CLAIMED BY THE ANCIENT VAMPYRE

Chapter 9

Chapter Three

Alessia POV

"Isabella," I croaked.

"My name is Isabella."

His grip tightened.

He was not pleased with my answer. Any more and I would actually choke to death.

"Try again," he hissed.

There was no heat in his voice, and that was the worst part.

I had braced for his anger – raised voices, the fury of a man who had been made to look foolish – but I had forgotten one thing.

Matteo was not my father.

There was none of that display of emotion, just the flat certainty that he would get what he wanted eventually.

His hand around my throat was not squeezing tightly, exactly, but it was present in a way that made breathing a negotiation all on his terms.

I made myself look at him, blinking rapidly as tears filled the corners of my eyes.

He was not handsome the way men in magazines are handsome.

Polished within an inch of their lives.

I would go as far as saying Matteo was not a handsome man. His nose had been broken at least once, and the scar over his brow and along his cheek didn't do him any favors either.

His dark eyes caught the glow of candlelight and gave nothing back.

Twin dead pools.

His jaw was clenched, and his lips formed a thin line across his face. And his hands – the one not currently wrapped around my throat – hung loosely at his side.

This particular stillness he had was unnerving.

He was not a man who lost control, and that frightened me.

A man who lost control had a ceiling – you could wait him out, or outlast the heat of him.

But this man had no ceiling.

I didn't want to think about what it would be like if a man like him ever lost his control.

But I didn't have the luxury of thinking about that because his hand tightened again.

He had decided on an outcome and was now waiting, with absolute patience, for me to comply.

"I don't know what you want me to say," I whispered.

He laughed, turning my face this way and then that.

He leaned in, the tip of his nose brushing along my jaw.

"You look alike," he said. "Definitely."

"But not the same. I've known since the church."

If I weren't already frozen, it might have happened now.

The church.

Which meant he had stood across from me and taken my hands and said the words and slid the ring onto my finger already knowing – or at least suspecting – and had said nothing.

He had smiled for the cameras and shaken hands and moved through three hours of his own wedding reception carrying this question like a stone in his pocket.

That, somehow, frightened me more than the hand at my throat.

It also made one thing very clear.

There was no hiding from Matteo.

I reached up and wrapped my fingers around his wrist.

He glared at me, and I huffed – or tried to.

I was under no illusions that I could pry his hand away, but I needed him to hear me, and I couldn't speak properly with his grip compressing my airway.

And the memories were starting again, and I knew that if I didn't speak soon they would drown out everything else.

"Let go," I said. "Or I can't talk."

A long moment passed.

Those dark eyes moved across my face like he was reading something there.

Then, slowly, his hand dropped.

I gulped in a deep breath.

The memories flooded me almost immediately, with no permission.

I was back in Isabella's room.

The smell reached me first.

Wine – deep and red – splashed across the floor beneath her.

But that was wrong. There shouldn't have been wine in that room because Isabella didn't drink before noon, and it had barely been past eight in the morning.

She lay on the floor between the vanity and the bed, still in her bridal underwear, the ones our mother had sent from Paris.

One arm stretched out, the wine glass lying near her outstretched hand, its contents bleeding into the ivory of her dressing gown.

"Don't waste my time," Matteo hissed.

I looked up at him.

"Isabella is dead," I mumbled.

He huffed, laughter rushing out of him.

But when he noticed I wasn't laughing, he stopped.

"Where?" he asked.

"The bridal room," I mumbled.

He hissed.

"Impossible."

"You're free to go see for yourself," I muttered under my breath.

I couldn't go back there again. See her like that again after what I had done.

"Did you see something else?" he asked.

I shook my head, playing with my fingers.

"The door had been locked from the inside. I pushed twice before it opened."

I didn't mention that her keys and coat were gone. I didn't really trust Matteo Ricci. I was not ready to hand those details to a man I had known for approximately four hours, regardless of what the marriage certificate said.

Plus, I didn't need him cleaning up evidence.

"Why didn't you report it?" he asked.

I scoffed.

"We both know that wasn't really an option," I hissed, still staring at my palms.

"I don't remember deciding to hide it. I just knew, in some logical part of my brain, that if the bride remained dead and we didn't go through with the wedding, it wouldn't work," I mumbled.

"I did what I had to."

I shrugged.

What I told him was enough.

The room went quiet once I had finished explaining.

The candles had burned low, and below us the mansion had settled into peaceful nighttime silence.

Matteo stood at the window with his back to me.

He had not moved for the last two minutes of my account.

I watched the set of his shoulders and tried to read them the way he had read my face, and found I couldn't.

He was closed in a way I didn't yet have the ability to decipher.

Finally, I asked the only question that mattered.

"So."

My voice came out steadier than I expected.

"You know what I did and why I did it. Now I need to know what you're going to do."

I held his gaze when he turned.

"Will you end this tonight and take your chances with the war? Or let it stand, so we figure out the rest together?"

Matteo studied me for a long moment.

Then he smiled.

Chapter Four

Matteo POV

She had grit. I'd give her that.

Most people, when cornered, either fell into one of two categories — hysteria or submission.

Alessia DeLuca had done neither.

She had sat on that bed with my hand wrapped around her throat as she glared straight at me.

She wasn't going to beg me either.

I turned to face the door, my mind running over the thousand details from the story this DeLuca sister had spun.

I didn't trust her. That hadn't changed.

But I could respect what she'd done, even while I turned it over in my head, looking for the weak link in all the plotting.

She was right about the war.

That was the part I couldn't argue away, no matter how many angles I approached it from. I had spent what felt like an hour standing at the dresser after she finished speaking.

I tried thinking of how exactly I could escape this. If I sent her away, then I would be disrespecting the Mafia king who had set up this alliance.

An alliance that had been three years in the making. It had cost blood and money and the kind of painstaking diplomacy that men in my world were not naturally built for.

After much concession, the wedding had been set for today, and every significant figure in the northern syndicate had attended it.

These men would rather be caught dead than find themselves at a wedding, which went to show how important this event was.

If I walked into that room and announced the bride was dead and the woman standing beside me was her twin sister, there would be no recovering the evening.

There would be no quiet conversation, no managed disclosure. There would be accusations, and then there would be no stopping the men and weapons that would flood the city with blood.

I could not afford that war. Not now. Not while my own position was still — carefully, quietly — in the process of becoming permanent.

The current Mafia king was not a man you defied publicly.

You manoeuvred around him, kept your face pleasant and your ambitions invisible, and waited, the way I had been waiting for two years, for the precise moment when the ground shifted in my favour.

Causing a war tonight would not just cost lives — it would cost me the political capital I had spent years accumulating, and I would lose the Mafia king's backing at the exact moment I needed it most.

So I looked at the woman sitting on the edge of the bed, and I made the only decision available to a man who intended to survive.

"We let it stand," I said.

She didn't look relieved, just nodded, like she had expected that answer and was already moving past it to the next problem.

"My sister?" she asked.

I shrugged.

"Stay in the suite. Don't speak to anyone until I know what's going on. I will take care of it."

There was a dead body in my house.

A house filled with security, and my men posted at every entrance and corridor — yet somewhere in the east wing, Isabella DeLuca was lying on the floor of the bridal suite.

Dead.

And not a single person had raised an alarm or knocked on that door. No one had noticed that the woman who walked down the aisle that afternoon was not the woman who had arrived the previous evening.

Which meant someone inside my organisation had either done this, or known about it, or both.

I went downstairs.

The main hall was still half-lit, a few of the older captains lingering over the last of the wine, reluctant to surrender the occasion.

I shook hands and accepted a few congratulations, doing my best not to draw attention to the fact that something was wrong.

I watched every face with the specific attention of a man who was no longer sure which of them belonged to a friend.

Carmine found me near the south terrace.

He walked in without announcing himself, but I could tell by his footsteps who it was. The man had never needed to announce himself because I knew exactly when he entered a room.

Carmine Voss had been beside me for eleven years. He had attended the funerals of my father and my brother and sat across from me in the worst hours of the war with the DeLucas and helped me make decisions I would spend the rest of my life carrying.

If there was a man alive I trusted without reservation, it was the one standing in front of me now with a glass of Barolo and a genuine smile.

"Congratulations," he said, and clapped me on the shoulder the way only he could — hard enough to mean it.

"How is she?"

"Settling in," I said.

"Nervous?"

"Aren't they always?"

He laughed warmly, the familiar sound setting me at ease.

I watched his eyes instead of his smile. They didn't match.

"She's quieter than I expected," he said. "I tried to speak with her during the reception. Barely got two words." He tilted his head, studying me curiously.

"Everything all right?"

"She's had a long day."

"Haven't we all." He swirled his glass.

"So what does she look like under that veil she wore all evening?" he grinned.

"Not bad," I mumbled.

He huffed, and something moved behind his eyes that I couldn't place.

"That's fine then," he said.

"Have fun on your wedding night," he laughed, clapping his palm over my shoulder.

I laughed at the right moments.

I didn't tell him about the situation with the murder.

I had no proof, just suspicions that I couldn't act on yet.

I said goodnight, shook his hand, watching him cross the hall and disappear through the far door, and I stood alone in the half-dark of the terrace and thought about what it would mean if any of the men I trusted most had been part of this all along.

Above me, somewhere in the east wing, my dead former wife lay waiting to be found.

And sitting in the bridal suite was the woman I had just agreed to protect instead.

God help us both.