Page 15 of Unholy Gambit: Checkmate in Blood
She took a sip, holding the mug in both hands, her eyes closed in bliss.
He wanted to kiss away the adorable blob of whipped cream on her upper lip when she set the mug down.
Her tongue swiped it off, and his cock pulsed in the ripped, zombie pants.
“It isn’tthatcold out,” she said, “we were just outside so long. It’s odd that ice on my knee can keep it from hurting, but being out in the cold makes it ache. I mean, I understand why, but it’s still a pain.”
He knew she’d pick up on it, but he altered the vibration of the air around them, effectively dampening the sound so no onewould hear what was said between them. He’d have to remove it when the wait staff came, but that wouldn’t be a problem.
“I can make it so you don’t feel your knee while we’re sitting, and turn your receptors back on before you stand.”
She shook her head. “It’s just a dull ache. I could do that, but if it turns into more than an ache, I need to know.” She tilted her head. “You did something. The sounds around us are muffled.”
“No one will be able to eavesdrop on us. I wonder if you know how exceptional it is that you figured out what I did in your head, turning off the pain sensors, and managed to duplicate it? To my knowledge, no human has done so after feeling it only once, or even a half-dozen times, and you were so damned tiny. So young.”
“You must have held it for a while after you left. It started hurting really bad in the ambulance, and I sensed what happened when it…” She shrugged. “It’s like something slid away, so I just slid it back where it’d been. I never figured out what thesomethingwas, but I could move it around, so I did. Eventually, I learned that sometimes you need to feel the pain. It’s there for a reason. You take your hand off the stove because it hurts. Same with my knee, the pain was eventually a gauge for how hard to push it during PT.”
She took another drink of her hot chocolate. Licked the whipped cream off her lip again.
“Figuring out how to do it in increments was hard, but I had plenty of time, trapped in the hospital bed, so I did the trial-and-error thing until I could manage it.”
“I didn’t want you to hurt, but I wasn’t in a car. There wasn’t a way to follow the ambulance without drawing attention to myself. The best I could do was wait until the paramedics had you in the ambulance, so their options were mere inches away.”
She took another drink, but the whipped cream had melted enough, her lip came away clean. No tongue. It was ridiculous, the stab of disappointment he felt.
“I guess there wasn’t a diagnosis for psychopathy seven hundred years ago. It’s even possible a ruthless, unemotional, implacable ability to…” A shrug. “Based on what I understand of the time period, it was probably a net positive.”
She met his gaze, thoughtful. “Though I suppose that also depends upon where you were born. There’s so much I don’t know about you.”
She wasn’t wrong. Emotion got people killed in those days, especially those too soft to protect what was theirs. Ruthlessness put food on the table, empathy got you killed. His cold, brutal pragmatism kept him alive in ways compassion never could.
“I was born in Northern Italy, shortly after the famine caused by what’s now known as the Little Ice Age.” He smirked. “Only the short-lived think climate change is new. While I was human, acquiring food was a challenge, but I had enough money to keep hunger at bay. The Renaissance was just beginning — the art didn’t interest me, but I dove into the study of maths. Specifically, finance.” A shrug. “Thankfully, I was made vampire before the Black Death arrived.”
She looked at him, reading between the lines. “If I remember correctly, officially, the Signore weren’t the start of the Italian mafia, but it’s always seemed to me, it probably was. I mean, I get that it was a family taking charge of local government, local royalty, basically, but over the centuries, those were the families who became the mafia once government grew strong enough to take hold of those cities again.”
Axel couldn’t help his smile. An American who could read history and interpret what likely happened, rather than the falsehoods the history books told.
“I love the way your brain works, and you’re exactly right. I was born into a Signore family, and I used the position to loan money with interest rates not even the Sopranos would dare attempt to enforce, but I was… ruthlessly creative when the funds weren’t repaid on time. As a result, I was rich enough to buy my way into the vampire elite, to sit at the ancient, venerated table long before I was powerful enough for anyone to believe I had the power to actually hold onto my assets…” A shrug. “And so, I fell back into old habits of being ruthless in order to stay on top.”
She didn’t need to know about the spiders. Not yet. Not the way he’d used them to remind even the oldest, ancient vampires they were merely long-lived and not immortal. Humans and vampires alike have a visceral fear of spiders, and she’d had enough supposedly-mythical, marrow-deep terrors slam into her tonight without adding the fact he bred them. Fed them. Each a living weapon. Death waiting in silk.
She absorbed all that with her typical, methodical logic — the calculated interest rates, the ruthless enforcement, the way he’d bought his way into the vampire elite and kept his seat through sheer predatory cunning. There were some emotional undertones, like feeling his telepathic voice carried the weight of centuries and the brush of danger this implied to someone barely two decades old, but mostly, her tactical brain filed away pieces she’d return to later, like a chess player mapping out a dangerous endgame, one where the wrong move wouldn’t just cost her the match, but the board, the pieces, and most important to her in that moment, the man who’d rescued a small child in her nightmares, now sitting across from her, watching as her mind weighed which moves to make next.
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Twenty-six.”
“And you had to leave once you were turned. Right?”
He nodded. “My maker brought me to Gropparello Castle, not far from where I’d lived, but the first decade, I wasn’t allowed near humans and never left the castle. When I passed the control tests and earned the right to step back into society, I had to relocate, lest someone recognize me.” He’d been known to everyone in his family’s territory. Being the scariest motherfucker tends to make one a little too memorable.
“I was sent to Hohenwerfen, high in the Austrian mountains. Snow, stone, and endless winter nights, and I wasn’t there to learn. I was there to serve. To amuse the powerful when they were bored, to follow orders without hesitation, to be a weapon in someone else’s hand. For forty years I played their games.”
His mouth curved faintly, without humor. “When the last of my family and friends were dead, I returned to Milan, to Gropparello Castle.
You can look both castles up. Hohenwerfen’s a museum now, but the website won’t tell you what those walls really saw.”
“Being sent away like that, it wasn’t normal, right? You weren’t supposed to have enough control to leave the castle until your family was dead, I’m guessing.”
