Chapter 2: The Blood That Doesn't Exist

They dragged me into a room with a marble floor. Marble is easy to hose down. I noticed that. I notice things like that—it's what four years in an underground trauma theater does to a girl. Dario sat across from me with a strip of gauze taped to his cheek and a doctor hovering at his elbow. His men lined the walls. Nobody spoke. The whole house was holding its breath, waiting to see how I'd be killed. "Roll up her sleeve," he said. "Take blood." The needle went in. I let it. I let my hand tremble, because trembling is what a terrified adopted daughter does, and because if I stopped acting for one second, this room would smell the truth on me. Under my skin, my heart was hammering out a countdown. Seventy-two hours. That's how long the suppressant in my system had left. Three years I'd been taking it—the compound that masks a blood profile, that turns something impossible into something boring on a lab sheet. Three years of hiding in a house that hated me, because the men who slaughtered my family were still out there, still hunting the last Vance heir, and the only thing keeping me alive was being nobody. If my real blood surfaced in this house, in front of these people, I was dead by dawn. "Don." The doctor came back from the machine looking gray. "The sample is... it isn't reading correctly. The antigen profile is—" "Is what?" "Contaminated. Suppressed. Something's masking it." Dario's eyes never left my face. "Say the word you don't want to say, Enzo." The doctor swallowed. "It looks like Requiem's blood." Something moved through the room like a draft. Requiem. The ghost surgeon. The one the families whisper about—the one who works in basements, takes no names, and has walked three dying dons back from the other side. Nobody has ever seen her face. I've seen it. Every morning, in the mirror. Dario stood. He came around the table and crouched in front of my chair so we were eye level, and I made myself flinch like a good little victim. "Three years ago," he said quietly, "I died in a warehouse in Bellhaven. Nine minutes. Someone poured her own blood into me. When I woke up, she was gone, and for three years my body has been..." His jaw flexed. "Wrong. Echoing. I get pain that isn't mine. I feel a heartbeat that isn't mine." "I'm sorry," I whispered. "I don't know what you're talking about." "My aunt slapped you and I bled, Miss Ashford." "I don't know—" The door opened. And in walked Serena. Silk dress. Fresh lipstick. Her father's coward hands behind her. Around her neck, on a thin gold chain, hung a signet ring with a crown-and-thorn crest. My mother's ring. The ring they took off my mother's finger the night they burned my family's house down. "Don Moretti." Serena's voice was velvet. "Forgive me for coming uninvited. But I couldn't let this go on any longer." She lifted the ring so it caught the light. "Three years ago in Bellhaven, I opened your chest and gave you my blood. I've kept quiet because my family forbade it. But if this creature is going to sit here and steal my name, I'll speak." The room turned. Every man looked at her. And Dario went very, very still. I stared at the ring swinging against her collarbone, and something inside me went cold and clean and quiet. Twenty-four years of your family eating my life. My name. My house. My mother's ring. And now my blood. "Take the stray to the vault," Serena said, not even looking at me. "Chain her. If she's carrying the Don's pain, then she's drugged him, and the Code has a fire for witches like her." Dario didn't stop them. He watched me the whole way out—jaw tight, eyes black, one hand pressed to the cut on his cheek—and he didn't stop them. Two men took my arms. I let them. Three days, I told myself. Three days until the suppressant died and my real blood came screaming to the surface in front of the most dangerous men in the country. Three days to bury the truth. It took Serena three hours to start digging it up.