PROLOGUE
The colors Matteo Andoni used in his paintings often reflected his emotions. For years now, they were darker, more despondent, as he had long associated color with beauty, and it was hard to see beauty in a world that was so destructive.
A destruction he had both witnessed and experienced. And inflicted himself.
See, Matteo hated guns. He hated weapons. He hated violence altogether, but it had taken many years to reach that point. To brush paint across canvas with a delicate touch. Toholda paintbrush and not immediately see it as a weapon, and thus see himself as despicable.
Yet he had indulged in carnage tonight. If one were to walk through the Athereum’s meeting hall, it would look as though someone had goneoopsieand knocked over several cans of paint on the well-polished floors, spattering it across the damask-patterned walls, across the bodies that had been dressed in their absolute best.
In the deepest, darkest red. It was silky, glistening, delicious.
One could ask ifindulgeanddeliciouswere the right words coming from someone who loathed violence, but there was no other way to put it. Matteo lived on the edge of ferocity. He might happily wield his brush and partake in the humdrum of high society, but a single event such as tonight’s could send him off, swiftly unlocking the cage where the vampire in him was waiting with bated breath.
And the vampire in him was most ardently pleased this night.
When the Ram’s men came for those reporters, the selfless, brave men and women who were drawn to upholding the truth, Penn held off as many as he could using the strange and wicked power with which he had been bestowed.
Until he fell.
And then Jin fell. Flick screamed.
By that point, there were very few people left alive, very few who would have noticed Matteo’s fangs extended, the blood trickling down his chin, the nails that had sharpened to claws at his fingertips. And soon, no one was left to tell the world the truth of what Matteo Andoni really was.
He never cared if anyone knew he was a vampire. But he’d lived a life so removed from true relationships that his undead-ness inevitably remained a secret. Even if word did get out, no one knew the extent of it.
For he did care about that particular bit.
Some twenty-odd years ago—he didn’t like keeping count—his world turned inside out when the Wolf of White Roaring stalked through the latter hours of the night, tearing through streets and limbs with equal disregard. The Wolf was ravenous, and not for food. He was empty and hurting and hollow, and wanted so badly to fill that void, but chaos was all he knew. Savagery became the only language he spoke. He did not drink from those he mutilated. He was trapped in memories, in cruel imagery that he’d tucked away since his childhood. His mother’s face contorted with pain. His father’s whip lashing across his back.
Fangs, breaking the skin of his throat against his will. Draining him. Feeding—poisoninghim. Transforming Matteo Andoni into the beast that he became:
The Wolf of White Roaring.
Eventually, bloody and beat, he had found himself in front of the lawn of a house on Imperial Square, which had been so meticulously trimmed that he had laughed at the mundaneness of it, just before he heard his name spoken with great dubiety.
“Matteo?”
He blinked back into the present. It was Penn who had spoken his name then, decades ago, but he was gone now. Now it was the girl in his arms, shivering and barely conscious. She was bleeding from a gunshot wound gaping beneath her breast. Matteo was no doctor, but she was so small and light, and her wound was so large. There was far too much blood drenching his front that he could scarcely believe it had bled out of her alone.
He threw open the front door of his house to the aghast face of Ivor. The butler stared from the bloody handprint on the door to Matteo, framed in the doorway.
“Sire? Wh-what has happened?” Ivor stammered out, already eyeing the trail of blood spattering the floor. “Is that the Casimir girl?”
“Yes. Not now, old boy.” Matteo pushed past him and into an empty room, nearly snagging the end of her sari when he kicked the door closed.
He gently set her on the bed.
She said his name again.
“I’m here, Arthie,” he replied.Eternally.
He meant that, even if he’d never say it aloud. He would goad her and tease her. He would stomach ashy tea for her and kill a thousand men for her, despite his loathing of violence. He could only hope his actions were telling enough.
“You came for me,” she said softly.
“Ouch, darling. Don’t sound so surprised now.” He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and swept his thumb across the soft bump of herchin. It didn’t matter that the windowpane was as dark as the skies outside; she was vivid. She was the color that he had not seen in years—from the violet-gray of her hair to the bronze-brown of her skin, the deep red of her sari and the deeper red of her blood.
“How?” she asked with a wet cough. “Where are we?”
