally begging to be bitten, the tramp. It was like I didn’t exist.

He must have been tempted, but his eyes never once flared red, so either he’s not as hungry as I thought, or he’s doing a great job of hiding it.

He’s damn good at hiding things. I have no idea what he’s thinking most of the time. We spent hours in a moving vehicle together, but we barely spoke. He was weak from his burns, and I was in a state of high adrenaline as I got us the hell out of dodge. Now that we are somewhere he has deemed safe enough to stop, we need to talk, but all I want to do is rest.

The man himself walks through the door that connects our room to Pietro’s. There’s a tell-tale red stain on his wrist, and I wonder if it hurts—I mean, it’s got to, right? Tearing your own flesh open with your teeth? Even if it heals up again, it’s got to sting.

He’s still wearing his stupid I-heart-Chicago hat and pulls it off as I stare. He runs long fingers through the rumpled mass of his hair and says, “He’s settled if you want to see him.” His tone is flat and neutral, and he must be conflicted about this. He thinks Pietro is the scum of the earth and deserves to die. He may be right.

I nod and move past him into the next room. It is dark except for the vague red glow given off by the fire escape light, and my brother is a shady figure, lying still on the bed. I take a deep breath and walk toward him. I cannot quite quell the image of the last time I was on a bed with him, and a lick of nausea slithers into my belly.

I sit by his side and study his pale face. He looks so young asleep like this—or unconscious like this, I suppose. Like he did when he was a child. When times were simpler and our family was whole. It feels like a lifetime ago, because it was.

I reach out and brush the hair from his forehead. His eyes move around beneath his lids and his breathing speeds up.

“Hey, bro,” I say, slipping my hand around his limp fingers. “Not a clue if you’re in there or not. If you can even hear me. But if you can, that was a real dick move. Even in the context of the last twenty-four hours, that was a major dick move. I lost Serena, and I lost Angie, and I lost our parents—what the fuck, Pietro? You planned to leave me alone with Tomasso?” I am getting angry, and some of that anger spills into my voice. If I want him back, that’s probably not the sensible approach.

“Anyway,” I continue, taking it down a notch. “If that was your plan, it sucked—and it didn’t work. You’re still here, Pietro, still in the land of the living. That might not be what you wanted, but it’s what you’ve got. So if you were serious when you said you were sorry, when you said you wanted to help me, then come back. Come back and help me. We’ll keep pumping you full of vamp blood, and that’ll keep your heart beating… But I think the rest might be up to you. Come back, baby brother. Don’t let our story end here, okay?”

I might be imagining it—I am exhausted, stressed, running on Reese’s Pieces—but I think I feel the vaguest hint of movement around my fingers. The slightest suggestion of a squeeze.

I’d like to drop a kiss onto his pallid cheek, but it is too soon for that. Too soon for my affection to override my recent memories. I give his hand a pat and leave him. It’s not like he’s going anywhere.

I walk back into the room I’m sharing with Luca just as he emerges from the shower, a white towel tied around his waist. His thick, dark hair is damp, curled against his skin, and his eyes are intense as they find mine. I gaze at the tattoo, which I’ve now seen in all its glory. The body of the black-and-silver dragon dominates his back, stretching its wings over his shoulders and down around his chest. It is a symbol of his commitment to the Cosca—to this Don Vincenzo asshole—but it is still beautiful. He is beautiful.

I have made so many vows to myself over the last few hours. Vows to remain clear-minded, focused, levelheaded. Vows to think before I act. Vows to keep my damn hands off this man.

Yet when I look at him now, his eyebrow quirked as he tries to figure out my mood, all I feel is thankful. And yeah, a little bit turned on. Without him, Pietro would be dead. Fuck it, without him, I might be dead—or living one of those fates worse than. Without him, I might never have had the courage to finally escape Tomasso.

There is so much I want to say to him, but none of it feels quite right. A mere thank you comes nowhere close. I gulp down the emotion and aim for some of that clear-minded thinking I was so determined to find. I go to my travel bag and unpack the few items I brought with me. I lay them out on the table—laptop, phone, cash, IDs. Clean panties, always important. A set of different-sized stakes in a fabric roll. Finally, I find what I now realize I was looking for all along. The hairbrush. The photo.

I sit at the rickety stool and hold them to me. I set the brush on my lap and look at Serena, and I just sit.

I sense him behind me, feel his hands come to my shoulders, his touch gentle and reassuring. I lean back, letting my head rest on his body.

“These are what you went back for, carissima?” he says, his voice a low rumble.