One satin petal lit, and she put it on the floor next to them as the flower kindled to life. Lifting her gaze, she found herself face-to-face, very close to Max, and their eyes met over the tiny flame on the stick before he huffed it out.
There’d been pain there. She’d seen it in the unguardedness of his expression for a moment, the deep, bone-crunching pain swimming in his dark eyes.
“Where are you shot?” she asked in a kinder voice than she’d used recently.
“My shoulder. My right leg, though I think it isn’t more than a graze.”
A normal man would still be unconscious—between the chill of the dungeon and the loss of blood, not to mention the battering he’d taken under the hands of the vampires.
Before she could move he was shrugging painfully out of his heavy coat, which smelled like bloody, wet wool. Victoria helped pull it away from his left shoulder and saw the huge bloom of darkness glistening on his white shirt. It was, she realized suddenly, just above where the tiny vis bulla hung from his areola.
Her stomach squirmed, remembering how he’d forced her hand to touch it when she needed power and strength, and how warm and firm his skin had been under her reluctant fingers.
She reached to help him, but he batted her hand away.
“Tear the coat and I’ll use it to bandage this. Then we have to find a way out of here, or it won’t matter,” he said.
“Your coat? Don’t be ridiculous; the wool will be too prickly.” She tore at her chemise and wadded up a large piece of the fine cotton, handing it to him when he made no move to allow her to bandage him herself.
“What have you found, Vioget?” asked Max.
“Little to assist us. The door is bolted solidly from the other side, and the hinges are outside as well. The door is made of wood, banded with iron, so unless you happen to be carrying some much larger accoutrements in your unmentionables, my dear Victoria, we shan’t be leaving this chamber until they open the door. And we certainly don’t want to wait for that.”
“No,” Max agreed.
“Sara Regalado and her father—and likely all of the Tutela—have allied themselves with Akvan, then,” Victoria said. “And they tricked people into coming here to feed the vampires, I presume.”
“Not all of the Tutela,” Sebastian corrected. “A great number of them are still loyal to my grandfather.” There was a bit of stiffness in his voice.
After Akvan’s Obelisk had been destroyed—and with it Nedas, who’d been the most powerful of the vampires in Italy—there had been a great power struggle between Beauregard and Sara’s father, Conte Regalado. As a newly turned vampire, the conte wasn’t nearly as powerful as Beauregard …but by allying himself with Akvan the demon, perhaps he thought he could overcome Beauregard.
Not a bad strategy.
And now she understood what Beauregard had meant when he spoke of Regalado’s new alliance.
“And not only for the vampires,” Max said. “Akvan will feed…from the mortals trapped here.”
Victoria looked at him and read the expression on his face. “What does he do to them? Drink their blood?”
“Human heads,” Sebastian said flatly. “But you’re wrong, both of you.” Grim satisfaction laced his voice. “It’s not so much the mortals they wished to draw here. I cannot believe you don’t see it for yourself.”
“Of course I do. It was Victoria all along.”
The understanding blossomed inside her. They’d been kidnapping mortals—and before them, dogs and cats—to feed Akvan for months. “Sara tried to capture me before…this treasure hunt was nothing more than a way to get me to come.” She looked at Max. “They want the key, Aunt Eustacia’s key.”
“Or they simply want you. Which I can understand most readily,” Sebastian added dryly. “It seems to be quite a common ailment as of late.”
“Don’t let that go out,” Max said suddenly, gesturing toward the dying rose blossom.
Startled into action, Victoria quickly sliced off another flower and used the burning one to light it. When she looked back at him, he was drinking from a small vial.
“What is that?”
Swallowing, he looked at her in annoyance, then corked the tiny bottle and slipped it into a pocket. “Is that a window?”
Victoria looked up and saw, for the first time, right at the junction of ceiling and wall, the faintest rectangle of dark gray. Really, it was barely discernible from the other bricks on the wall, except that it was bigger, and just a bit lighter in color.
“Sebastian, let me stand on your shoulders,” she said.
She could see the amusement on his face when he approached the small circle of light they shared. “What a serendipitous opportunity to refresh my memory about what’s under your skirt,” he murmured, drawing her toward the wall.
Victoria resisted the urge to acknowledge the comment. Instead she used her fingernails and the crevices between the bricks to steady herself as she climbed up onto Sebastian’s bent knee, then onto his shoulders, and then even higher as he rose to a full standing position.
The top of her head brushed the stone ceiling, and she said, “It’s a window. Too small for any of us to pass through.”
“What can you see?”
Sebastian’s fingers had moved from steadying her ankles to sliding up her calves over the silky stockings she wore, creating a delicate, delicious friction—and causing the stockings to sag. She gave him a little jab with her toe and replied to Max, “The window is level with the ground. I can see very little. A wall. The sky—it’s nearing dawn, and the sky is turning gray.”
“Can you see a small iron gate? Low in the wall?”
“It’s very dark, Max; I can’t see much of anything.”
“Here.”
The light below her in the small room moved closer, and Victoria reached down carefully to take the small rose from Max, who’d stood, but was now leaning against the wall. He was holding his right hand over his shoulder wound, though his face looked a bit less tense. Whatever was in that vial had begun to work quickly.
When she rested the little candle on the narrow sill of the window, Victoria could see into the yard in front of the opening. “Yes, I see a small thing—it looks like a grate. It’s very small, though, Max…”
“As I thought. You can come down now.”
She carefully handed down the candle, and found Sebastian to be exceedingly helpful in assisting her to get down from the window, his hands groping about and assisting in areas that weren’t off balance in the least.