Bram hesitated but shook his hand. He winked at me. “What are friends for, right?”
“Friends could keep friends from losing more blood,” Blanche told him, grunting as Annette tightened the tourniquet over her thigh.
“Right,” Bram agreed, kneeling down between Annette and Aunt Cheron to help.
Henri walked over and settled a hand on Bram’s shoulder, causing the other man to stiffen and look up. “I hope we can be friends, Valancourt. Truly.”
“I would like that.”
The gray wolf trotted over and licked Blanche’s face. I stared for a moment, while Blanche smiled at it.
Henri returned to my side and gazed down at me, his green eyes conveying an array of emotions. “I’m so happy you’re alright.” He swallowed hard. “I don’t know what I would have done if …”
“You don’t have to worry about that now,” I told him, putting a hand to his chest. “We’re okay now.”
He nodded, then leaned forward, resting his forehead against mine and closing his eyes. “Thank you for saving my family.”
“I will always fight for you and Blanche,” I told him, finding his lips with mine. “You’re my family now too, whether you like it or not.”
The next day, we sat in the front room of Udolpho Castle, Annette having just made tea. Blanche was still pale and weak, but she already showed great progress according to Bram, and whatever hadn’t healed completely by the next full moon would heal then. Until that time, we decided to remain at Udolpho Castle. We had plenty of decisions to make anyway, about where we wanted to go from there.
“I won’t take that antidote anymore,” Blanche insisted, sipping daintily at her tea. “Not now that I know where it comes from. And with Schedoni out of the picture, I’m not sure it could be replicated even if we wanted to.”
“Wherever he is,” Ludovico added, as the monk’s body had gone missing. He likely had survived my attack. If his wounds hadn’t been as terrible as we had at first thought, he may have even made it to the village before his injuries killed him.
“So, what will you do?” Aunt Cheron asked, meeting my eyes briefly before looking expectantly at Henri, the new head of the family.
Henri sighed, leaning back into the sofa beside me. “We’ll have to use the dungeons of the castle for now, until we find an alternate way to keep us in check. Perhaps some of the scientists Schedoni has reached out to for a cure will come through. If not, I don’t see another option aside from confinement on the night of the full moon.”
Bram bristled on my other side, and I patted his knee. He would have to become accustomed to life as a werewolf alongside the Morano family. I was sure he was up to the task, but he would clearly have a lot to learn. “It won’t be all that bad, I’m sure,” I told him. “I’ll make sure you all behave.”
He rolled his eyes and smiled.
“And we’ll clean the dungeons up,” Annette said, smiling at Blanche. “Maybe some nice potted flowers and rugs will make them a little more comfortable.”
Ludovico snorted but didn’t say anything when Annette sent him a dirty look.
“I think it’s a wise choice,” a woman in her early forties said. She lifted a teacup to her mouth, long blonde hair so much like Blanche’s before she’d cut it that I couldn’t help but stare. Her kind green eyes sparkled as she gazed around the room. “I think this family has denied their legacy for too long. Perhaps a reckoning for cheating the curse was always going to find us.”
The woman, of course, was the same from the portraits I’d seen of her, an amalgam of her two children. Countess Helena Morano, alive after all these years.
Blanche set down her tea and cleared her throat. “Mother, we know how you’ve been kept in that horrible turret the past five years, but … I have to know more about what happened to you. How did you become Montoni’s prisoner?”
“And how are you not dead?” Annette added, nodding.
“You left the skeleton key for Ludovico,” I said, to confirm what I’d already pieced together.
“I did,” Helena confirmed. “I stole it from Bertolino weeks ago.” She shifted, then looked thoughtfully around before finding my eyes. “We’ve met before, you realize?”
I blinked, then frowned at her. “Have we?”
Helena nodded. “I was emaciated and sickly, practically a living skeleton, in the gallery. I think I scared you half to death.”
I tried to reconcile the beautiful woman before me with the creature I had mistaken for a corpse, eyes sunken and emaciated beyond possibility. “That wasyou?” I asked, incredulous.
“Yes. I was still taking the antidote during that full moon because I couldn’t chance losing control. It wasn’t until last night that the full moon renewed my body to peak health.” She ran a hand back through her hair. “The first full moon, after I fell from the cliff, my brother, Count Montoni, refused me the antidote, and my body healed from the fall. Then I was locked in the turret and the antidote was forced on me, keeping me weak and complacent, a wilted shadow of my former self. I watched from the window all these years as my children visited the castle, unable to speak or call out to them. I was wretched, the curse keeping me alive even as I let myself wither away.”
Blanche walked over and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “What changed?”
