Page 106 of Roguefinder

Alonzo grabbed a stun gun from the instrument table and pressed it to Caleb’s ribs. The crackle filled the room.

Caleb screamed, his spine bowing off the table until only his shoulders and heels touched the steel.

My mind started to splinter. The colors at the edge of my vision bled inward, my wolf throwing itself against my ribs. Hot tears ran down my face. I threw myself against the restraints so hard the wall cracked behind me and dust rained down on my shoulders.

“Take it from me!” I bellowed. “Whatever you want, take it from me. Please. Not him. Not him. Jesus, not him.”

Alonzo stared down at Caleb with bright, hungry eyes. Then he looked to Carlo. “Ancora?”

Again.

Carlo nodded.

Alonzo delivered another shock. Caleb’s spine bowed. His mouth stretched on a silent scream and flayed me down to nothing.

“You’re right!” I shouted at Carlo. “I love him! He’s the love of my life. You know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

Carlo went still.

Slowly, he turned from the table. And something passed through his eyes—a flicker there and gone in the space of a candle guttering. But I’d seen it.

Grief.

For the briefest moment, Carlo Gesualdo looked human.

And I had my opening.

“You loved your wife,” I said. “You’re not the first man to lose control because you saw the woman you love in the arms of another man. You’ve spent centuries regretting what you did. Bad circumstances took her from you.” I held his stare. “Don’t take Caleb from me. Don’t make the same mistake.”

He was in my face in less than a second.

His hand clamped my jaw, cold as the stone at my back, and when he spoke, his voice was low and dangerous.

“You’re missing a critical part of that story. Maria didn’t just fuck another man.” His fingers tightened. “I walked in on her fucking a werewolf.”

My breath caught. Pieces shifted in my head, four hundred years of history rearranging themselves.

Carlo gave a slight nod, obviously reading my face. “That’s right. One of you disgusting animals seduced her. Fucked her in my bed. He would have bitten her. Turned her and made her into an animal just like him. That’s what she wanted. She was vain, my Maria, and she wanted to keep her beauty forever.”

“So you killed her,” I said.

He stared at me, unblinking and unbreathing, a corpse wearing a man’s outrage. “And I made sure they were both dead.”

The historical accounts scrolled through my memory. Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, hacking his wife and her lover apart in their bed. Leaving the palazzo. Telling witnesses he didn’t believe they were dead, then going back in to finish the job.

He’d made sure.

“That werewolf took Maria from me,” Carlo said, releasing my jaw. “But I’m going to get her back.”

The hair lifted on my nape.

He sounded like Philippe. The same conviction. The same refusal to veer off course. Philippe had bent himself around the idea of a man who no longer existed. Maria was four hundred years dead. Like Marcus, she’d gone somewhere Carlo couldn’t follow. Nothing and no one brought back the dead.

Carlo wasn’t merely cruel. He was mad. And madness was far more dangerous than cruelty because cruelty could be bargained with.

“You don’t believe me,” he said, making it a statement. “It doesn’t matter what you believe. I’ve seen it.” His nostrils flared, the closest thing to a breath I’d seen from him. “I’ve seen magic you can’t even dream of.”

“What kind of magic?”