Hours before dusk, I feel him surface.
Specific and unmistakable. His end brightens. The thread thickens but doesn’t complete. He’s awake. Several miles away, but awake.
I wonder how long he will be gone. I stay on the bench and wait.
Chapter
Two
Ileave the compound and cover the distance to the southwestern property in under four minutes. Vampire speed through back roads.
The property is one of several I maintain across the territory. I’ve been inside it fewer than a dozen times. A safehouse. Operational use only. No one has ever gone dormant here willingly, and it shows. A kitchen, a bedroom, furniture built for durability rather than anything else. A place that exists to solve problems and doesn’t care whether you’re comfortable while you do it.
I let myself in. Go to the window.
Atlanta at night. The lights of it, the low amber glow the city throws against the underside of clouds, the grid of streets I know as well as the layout of my own compound. I’ve stood at windows like this across every version of this city and felt the gravity of a lord surveying a territory that was and remained his through persistence and controlled force.
Tonight it just looks like a city in the dark.
I stand there for a long time. I don’t know what to do with my hands.
In all my centuries, I’ve always known what to do with my hands. A soldier’s hands are his primary tools. They have no business being idle.
I put them in my pockets and think about the ring.
My father wore it for forty years, his father before him, and his father before him. My father was a Marchetti in fourteenth-century Tuscany. He wore the family ring with the dignity of a man who understood that lineage didn’t need to be grand to be real. He put it on my finger the year I became a soldier, when I was old enough to be trusted with the burden of it, and told me that men in our family had worn it for longer than anyone could verify.
The ring passed to me.
I was wearing it the night Luciano found me and took everything I had. The ring. The name. The chance to pass it to a son. My life.
One hundred and fifty years of my existence spent as Luciano’s slave.
He didn’t need one. But breaking something powerful enough to be worth breaking and reshaping it into what you want is its own category of cruelty. He was very good at it.
He took the ring the first night. He didn’t wear it himself. He kept it in a locked case in his private chambers, with everything else he’d taken from people he’d decided to keep. Inventory.
I spent that century and a half knowing exactly where it was.
In the last decade, he took the ring out of the case and put it on his own finger. I noticed the night it happened. He wanted me to. That was Luciano. Take what belonged to other people. Wear it as though it had always been his. I looked at my father’s ringon his hand and I added it to the list of things I was going to take back.
When I killed him, and I had planned that killing in specific and patient detail across the full length of those years, I didn’t use a weapon. I used my hands.
I caught him in his private chambers on a night he thought I was broken past the point of action. He had just fed. His guard was settled. I closed the door behind me, and he looked up from his chair with the expression of a man who had never once considered that the thing he owns might turn on him.
I hit him so hard his jaw dislocated before he processed the motion. His blood hit the wall behind the chair. He tried to stand. I drove my fist through his ribs and felt them give individually under my knuckles. He said my name. The old one. Massimo. Said it the way he always said it, like calling a possession to heel.
I broke his arm at the elbow. Then the shoulder. His body tried to heal, but I was faster, each strike aimed at a structure his body would prioritize repairing, so the healing pulled in every direction and couldn’t keep up. His blood was on my face, my hands, the stone floor in a spreading pool that caught the firelight. I hit him again. And again.
I wasn’t angry. That’s the part I remember most clearly.
I had been angry at the beginning of my enslavement. The anger had burned so long it had gone past heat into something cold and mechanical and perfectly calibrated. I took him apart. Methodically. Without waste.
His body stopped trying to heal. His eyes were open, and for the first time since he took me, I saw something in them I recognized. Fear.
I put my hand on his sternum and pressed until my palm met the stone floor beneath him.
I held his gaze the entire time. I wanted him to see me. The man underneath all of it, who had waited and planned and carried every humiliation, and who was now, finally, getting his retribution.
