It would be so, so freeing. It might take fifty, even one hundred, years before the Guild finds someone else to hunt my bloodline. It would earn me decades of not watching my back. Of not having to move to a new continent because my hideout was discovered. Of peace.

And yet, I hesitate.

Do it. Do it now. He’s not the person who snored in your ear at two a.m. Who pretended to no longer understand the rules of cribbage once you started beating him. He’s not the man who kissed you. He wouldn’t have done any of it, not if he’d remembered what you are. He finds you disgusting. He hates you. His entire purpose is to eliminate you, which . . .

Doesn’t explain why his eyes, all of a sudden, seem so soft. Or the fact that instead of pushing me away, instead of hitting back with his own weapons and his own strength, he touches me tenderly. One hand lifts to cup my face, and he gently thumbs my cheekbone.

“What are you . . . ?” My voice trembles. I can’t bring myself to finish the question.

“Aethelthryth,” he says, calm. His voice is the same as it was before the attack, and yet completely different. He is the man who saved my life two days ago, the man who kissed me, the man who cleaned up the mess I made in my kitchen, but also something more. “If you want to kill me, I’m not going to stop you. But first, I’m going to need you to tell me something.”

I feel disoriented. As though someone is spinning me around blindfolded to make fun of the way I stumble to my knees. There must be something I’m missing. I certainly don’t know why I let him lean even closer to me, his own movements causing my knife to press against his throat and break the skin. The scent of his blood melts into me, tantalizingly sweet. His lips find my ear, and he asks, “Where do you think I’ll go once I’m dead?”

And then it’s my turn to remember.

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Chapter 12

His Excellency, Duca Aurelio Corsini, had been, true to his title, an excellent man.

An eccentric one, too. I had known him for approximately fifty years, and was therefore wholly unsurprised that only three months after his death, his daughters had decided to throw a masquerade ball in his honor.

It was, without a doubt, what he would have wanted.

The duca and I first met when he was a child. He had been traveling the Florentine countryside, on his way back from an excursion in the Apennines, when he and his escorts were attacked by a group of bandits. Normally, I wouldn’t have interfered with the affairs of the human aristocracy. But it was dusk, and I was hungry. The ducato may have been no friend of mine, but I did not approve of this specific gang of bandits. Torturing nearly twenty people with a semi-orgiastic relish was, simply put, in bad taste.

So I killed half a dozen outlaws, drank from them well past the moment of satiety, and when the last drained body fell to the ground, I noticed that not everyone from the ducal party was as dead as I had thought.

“Thank you,” a young boy said to me, his voice surprisingly firm. He couldn’t have been older than seven or eight. He ought to be screaming for the Tuscan hills. Instead, he held the hand of a rapidly cooling female corpse. “They were very bad to my nurse. I’m glad you were bad to them.”

The reasoning made sense to me, and I was too pleasantly full of fresh blood to panic at having been found out. In the moonlit night, I could see a shimmer of defiant tears in the boy’s eyes, and I took a liking to him.

So I asked, “Would you like me to escort you back to your home?”

“Please, my lady.”

And that was it. When I dropped him off outside the gates of the palazzo, he asked if I would come to him again. “Please,” he added, and only because of that, I promised that I would. Once he turned fifteen, I visited, convinced that he’d have forgotten all about me. But he remembered, and he welcomed me at his court. He never asked me to explain my actions or my nature. He never brought up what he’d seen or my extraordinary, never-ending youth.

And yet, he knew I was not like him. He would ask me questions about history and the meaning of life. He would seek my company and my conversation. He extended friendship and protection without demanding anything in return.

It was refreshing. Throughout the centuries, there had been a handful of humans to whom I had shown my true nature. Alas, faced with the reality of immortality, people either deemed it a symbol of evil or they demanded a piece of it for themselves. Not the duca, who knew me for who I was and offered nothing but acceptance, making me feel as though I was something more than a figment of people’s nightmares.

I loved him dearly, and I knew that I would miss him. Therefore, the least I could do was to put a traditional Colombina mask over my eyes, show up for the odd ball his daughters were throwing in his honor, and watch the attendees get wine drunk as they shared improper stories about his life.

“Were you a personal acquaintance of the duca?” a deep voice asked, Italian but accented. Someone else who had traveled from far away to pay their respects.

I was leaning back against the stone wall in the great hall. When I turned around, I found a tall, broad-backed man whom I hadn’t noticed before. He wore a charcoal cloak, a matching three-cornered hat, and a black-and-golden volto mask that covered his entire face.

My first instinct was inexplicable and yet very clear: to excuse myself and step away. Go back to the inn where I had already decided I would spend the day. But it was just that—instinct. It lasted a fraction of a second, and then I subdued it.

“I was, yes. You?”

He nodded, but said, “‘A friend of a friend’ might be a better definition. You must have known him better than I did.”

I smiled, even as a pang of sadness spread through my chest. “He was a very kind man. A rare thing.”

“Kind men?”

“Kindness, in general.”

The ensemble, which comprised a lute, a harpsichord, and a viola, began playing a beautiful, slow piece, clearly intending for the guests to dance a saraband. When the man offered me his hand, I briefly hesitated, surprised. The steps I’d learned were probably one or two decades old by now, and I was unlikely to keep up with the rest of the dancers.

On the other hand, the duca would have been highly amused by the mess I was going to make of it.

“Please,” I said, smiling, and sure enough, it was obvious from the start that I should have declined. But half the attendees were in their cups, and the man guided me through the steps until I was less of a disaster, his assured hands pointing me in the right direction. Once, I even felt him grip my waist, stopping me from walking into a young girl dressed like a Harlequin. Perhaps I should have gasped at his daring, but I couldn’t find it in me to mind. When it was the turn of the couple next to us to take the stage, he asked quietly, “Was the duca your lover?”

There was some impropriety to the question, but I assumed that the man had overindulged, or that he was simply honoring the Italian custom of being nosy. Either way, I didn’t take offense. I enjoyed the deep rasp of his voice, the line of his shoulders, his quiet questions. So much so, I found myself wondering: When was the last time I had taken a lover? Years. Decades. What about the last time I had considered taking a lover?

“No. We didn’t suit that way. He was more special than that to me.”

“A friend cannot be more special than a lover.”

I turned to glance up at the man—uselessly so, given that I could not glimpse a single inch of his skin, making it impossible to read his intent. Moreover, I couldn’t very well tell him why the duca was so unique a presence in my life. Still, I attempted to explain. “Some lives run invisibly. Undetected by most. And when a person comes along who sees those lives for what they are, who acknowledges their reality, who reminds people that there is value in different ways of existing . . . A minute of that is worth more than a thousand nights with a lover. Wouldn’t you agree?”