Chapter Twenty-one

South Aegean Sea

June 2004


“Do you require another drink, Miss De Novo?”

She glanced at the small servant who stood next to her chair before staring back at the ocean that surrounded her.

“No, thanks.”

“You must ring the kitchen if there is anything you need. Or let your guard know.” Beatrice glanced at the sturdy Greek who stood near the entrance to her room. As far as she could tell, he didn’t speak a word of English. She wasn’t sure he spoke at all.

But he watched.

He watched every move she made during the day, unless she ducked into the small bathroom in the chamber where she had been kept for the past week.

“Sure. Thanks. I’ll let him know.” She looked back at the ocean, letting her thoughts drift in and out with the crashing surf.

The servant crept away, following the small trail that connected all the exterior rooms of Lorenzo’s strange house. She watched him duck into what she thought was the kitchen area of the vampire’s house, which had become her prison.

It was sprawling, built into the half-moon bay of what she had been told was Lorenzo’s own island. Cliffs speared up from the surface of the water and the house was nestled in the crook above the rocky beach.

She knew there were other rooms, built back into the cliffs where the sun could not reach. All the exterior rooms faced the water and opened to the ocean with large doors not unlike a garage. She wasn’t locked in, per se. But unless she wanted to jump fifty feet into the vast expanse of the Aegean, there wasn’t anywhere she could go.

When she had woken after being dragged from Giovanni’s house, she immediately heard the sound of large engines droning. She thought she was in the belly of a cargo plane of some sort, though it was outfitted luxuriously with plush seats, tables and beds.

She saw Lorenzo, lounging in a pair of white slacks and shirt that only emphasized his inhuman paleness.

“Where are we?”

He looked up with an indulgent smile.

“You’re awake! On my plane, of course. Headed to what will be your home for some time. Do you want any refreshment?” She glanced at his own crystal glass, filled with a thick red liquid she assumed was human blood. Lorenzo noticed her looking.

“I’m not a heathen like Giovanni. I drink human, of course, but I don’t like drinking from the tap.” He shuddered. “So disgustingly intimate, in my opinion. I only like getting that close to someone when I’m fucking them or killing them.”

He winked at her when she blanched. “No need to worry about that, my dear. I want you fresh and unharmed when your father comes begging for you.”

“Where are we going?”

Lorenzo sighed with a smile. “Somewhere far more temperate than Houston. I don’t know how you stand the weather in that horrid city.” He shivered. “Absolutely horrendous. We’re going to a little private island in the Aegean, my dear girl. A special place. Only a very few people know about it, so you should feel privileged.”

“Be still my heart,” she said dryly.

Lorenzo laughed, his sharp fangs falling down in his delight. “Oh, there you are, Miss De Novo, I knew I would like you once I got you away from my father. He’s so stifling, isn’t he? Terribly boring vampire. And I was sure you had that quick wit that so delighted me with Stephen.

“Even when I was torturing him,” a wistful expression crossed Lorenzo’s angelic face, “he would come up with the most inventive barbs. What a treat he was.”

A sick feeling churned in Beatrice’s stomach, and she thought she might throw up again, but she forced herself to take a deep breath and change the subject.

“How are you flying? I mean, doesn’t your wonky energy mess up the plane and stuff?”

He chuckled. “What an excellent question. Yes, it would if the cargo compartment had not been especially designed for me. All sorts of wonderful, insulating materials they’ve come up with in the last few decades.”

“Yeah? Well, God bless chemistry, I guess.”

He chuckled, but continued paging through the magazine he’d been perusing. It appeared to be something about boats, but she couldn’t read the language on the front cover; she thought it might be Greek.

“Just consider this trip a vacation, my dear. After all,” an evil grin spread across his face, “you’ll have an ocean view room.”


Ocean view room, my ass. She stared at the endless sea that imprisoned her. The small interior door to her room was always locked. Any traffic in or out came by way of the large ocean-facing doors she was currently sitting in front of. They could be pulled up completely, so her room was always open. In the morning, her silent, watchful guard came and unlocked her, throwing open the room to the ocean breeze.

If she hadn’t been a prisoner, it would have been beautiful.

She had no privacy except the small washroom that contained a toilet, a sink with no mirror, and a shower with no curtain. She could not lock the door, and lived in fear of someone walking into the bathroom if she lingered too long. The room had come stocked with clothing; when she arrived, two silent women undressed her and threw her clothes into a garbage bag, leaving her naked and crying on the floor of her room. She crawled to the bed, intending to cover herself with a sheet until one of them came back and wordlessly opened the small chest of drawers was filled with pure white clothes.

There were white pants and white shirts. Looking in the top drawer even netted her a wealth of white bras and panties, all in her size. There were bathing suits and sundresses, all in white, all without any other identifying feature on them. She hastily dressed herself and crawled into the corner of her room for the next two days, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Beatrice had been captive a week and fallen into a monotonous rhythm. She woke. She took a quick shower and dressed herself in the white clothes, dumping the towel and dirty linens in a basket by the ocean door where another silent servant would carry them away at some point in the morning. No one ever talked to her. Her guard would open the door and she would sit in one of the chaises that faced the ocean, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing ever did.

When darkness fell, she could hear scurrying movements farther along the cliff to her left, but she never made any attempt to investigate the sick laughter or sounds of revelry that drifted to her room. Darkness meant vampires, and Beatrice may not have liked her human guard, but at least she didn’t think tall, dark and silent was going to rip her throat out if he got hungry.

Her door wasn’t shut until well after dark, so she often sat staring at the moon as it reflected off the dark water below her.

One night, about a week and a half after she’d been taken, she heard footsteps approaching. She tensed, but refused to run back to the corner, knowing that anything that came after her would just consider that an easier and more private meal.

To her surprise, it was Lorenzo who peeked his head around the corner.

“Hello, my dear. How are you enjoying your stay?”

Eying him warily, she took a moment to answer. Her own voice sounded strange to her ears.

“Well, I have no privacy, no human contact, and nothing to read or listen to other than the ocean. But at least your prison decorating skills are top notch, Lorenzo.”

He walked over to her and stretched out on another chaise, dressed from head to toe in loose white linen that made his inhuman skin glow in the moonlight. “You like it? I’m so glad my home meets your approval.”

“Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s just so…white. And white. And with all those white accents.”

Lorenzo smiled, his fangs dropping down. “Is this why Giovanni kept you around? To make him laugh? You smell as lovely as your father, so I’m sure he must have had to control himself if he didn’t bite you. It does make me wonder.”

She clenched her jaw for a moment. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Because he traded you?” Lorenzo shrugged. “Giovanni never cared for much besides his books and himself, to be honest. Don’t take it personally.”

Her mind flashed to a hundred different moments of kindness between them, but she didn’t want to dwell on those memories when the reality had turned out to be so much different. “I just have better things to think about.”

“I was expecting him to show up. I was so sure it was you he was smoking about in the library that day…but he hasn’t by now, so he probably won’t. If he cared for you at all, he’d be far more territorial.”

She stared at the ocean, remembering Giovanni’s fiercely protective behavior around Carwyn and Gavin. It had annoyed her at the time; but the moment she’d really wanted him to protect her, it had fallen away to nothing, so she didn’t know what to think.

“Something tells me he still has something up his sleeve.” Lorenzo flicked at a bug on his pants. “After all, one doesn’t hire expensive security for dinner. So…yes, I’m expecting something.”

“Yeah?” she muttered. “I’m not.”

She suddenly remembered him laughing over a bite of lemon cake she’d forced him to try. He’d made the most hilarious face, and she had leaned over and kissed his cheek in delight, laughing at his disgust and tugging the ends of his hair.


“You need a haircut.”

“I do not. Do you know how long it takes my hair to grow?”

“It falls in your eyes all the time and annoys you. Just a trim. I’ll do it for you; I used to cut my grandfather’s hair for him sometimes.”

“You’d cut my hair for me?”

“Sure.”


She felt tears come to her eyes, and she bit her lip until it bled, forgetting for a moment about the vampire sitting next to her in the dark. She glanced at him, worried he would try to bite, but he only handed her a white linen handkerchief and chuckled at her expression.

“I’ve had requests for you to join us in the evenings, but I doubt you’ll do that. But there’s a full library for you to enjoy, as well as plenty of music. I even have a music player you may borrow, if you like.”

“What’s the catch?”

His delighted laughter pealed out. “No catch, my dear. Xenos can come with you. He’s your personal guard, you know, chosen by me. No one will touch you or harm you in any way. After all,” he winked, “I need to have you in good condition when your father arrives.”

Her heart dropped. “My father’s coming? When?”

“I have no idea.” He shrugged. “Crafty little boy to have eluded me for so long. I’d really find it quite endearing if I didn’t want to kill him so much.”

Beatrice shuddered at his matter-of-fact tone. “Why? Why do you want to kill him? You made him a vampire, now you want to kill him?” Her frustration boiled over. “I don’t understand any of this! I feel like I got caught in some giant game all of you are playing, and I don’t even know why.”

Lorenzo’s head cocked; he almost looked amused. “I suppose it would be confusing to a human-even a bright girl like you.”

“So why don’t you enlighten me, Lorenzo? Since I’m here and no one seems to be coming to my rescue.”

He stared at her with the inhuman stillness she had come to associate with them. Finally, his lips cracked into a smile.

“You met my little mouse at the library, didn’t you? Scalia has been my mouse for many years, long before you were born, and long before he met your father in Houston when they were in school. It was pure chance that they met again in Ferrara.”

“My father wasn’t in Ferrara, he was in-”

“Yes, he was in Ferrara, researching some correspondence about Dante, of all people, and his exile in Ravenna, blah, blah, blah. Very boring. He was in the old library and had the unfortunate luck to stumble upon some books of mine. Books I had hidden there.” Lorenzo’s expression darkened. “Books that my little mouse was supposed to be guarding for me.”

“So you killed him? For finding some books?” She felt the tears slide down her cheeks. “He probably didn’t even know what he was looking at. Why did he have to die? Why-”

“It didn’t matter that he didn’t know, Beatrice. Scalia found him and your father began asking questions of his old school chum-questions I didn’t want any human asking. When Scalia told me about it, like the good little mouse he was, I decided to get rid of him. It seemed like the simplest thing.” Lorenzo rolled his eyes. “It’s my own fault I let myself be swayed to turn him. I thought he could be a replacement for Scalia, who had disappointed me, but sadly, your father was too bright.”

“And he ran away.”

“Yes, he did.” Lorenzo grimaced. “Though not before taking some books he knew I valued.”

“What books? Some of Giovanni’s?”

His eyes narrowed. “Some of mine. Our father-yes, we had the same father, I only call Giovanni ‘Papà’ because it annoys him-and it is technically accurate. Our father left them to him, when he should have left them to me. It didn’t matter what Giovanni thought. I was the one who had earned them.”

Lorenzo broke off, making a disgusted noise and flipping his long hair over his shoulder. “The fool was so trusting.”

“Who? Giovanni?” Beatrice was still confused. Was Lorenzo Giovanni’s brother? His son? She wanted to ask, but wanted to know about the books more.

“I told him the mad friar had burned them all.” A laugh bubbled up from Lorenzo’s throat. “And he believed me! He thought they were all gone. All his books and letters, Guiliana’s precious sonnets…all of it. Up in smoke in the ‘bonfire of the vanities.’”

“In Florence,” she whispered. “The bonfires of Savaranola.”

“Of course, my dear.” Lorenzo winked. “There were many things that didn’t quite burn as Savaranola intended. It was a good time to be an opportunist. It all happened before Giovanni was turned. Even then, he couldn’t run about like me. Andros didn’t trust him. With good reason, as it turned out.”

“Andros?” she muttered, but Lorenzo wasn’t listening. She recognized the name from the letters. Niccolo Andros was the name of the strange associate of Lorenzo de Medici’s who had shown such an interest in Giovanni Pico. Andros was Giovanni’s sire? She wondered why Lorenzo called him his father, too.

“Father thought Giovanni was the clever one.” Lorenzo chuckled, still reveling in his own deceit. “I was smarter than both of them. I fooled them both.” His eyes narrowed as he looked over the water. “And soon, I will fool them all. All the silly, trusting fools with their delusions of grandeur. As soon as I find your father and torture him into telling me what he did with the books…”

Lorenzo smiled and turned to her. “But perhaps torture won’t even be necessary. In fact,” he chucked her under the chin as she cringed, “I’m absolutely counting on it.”

Tucking all the vampire’s cryptic revelations into the back of her mind, she swallowed and tried to remain calm. “How do you know he’ll even come for me? How do you know he’s even keeping track?”

“He might not be.” Lorenzo shrugged. “But word will reach him eventually. Maybe tomorrow? Maybe in a few years? I’m sure it depends on where he is.” Lorenzo smiled and scanned her with cold eyes. “I have no doubt he’ll join you eventually.”

A few years? She cringed at the thought.

“And then? What happens to me then?”

He looked at her, cold eyes raking over her throat and legs, lingering around her breasts until her skin flushed in embarrassment.

“Human women are too fragile for me. But maybe I’ll have one of my children change you for me so we can play,” he shrugged, carelessly nonchalant about the idea of her mortality.

“What if I don’t want to be a vampire? Would you just kill me?”

His delighted laughter rung over the crashing waves. “Oh, my dear Beatrice, you’re so amusing. Why do you think it matters what you want?”

He laughed again and stood, still snickering as he walked down the path.

When he was far enough away, she let the tears fall, soaking the linen handkerchief stained with her blood.


Despite Lorenzo’s assurances, she didn’t want to risk venturing out at night, so the next day she put a pair of pants and a shirt over a bathing suit and walked down the small cliff path to the area where she had seen the servants disappearing. She passed other rooms, all of them identical to hers, but none of them appeared to be occupied. There was a railing along parts of the path when it became too narrow, and even one place where a small bridge spanned a sharp drop into craggy rocks below.

She finally reached a series of rooms open to the ocean. They were living areas, and she saw a number of servants scuttling around, but nothing that resembled a library. She turned in confusion to her guard-who Lorenzo had referred to as Xenos-but he only shrugged.

Just then, an English accent rang from across the room.

“Oh, there you are!”

She turned and looked at a young man, also dressed head to toe in white, as he crossed the room. He was around her age, and wore a pair of wire-framed glasses on his tan face. His brown hair had gold highlights from the sun, and his smile was brilliantly white. He was handsome, in a catalogue model kind of way, and a friendly light shone from his eyes.

The stranger held out his hand. “I’m Tom. I’m one of Lorenzo’s day people. I knew he had the daughter of a friend staying with him, but we hadn’t seen you. Enjoying your stay?”

She choked out a stiff laugh. “The daughter of a friend? Is that what he told you?”

He cocked his head in amusement. “Of course! Lorenzo’s a good man, he wouldn’t harm anyone.”

She frowned at the startlingly false statement. “Um, no actually, he’s a vicious vampire, who killed and turned my father and tortured him to get information. And then he flew to Houston, attacked my grandmother, killed some people who were protecting me, and then kidnapped me to get my father back.”

Through her entire statement, Tom’s smile never wavered. When she was finished, he only chuckled again. “Oh, don’t worry. Lorenzo’s a good man, he wouldn’t harm anyone.”

She looked at him, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Did you not hear the part about him murdering and kidnapping and holding me hostage?”

Tom just shook his head again, still smiling. “Don’t worry. Lorenzo’s a good man, he wouldn’t harm anyone.”

She nodded, finally understanding that the man’s cerebral cortex must have been altered by Lorenzo or one of his minions. “That’s nice. What did you say your name was?”

“Tom. Tom Sanders. And what’s your name?”

“It’s B. Nice to meet you, Renfield.”

The young man frowned, “Uh…no, my name is-”

“I heard you, Tom.” Beatrice sighed. “Is there a library here?”

“Sure, just come with me; I’ll be happy to show you the library.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“So, what do you like to read? There are computers here, too, if you want them.”

“Computers?” her ears perked at the thought of contact with the outside world.

“Well, they’re not online unless you have a special code. I do, but I can’t give it to guests.” The stiff set of his shoulders warned Beatrice they were treading on uncomfortable ground.

“No problem.” She shrugged. “I’d rather read, anyway. What do you do for Lorenzo, Tom?”

He smiled, relaxing at her easy question. “I do some financial stuff. No biggie. Just things he can’t do because of his disability.”

Oh really?

“You mean the fact that he fries a computer just by touching it?”

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “Something like that.”

Beatrice nodded, and decided to watch the young man more carefully. She was curious. As inept as Giovanni and Carwyn seemed to think Lorenzo was about technology, why did he have a financial guy who had online access in his super-secret bad guy lair?

They walked through a doorway to a dark paneled library.

Finally surrounded by something other than white, Beatrice took a deep breath, relaxing in the smell of leather bindings and old paper.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Tom said, “I have some work to do.”

“Sure, do you mind if I read in here?”

“No problem,” he said. “Don’t let me bother you. And feel free to take books to your room, if you like.”

She glanced around at the furniture which looked more like a typical English manor house then the cold, modern lines that characterized the rest of the mansion. The warm tones reminded her of Giovanni’s library, but she frowned and turned toward the bookcases.

“No, I like it in here. It’s warm.” She smiled at him and went to explore the library, keeping an eye on the young man and the computer screen he studied.

She spent the next two weeks there. Or at least, that’s what she guessed, since she had little sense of time in the strange, surreal world of Lorenzo’s household. She would wake in the morning, dress in her white clothes, then go to the wood-paneled library to sit with Tom. She spent every moment she could in the library, and a grim satisfaction settled on her when she finally figured out what Tom was doing.

He was transferring money for Lorenzo. Cleaning it in clumsy ways and then moving it to offshore accounts that were far too obvious to be effective. She almost laughed at the young man’s inept manipulations, but then, she hadn’t had her cerebral cortex mangled on a nightly basis like Tom had.

When she had finally began creeping closer to the raucous parties Lorenzo hosted in the mansion on the sea’s edge, Tom was the only human she recognized.

It happened every night, with Lorenzo lording over his men like some sort of modern day warlord. The music was loud, the lights were low, and the blood flowed freely. She had seen young Tom passed around from vampire to vampire on more than one night, though he always seemed to end up crumpled in a pile next to Lorenzo by the end of the evening.

The first time she snuck down to observe the parties, she looked at Xenos, who was following her, wondering if he would object to her furtive observation. He simply shrugged and continued to watch her. Apparently, as long as she wasn’t trying to escape, she really did have free rein.

Lorenzo had a seemingly endless supply of humans who were brought out for his vampires to feed on. She guessed there were around twenty immortals on any given night, though she often saw different faces, so she suspected there were closer to thirty or forty around. Most nights, they would drain the humans to the point of unconsciousness and then toss them on a pile in the corner. Sometimes the oblivious people woke up and joined the party again, writhing on the vampires’ laps and moaning as they were bitten. Other times, the pale men and women simply slunk out the door.

They were all young, beautiful things, tan and bleached from the sun, and she wondered where Lorenzo seemed to find such an endless feast for his men. On more than one occasion, tears slipped down her face when one of the humans was drained to death.

One night, a blond girl was killed, and the vampire who drained her laughed and pretended to dance with the limp body before tossing it over the side of the cliffs to be bashed against the rocks below.

Other than Tom, she never saw any of the house staff at the parties, so she imagined there was some kind of prohibition about feeding from the human servants. She hoped she fell into that category if any of the vicious looking vampires she saw at the parties ever found her.

Her life fell into a strange rhythm. Servants all seemed to look the same. Xenos hovered over her every move. Lorenzo would come visit her in the evenings, always with thinly veiled threats about her father hidden under his playful, angelic expression. She dreaded his visits most of all, but there was no way to avoid them.

The days and weeks dragged on.


She was sitting in her room one afternoon after her trip to the library, when an unexpected tap on the interior door startled her.

“Hello?” she called through the locked door.

“Miss De Novo?” a lightly accented female voice called out. It was daytime, so Beatrice knew it wasn’t a vampire. She looked to Xenos, but he only shrugged and continued to watch the empty path by her room.

The door rattled open and she saw two small women, one of them smiling and the other looking somber and silent. The smiling one spoke some English.

“We are here for Miss De Novo.”

“I’m Miss De Novo.”

“The master wishes that we tend to you, miss.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “What?”

The smiling woman, who was quite young, lifted a hand to her hair.

“Your beauty. Your hair and face.”

“Oh,” she said, feeling somewhat embarrassed. There were no mirrors in the mansion, and she’d forgotten that her hair must have had two inch roots showing at the base. She’d finally been given a wax kit for her legs-razors were not allowed-but her hair was probably a horrible mess. She put a hand up, feeling the limp lengths that hung around her face.

For some reason, this-more than the constant observation, more than the nightly horror of tossed bodies, more than the chill-inducing innuendo from Lorenzo-this small realization about her hair finally caused Beatrice to break down in loud sobs.

“Miss! We just make your hair pretty!” the woman said in a panic. Xenos frowned at her, but made no move toward the three women standing at the door.

“No,” she sniffed, “it’s fine. Come in. My hair’s probably horrible.”

“The master picked a color, so you sit down and we fix it.”

“What?” Her head shot up. He may have dictated her every move in the mansion, but she was going to throw a fit if Lorenzo tried to make her blond.

Luckily, the woman held up a box of color that looked very close to her natural brown. Deciding it was better than walking around with roots-even if she couldn’t see them-she sat down and let the two women get to work.

As they chattered in Greek, Beatrice couldn’t help but think about the last time she’d had her hair cut and colored. Her grandmother had been with her and they’d gone to the salon where Marta’s son worked. She had sipped a glass of wine and laughed at the jokes swirling around her and the comforting accents of home.

Tears began to pour down her face as she thought about the frightening new world she had been pulled into. She sniffed, biting back sobs, while the women silently colored and cut her hair. For the first time since she had arrived, Beatrice felt broken.

Eventually, the ever-present echo of the waves lulled her to sleep. When she woke, her hair felt soft and shiny at the tips, and the moon shone on a passive sea.

Unfortunately, she also had an unwelcome blond visitor.

He smirked. “You look lovely. That color suits you much better than the black.”

She stared out at the ocean. “Why do you care if I’m ugly? I’m your prisoner here.”

“I prefer to think of you as my guest.”

“You can think that all you want, blondie, but I’m still your prisoner.”

“‘Blondie?’” he laughed. “I so enjoy you, Beatrice. Our chats are always amusing. But why are you so hostile, my dear? Did you not want your hair done? Would you rather walk around looking unattractive?”

She refused to look at him, staring as the glowing reflection of the silver moon was broken by the waves that rippled beneath her.

“I was supposed to start grad school in September,” she murmured. “I was going to be a librarian.”

She heard him snort. “Why?”

She shrugged and wiped at the silent tears that slipped down her cheeks. “I liked it. I love books and helping people. It wasn’t a big dream, but it was mine.”

“That’s your problem. Small dreams. Didn’t anyone ever tell you to dream big? I figured that one out myself. I have dreams, too. But they’re not small in the least. They’re positively…world changing.” She finally looked at him. He was looking at the water with a cold light sparking in his eyes. “And they will happen once I have your father back.”

She found it difficult to gather any real anger toward him anymore; she had been exhausted by horror. “Maybe I would have gotten married. Gotten a cat. Maybe I would have written a book someday.”

“Or you could have been hit by a bus on the way home from work. Humans are very fragile.”

Beatrice didn’t feel like there was any use fighting. No one was coming for her. If it wasn’t for the faint hope her father might have some way of getting her out, she would have taken her chances climbing down the cliffs to be bashed on the rocks. In the end, she knew the chances of either of them escaping from Lorenzo were small; in all likelihood, she would remain under his thumb. Possibly for eternity.

“I heard a rumor that Giovanni was in Rome,” Lorenzo said suddenly. “Talking with all his little allies.” A demented giggle left Lorenzo’s throat, and she tried to smother the faint hope that fluttered in her chest. “Do you think he’ll try to come save you, Beatrice? Do you think he could? Do you even want him to anymore?”

Yes. Even if Giovanni only came for the books Lorenzo had stolen from him, maybe she could persuade him to take her, too. Surely not all of his humanity was a sham. Surely Caspar wouldn’t-

“He tries to make himself so disgustingly good,” Lorenzo mused. “So few people know the real vampire.”

“Oh really?”

“Did he ever tell you why he made me? So unlike him to make a child. I’m his only son, you know. He doesn’t care to ‘form attachments.’ That’s what he told me when he sent me away,” Lorenzo said. Though he tried to sound nonchalant, she still detected the faint edge of bitterness in his voice.

“Really?” Beatrice was having a hard time feeling sympathy for the bloodthirsty immortal next to her. “Poor you.”

“Aren’t you curious why?” he said with a glint in his eye.

“Not really.”

“That’s okay, I’ll tell you anyway.”

“Knock yourself out,” she said, closing her eyes and trying to get lost in the sound of the surf.

“It was payment of a sort. Payment for killing someone.”

“Yeah, right.”

He grinned. “He comes across as so noble, doesn’t he?”

Beatrice sat in silence, the rhythmic sounds of the waves enveloping her.

“But our Giovanni isn’t nearly as virtuous as he’d like everyone to think. He wasn’t always a mild-mannered book dealer. He’s really quite vicious. And self-centered. Did he tell you he used to be a mercenary?”

She snorted in disbelief as Lorenzo continued. “Yes, he made a lot of money doing that. He was one of the best in the world. He killed many humans.”

“Right.”

“Ask him yourself, the next time you see him.”

She finally sneered. “Because that’s so likely, isn’t it?”

He grinned, pleased to have finally sparked a reaction in her.

“We’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

She sank back in her chair, determined not to react to him again. He left shortly afterward, his interest in her dying along with her temper. He seemed disappointed by her defeated demeanor, but Beatrice had lost the will to spar with him.

The next day, she didn’t leave her room.

She didn’t leave it the day after or the day after that. And as the days stretched into weeks, she slowly shrank further and further into her protective shell.

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