Still, not all her hesitation was embarrassment.
She knew a part of her didn’t want to know the truth.
What if the feeling of connectedness that she had experienced wasn’t just a mechanism to quiet prey? What if it was something else?
10:47 A.M.
Rhun awoke to a feeling of dread and panic. His arms flailed up and to the side, expecting to feel stone walls enclosed around him.
His memories filled back in.
He was free.
As he listened to the clack of steel wheels on tracks, he remembered the battle at the edge of the Holy City. He had suffered some minor wounds, but worst of all, the battle had drained the last dregs of his strength, returning him to a weakened state. Cardinal Bernard had insisted he rest while they waited for the arrival of Erin and Jordan.
Even now he could hear the thump of human hearts, the timpani of their beats as familiar to his keen ears as any song. He ran his palms over his body. He wore a dry set of robes, the reek of old wine gone. He eased himself upright, testing each vertebra as he did so.
“Careful, my son,” Bernard said out of the darkness of the train car. “You are not yet restored to your full health.”
As Rhun’s eyes adjusted and focused, he recognized the papal sleeping car, outfitted with the double bed upon which he had slept. There was also a small desk and a pair of silk chairs flanking a couch.
He spotted a familiar figure standing behind Bernard at his bedside. She wore tailored leather armor and a silver chain belt. Her black hair had been braided back from the stern lines of her dark face.
“Nadia?” he croaked out.
When had she arrived?
“Welcome back to the living,” Nadia said with a sly smile. “Or as close to living as any Sanguinist can claim.”
Rhun touched his brow. “How long—?”
He was interrupted by the final figure in the room. She lounged on the couch, one leg stretched up, outfitted with a splint. He remembered her limping flight down the cobblestone street toward the Holy City.
“Helló, az én szeretett,” Elisabeta said, speaking Hungarian, every syllable as familiar as if he had heard them only yesterday, instead of hundreds of years before.
Hello, my beloved.
There was no warmth in her words, only disdain.
Elisabeta switched to Italian, though her dialect was old, too. “I trust you did not find your brief time in my prison too burdensome. But then again, you took my life, you destroyed my soul, and then you stole four hundred years from me.” Her silver eyes glared out of the darkness at him. “So I doubt you’ve been punished quite enough.”
Every word cut him with its truth. He had done all that to her, a woman he had once loved—still loved, if perhaps only the memory of her former self. He reached for his pectoral cross, found a new one hung around his neck, and prayed for forgiveness for those sins.
“Has Christ been much comfort to you these last hundreds of years?” she asked. “You look no happier than you did in my castle centuries ago.”
“It is my duty to serve Him, as always.”
One side of her mouth lifted in a half smile. “You give me the politic answer, Father Korza, yet did we not once promise to speak truth to each other? Do you not owe me at least so much?”
He owed her much more.
Nadia glared at Elisabeta with undisguised rage. “Do not forget that she left you in that coffin to suffer and die. Or all the women she killed on the streets of Rome.”
“It is her nature now,” he said.
And I made her so.
He had perverted her from healer to killer. All her crimes rested on his conscience—both in the past and now.
“We can control our natures,” Nadia countered, touching the delicate silver cross at her neck. “I control mine every day. So do you. She is fully capable of doing the same, but she chooses not to.”
“I will never change,” Elisabeta promised. “You should have just killed me at my castle.”
“So I was ordered,” he told her. “It was mercy that hid you away.”
“I trust little in your mercy.”
She shifted in her seat, lifting clasped hands to brush a lock of hair from her forehead before settling them again in her lap. He saw she wore handcuffs.
“Enough.” Bernard gestured to Nadia.
She stepped closer to the sofa and pulled Elisabeta none too gently to her feet. Nadia kept firm hold of her. She would not underestimate Elisabeta as he had when he took her from the wine.
The countess only smiled, baring her handcuffs toward Rhun.
“Shackled like an animal,” she said. “That is what your love has brought me.”
10:55 A.M.
Leopold started at one end of the dining car and worked his way to the other. He did what he was ordered to do, closing each set of curtains, pulling the panels tightly together until no scrap of sunlight came through.