Starling (74 page)

dress noble, but they seemed to have a steady supply of gold.” She
flicked her eyes toward the doorway as if she’d heard someone approaching, but when no one entered, she kept talking. “They said
they were new to Venice, and would we show them around the city?
We took them to the usual spots—the Palazzo Ducale, the Piazza San
Marco, the Rialto Bridge—but then one of them mentioned Palazzo
Viaro. He’d heard there were no vampires, that it was just a story
someone concocted to keep strangers away. He said nobles threw
fabulous secret parties at the palazzo, and he dared us to take him
there. It seemed harmless at the time, but when we got to the palazzo,
he wanted to go inside.” She shuddered. “Tessa and I had consumed
a fair bit of wine, but there was no way we were going inside a vampire lair. But then, one of the men pushed open the front door and
stepped inside. He went through the whole house, told us it was
empty, except for a nice cask of wine someone had left. He coaxed us
inside.” She shook her head bitterly. “We drank the wine. I remember being led upstairs to a bedroom. Drinking more wine. The next
thing I knew, Tessa and I were here.”
“So they seduced and then drugged you?” Cass asked. The goblet
at Palazzo Viaro—it must have been left from the night Minerva was
taken.
She nodded. “They were so charming, and they seemed so confident and wealthy,” she said. “Well, I thought Cristian was a bit odd,
but Tessa really liked his quiet demeanor. She said he had an artist’s
soul.”
Cristian. Cass was fairly certain he had no soul at all. How could
the girls not see he was insane? Then again, even she hadn’t noticed
anything wrong with him when they first met at Madalena’s family
home. He was just an attractive if somewhat reserved man. Mada had
trusted him, as had her father. Even Joseph Dubois had trusted him.
Only Luca had known what Cristian was capable of.
It made sense if Belladonna and Dubois were working together
that Cristian was working with them too. But why had Belladonna
switched her technique? Alessia de Fiore and Paulina Andretti had
been executed as vampires, so obviously she had begun procuring
blood here as she had done in Florence, perhaps through parties held
at the deserted Palazzo Viaro. But then she had opted to capture and
imprison a pair of courtesans instead of merely drawing off some
blood. And she had gone so far as to kill one of them.
Before Cass could further contemplate this, Piero strode into the
room with a set of keys dangling from one hand and a candle in the
other. Minerva cowered against the back of her cell. Cass glared at
him.
“I see you’re up to your old tricks,” she said. “Pity the only way
you can get a woman to spend time with you is to drug her and restrain her.” Cass had woken in Florence to find her arms bound.
Piero had untied her but then promptly began stealing so much of her
blood that she was too weak to get out of bed.
Piero’s lips twitched. “Signorina Cassandra,” he said. “I look forward to spending lots of time with
you.
” He cocked his head to the
side, and his hair fell over one eye. Cass couldn’t understand how she
had ever thought that he resembled Falco. Everything about Piero
reeked of evil. “I was going to take her next door for this procedure,
but perhaps you’d like to watch?” he asked.
Cass could see into the next room only slightly, but she had a feeling it was the room with the surgical instruments and the big flat