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Chapter Twenty-Two

The black ring must have fallen off his finger. I lean down.

“Don’t!” Manod barks. “Don’t you dare touch it.”

I look up just in time to see stars. He’s punched me twice before I recover my senses.

But I do recover them, and I hit back. He is made of stone, but with this Strega blood—this magic elixir—my fists are also stone.

They land hard, but don’t seem to hurt him.

I dodge faster than I ever did before. I last longer.

I surprise him a few times, but in the end, I am just a fledgling and he is an ancient.

“You.” He’s straddling me on the bed with his knees pinning my arms to my sides, pummeling me repeatedly.

“You are trouble. I will beat the trouble out of you every night.” My vision is only fit to see stars.

“I will starve you.” He does not tire. He will hit me until my face caves in. “You will beg me for mercy.”

I should be blacked out, but I am fully conscious. I feel everything as if it’s brand new. From the first time my jaw breaks, to the tiniest friction around my right ring finger.

He stops. I can only see him out of one eye. His bloody fist is pulled back and his face is splattered with red.

“What did you do?” he asks.

Nothing. I did nothing. But my mouth won’t make the words.

He twists around. Paolina is crouched by the side of the bed. The wound at her throat is raw but already healing. She smiles.

“Did I return it to the wrong one?” She covers her giggle with her fingertips. “Oops.”

Master reaches for her. He’s going to snap her in two.

Quietly, without shouting or concern, I state the fact, “No.”

I throw him off me. Not with my hands. He had those pinned until he was smashed against the stone wall. He leaps up, and by holding up my hand the way he did, he’s thrown again.

I stand over him, ringed hand out, fingers splayed. The ring is snug but not tight—as if it was made for me.

“Paolina!” I say through clenched teeth.

“Finish it, Carmine.”

“Did you—?” My jaw won’t operate properly, so I tilt the ring toward her.

“I did. Please. Just do it.”

I’d thought about running. I’d considered lying and negotiating. Once he sired me, I forgot I could kill him.

He struggles to get free of my control, but I have him.

“ Nnff .”

I mean to say, it’s wrong. I feel the wrongness in my gut. I cannot drink another vampire’s blood, and I cannot kill the one who sired me. But my lower face isn’t connected to my head.

“I told you,” Manod says. “Give me my ring.” He holds out his hand as far as I’ll let him.

“He will never leave you alone,” Paolina says.

She’s right. Ring or no ring, long after this woman is dead, he will follow me.

“Take it off, beautiful one, before you hurt yourself. Give it to me. We will speak on the way home, to Neapolis.”

“It won’t fit him,” she says to me. “If it came off in the first place?—”

“Shut it, whore!”

“It probably won’t even come off you!”

“ Nnnt !”

“He will never leave us alone.”

With that, I have heard enough. Whatever wrongness made me pause, it is gone now. I have the courage, or the reckless stupidity, to grab the frame Paolina used as a weapon against me, and drive it into Master’s chest.

Immediately, he is a black bird.

A crow. The point of the frame pins his wing to the wall.

The power of what I’ve done sends me to the floor. I scrabble back from the writhing, twisting bird that is throwing feathers trying to get away, squawking like an unearthly demon, loud enough to deafen the Pope and send the Bourbon army home.

Paolina is in my arms, sobbing and weak, burying her face in my chest so she doesn’t have to see what I can’t stop looking at.

It’s just Paolina and me, panting in the same hard rhythm.

It’s not done. I have to decapitate this bird.

I kiss her head. It should hurt to press her to my jaw, but it only aches like a bruise. I touch it. It hurts, but it’s connected. I’m healing already.

“Are you okay?” I ask her with my jaw clenched.

“I’m tired.”

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go.” I stand and help her up, holding her steady when she wobbles. “You’ll get better, and we’ll figure it out. Let me take care of this first.”

I pull the Squirrel’s sword from his sheath.

She stares at me, doe-eyed. “You put me in thrall.”

I meet her gaze and think better of reaching for her. “I didn’t.” But I did. I may not know how I did it, but I did. I wanted to own her. Now I do. “I’ll fix it.”

A part of her doesn’t want to be fixed. That’s the part that forces her to take a step toward me, but a pounding at the door freezes her.

“ Everything all right in there ?” a man’s voice calls from the other side of the door.

“Stay here,” I say.

She neither agrees nor disagrees, but I trust her, so I open the door a crack. There’s an Empire soldier with the hotel owner and a man the size of a house that I remember from my whoring days of a few months ago.

“Remo,” I say to him. “It’s me.”

Remo bows his head. I take it as a simple sign of respect, not an apology.

“We don’t want no trouble,” the hotel owner says.

“We heard some noise.” The soldier leans forward, peering in as if he expects me to move. “Your pecker’s hanging out.”

“I don’t need it sucked again tonight, but thanks for the offer.”

Before I finish, what looks like a black leather bag drops from the ceiling, grows the wings of a bat, and flies behind me, into the room. It falls to the floor on two feet.

“Go,” he barks to the men in the hall and waves, slapping the door closed.

It’s Charles, my wife’s uncle, in his bloodied white cape.

He has not changed in ten years. His moustache is still as thick as the lips they’re over.

The waves of gray hair above his ears haven’t spread, and his meager forehead has gotten no higher.

Not a single new line was etched into it then, as now.

The white indent in his thick left eyebrow is still there.

He stands before the wall where I pinned Manod, my master.

Only a wing is left. He ripped it off to escape.

“Not bad,” Charles says.

I get between him and Paolina. Whatever sweetness attracts me must be drawing him.

His hands always bore the softness of an aristocrat, but now, when he puts one to his chest, it’s even whiter and more pristine against the black signet ring on his finger.

He bows at the waist. I try to remember if he had that ring when he was at my wedding.

I cannot. My entire life is turning to a mist in my memory.

“King of Corvids,” he says.

“You died on the wall,” I say like a fucking idiot. It doesn’t matter. He and I are the same now.

“And I can smell your hunger, fledgling.” He stands before correcting himself.

“King Fledgling.” The confusion inside me must be visible on the outside, because he smirks with a twitch, then pinches his lips tight.

“You’ve come a long way since I saw you last.” He flicks his finger toward the finger the black ring encircles.

“Like recognizes like.” He steps toward me.

I move back, pushing Paolina away from him. “I’ve been looking for this one.”

“She is not for you.”

He holds up his palms. “King will not fight king.”

This is the second time he’s called me a king, but now… is this a rule? How many rules do I not know? It’s barely been a season since the days when I wanted nothing to do with my official capacity. I already rejected my rank and my power. Now I’m king of… what?

Paolina, at the very least.

I stand up straight. “You will leave us.”

He makes a sound in his throat that’s something between a question and an answer, but makes no move to obey. “How is my niece?”

“You should go ask her.”

“I may.” He shrugs in that way he did when I answered his question about my lineage. “I haven’t seen Laro since he was a baby. How old is he now?”

A bolt of ice shoots down my spine.

Paolina’s fingers dig into my bicep. She heard the threat in his voice. She knows what my son means to me.

“You can count the summers yourself, on the way out.”

“I can ask his mother.”

“You will not touch him,” I say.

“I notice you protect him, but not your loving wife.”

“Neither should need protection from you.”

“Ah. Well, King of the Corvids, you’re right. I am still attached to my human self. But our attachments will wane.” He sighs and picks up a black feather from the side table. “Once that separation is complete, what is there left to want?”

“You wanted to put blood in the gutters.”

“And I did.” He sighs with boredom. “If I leave, you won’t know why you wear that ring.”

“Neither will you.”

He laughs gently. “Let me mentor you. Let me show you the way our world works. We will drink from this Strega and?—”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish. Paolina dives out from behind me with a shorter end of the same picture frame. The pointed edge makes contact, piercing a layer of fabric before he swats her away—throwing her into the wall so hard the floor shakes.

“I will kill you!” I growl.

“Try, fledgling. Try.” He turns into a bat, flapping around the ceiling then out the open window. I would follow him, but Paolina’s still on the floor. I help her up.

“Are you all right?”

“Do you still want me to stay here?” she asks.

At first, I assume here is Rome . The last thing I said to her was stay here , and she’s in thrall. I’m going to have to be careful what I say. “No, no, it’s?—”

“Good.” She interrupts before I can say another word, backing up, one finger on her lips.

I don’t know why she’s asking me to keep quiet. Not then.

Her calves hit the windowsill. She leans backward with a deliberateness that blinds me to her intentions. She bends back farther into space, too much, before I realize I’m not faster than gravity.

“Paolina!”

I run to the window. She is splayed on the street in the shape of a dying flower, naked, with the open wound I made on her throat.

The woman standing over her looks up at me and screams, pointing while she shouts, “Monster!”

Of all the evil happening in this city right now, she’s identified this one with pinpoint accuracy. I step back into the room.

It’s just me now.

The black ring tightens.

I slide into the liminal and change into a raven. The ring and my clothes disappear into my consciousness. I fly out the window and away, away, away, but no man is ever free from Rome.