Chapter 3: He Bought Me With My Children's Lives

They didn't take us to a police station. They took us to the Moretti compound and put us in a room with no handle on the inside. Luna cried herself to sleep on my lap. Leo sat with his back against the door like a tiny soldier, refusing to close his eyes. "Mama," he whispered around midnight. "Are we going to die?" "No." I kissed his hair. "Because I won't let it happen." At 2 a.m., the door opened. The man who stood there had a face like a closed fist. "You. Up. He's in an episode." "Who—" "You'll do," he said, and dragged me out by the arm. They took me down two floors to a steel door. Something hit it from the inside hard enough to bow the metal. "He's been eighteen hours," the man said flatly. "The blood bank match failed again. If he doesn't stabilize by dawn, his organs start shutting down. And if he tears you apart first, well." He shrugged. "You were sentenced anyway." They shoved me in and locked it behind me. The room was destroyed. Books, glass, a bed frame folded like paper. He was on the floor in the corner, shirtless, black veins crawling up his throat. Six years older. Twice as beautiful. Ten times as terrifying. Dante Moretti lifted his head, and his eyes were molten gold, and he didn't know me at all. "Get out," he snarled. "You'll die if I do." He came at me the way he had six years ago—fast, blind, gone. His hand caught my wrist and squeezed until something ground. I didn't fight him. I took the shard of glass off the floor and I opened my own palm. Blood ran between our fingers. He went rigid. Then he made a sound like a man surfacing from deep water, and the black drained out of his throat, out of his jaw, out of his eyes, and he sagged forward until his forehead hit my shoulder. For a long moment we knelt there in the wreckage, breathing. "Who are you?" he said against my collarbone. His voice was raw. "I know this. I know this." "Nobody," I said. "I'm nobody." He pulled back and took my chin in his bloody hand, and studied my face with those exhausted gold eyes for so long that my heart started slamming. "Say that again." "I'm nobody, sir. A street chemist. I carry a compounded herb pouch." I fumbled it out of my coat with shaking hands and held it up like a shield. "It's the herbs. That's what calmed you. That's all." I watched him decide whether to believe me. He dropped the pouch on the floor. "Then you belong to me now," he said. "You'll be here for every episode. Every month. For as long as you live." "I have children—" "You'll have a wing and a salary." He stood, and the pressure of him filled the whole room. "But understand something. There is one woman I have been looking for since I was twenty-four. One. When I find her, she gets everything. You get a paycheck. Don't confuse the two." "I would never," I whispered. I put my forehead to the floor. "Then let my children go. Please. My son is five years old. He didn't know whose gift he broke." Silence. "Take her to see them," he said at last. I sobbed out loud. "Thank you—thank you—" He was already turning away. And behind him, on the shattered table, I saw a sketch pinned under a paperweight: a child with dark hair and gold eyes. He hadn't seen it yet. Two floors down, in the compound's private lab, a technician re-ran a rejected sample at 4 a.m. because the reader had been dropped that morning and protocol was protocol. The screen turned green. PATERNAL MATCH: 99.998%. He printed it. He turned around to find the phone. A hand in a red silk sleeve took the page out of his fingers. "Oh," Bianca Castellan said softly, reading. "Oh, you poor stupid man." She held the paper over the burner until it curled black. "Now," she said, "the boy has to disappear."