in love with the devil himself

The devil unmasked

It started with the smell of blood.

Not mine. I hadn't done anything. I was in the library — Vincenzo's library, three floors of books behind iron railings and rolling ladders, the kind of room that made you feel small in the best possible way — when something shattered somewhere deep in the mansion. Then came the shouting. Then the silence that followed, which was somehow so much worse.

I should have stayed where I was. Every reasonable part of my brain was screaming at me to sit down, pick up the book I'd abandoned, and pretend I hadn't heard anything.

I went toward it anyway.

The noise had come from the east wing — the part of the mansion Vincenzo had never shown me, the part with the doors that were always locked. One of them wasn't locked now. It stood open by an inch, and through that inch came a thin strip of cold light and the low, vicious sound of a man trying very hard to control himself.

I pushed the door open.

The room was stark compared to the rest of the mansion. No velvet, no antiques, no careful beauty. Just stone walls, a long table, and three of Vincenzo's men standing as still as statues against the far wall, their faces carefully, deliberately blank — the look of people who had learned that drawing attention to yourself in moments like this was a very bad idea.

Vincenzo stood in the centre of the room.

His back was to me. His hands were at his sides, fists clenched so tightly I could see the tension running up his arms, across his shoulders, into the rigid line of his spine. On the floor in front of him was a man I didn't recognise — one of Aria's, I realised, from the mark on his wrist, the same symbol I'd seen on the people who'd come to rescue me. He was alive. Barely.

"Vincenzo."

His name left my mouth before I'd decided to say it.

He went completely still.

Then, slowly, he turned around — and my breath left my body.

I had seen Vincenzo dangerous before. I had seen him cold, controlled, terrifyingly calm. But I had never seen him like this. His eyes were wrong — not dark anymore but deep, burning red at the edges, the kind of colour that didn't belong in anything human. The sharp lines of his face were harder, his jaw set so tight it looked like it might crack, and when his lips parted slightly I caught the edge of something that sent ice straight down my spine.

He looked like what he was. For the first time, with no careful mask between us, I was looking at a vampire.

"Selina." My name in his mouth came out rough. Strained. Like he was holding a door shut with his whole body and it was costing him everything. "Get out of this room."

I didn't move.

"Now." The word cracked like a whip. One of his men flinched. "I am not — " He stopped. Exhaled slowly through his nose. "I am not in control right now and you should not be in here."

And that was the thing that kept my feet on the floor.

Not bravery. Not stupidity. The fact that he was warning me. The fact that with whatever was roaring through him right now, whatever had pushed him to this edge, his first coherent thought was to get me out. To protect me from himself.

"What did he do?" I asked. My voice was steady. I had no idea how.

Vincenzo's jaw tightened further. "He had information about you. About what Aria is planning to do with you." A muscle flickered in his cheek. "The things she intends — " He stopped again, and this time the sound he made was low and involuntary, something that wasn't quite human, and the red in his eyes burned brighter for just a moment.

My heart was slamming against my ribs. But I took a step forward.

"Don't." His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper, which was somehow more frightening than shouting. "Selina, I am telling you. Do not come closer."

"Then look at me," I said.

Silence.

"Look at me," I said again, softer this time. "Not at him. Not at whatever is in your head right now. At me."

Something shifted. It was slow — painfully slow — like watching a tide turn. His eyes found mine across the room and stayed there, and I held his gaze and didn't look away, didn't let myself think about the colour of his eyes or the thing on the floor or the three men against the wall who weren't breathing.

Seconds passed. Maybe a minute.

Then the red began to fade.

It retreated slowly, like embers cooling, until his eyes were dark again — still intense, still unsettling, but his. He unclenched his hands at his sides. His shoulders dropped half an inch. The terrible rigid control came back into his face, and I watched him rebuild it piece by piece, like a wall going up brick by brick, and felt something ache in my chest that I didn't have a name for yet.

He said something sharp and quiet to his men in another language. They moved immediately, efficiently, and within moments the room was empty except for the two of us.

Vincenzo crossed to the window. He stood with his back to me again, one hand pressed flat against the glass, and for a long moment neither of us spoke.

"You should have left," he said finally.

"Probably," I agreed.

"I could have hurt you."

"But you didn't."

He turned his head slightly, just enough that I could see his profile. "That is not the reassurance you think it is. The margin was — " He exhaled. "It was closer than it should have been."

I thought about that. About the look on his face when he'd turned around. About the way my name had sounded in his mouth — like it was the one thing he was still holding onto.

"What is Aria planning?" I asked.

A long pause.

"She doesn't just want to use your blood, Selina." His voice was quiet. Precise. The voice he used when he was being very careful. "She wants to drain it. All of it. What you carry in your veins — the bloodline, the markers your mother passed down to you — it only works for Aria's ritual if it comes from someone who hasn't been turned. Someone fully human." He finally turned to face me fully, and his expression was something I had never seen on him before. Something raw. "You would not survive it."

The room felt very cold all of a sudden.

"So she was never going to let me go," I said. "Even if I'd made it out. She was always going to —"

"Yes."

One word. And in it, everything.

I stood very still and let it settle over me, let it find all the places it needed to reach. And then I looked at Vincenzo — this terrifying, controlled, occasionally monstrous man who hadn't slept in who knew how long, who had known my mother, who had just nearly lost himself completely over what someone planned to do to me — and I understood, for the first time, why I was here.

Not as a prisoner.

"You've been protecting me," I said slowly. "This whole time. That's what this is."

He didn't confirm it. He didn't deny it either. He just looked at me with those dark, exhausted eyes, and that was answer enough.

I didn't know what we were to each other. I didn't know what any of this meant or where it was going or how I was supposed to feel about a vampire who terrified me and made me feel safer than anyone ever had, sometimes in the same breath.

But I knew one thing.

I was done running.