He wanted to keep her on edge, I judged. Keep her trying to please him. It was easier to control someone who understood that they were replaceable.

“He told me he thought about taking her, too, since I worked out so well for him. But she was old—and while vampires don’t age, they don’t get younger-looking, either.” She leaned close to the cage and murmured sweetly, “And it looked as though she had her claws into your mate anyway. They are sleeping together.”

My mate. Adam had made it to Milan, then, to speak with Bonarata. Had he brought Elizaveta? Why had he brought Elizaveta? That was a stupid question. Elizaveta was a very strong arrow in our quiver as long as she chose to aim herself in a useful direction. She liked Adam. I realized that I should have known he’d brought her—it must have been her magic that had allowed him to contact me while I was in the bus’s luggage compartment.

Mary made a disappointed sound. I guess I was supposed to be jealous over the comment about Elizaveta and Adam sleeping together. If there was one constant in my life, it was my mate. Pyramids would roll down the desert before Adam would break his word or betray anyone, let alone me.

Finally, with a little unattractive pout, she said, “It is good for you that Guccio didn’t like that witch. He said he didn’t think she’d be cooperative, not useful to him as I have been. If he chose another to do for him what I do—I would not have liked that. You might have had an accident.”

Elizaveta was well able to defend herself. I expected that if Guccio had tried to suborn Elizaveta, the vampire would have found himself overmatched. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew quite a bit about Elizaveta.

“He’ll be so pleased with me,” she said, apparently to herself, because she got to her feet and turned her back to me, though the translating vampire kept translating.

Her gaze fell upon the chained vampire.

“Why is he still here?” she said. “I told you that experiment was a failure.”

Someone said something.

“Not him?”

Apparently my translator was only translating Mary, so I was getting half the conversation.

She looked at the vampire on the wall and frowned. “This is Weis? He was doing well, I thought.”

The translating vampire looked up and met my eyes and broke protocol while Mary’s attention was elsewhere.

He spoke to me very quickly in a low tone. “She has been using witchcraft to try to make humans into vampires more quickly. Recently, she has been successful. That one took her two weeks to make, and he functioned for three months. But they devolve with suddenness and without warning.” He paused. “If you escaped the Master of Milan, then perhaps you will survive this. Someone should know what she has done, so that they are prepared for the problems this will cause. They should destroy any vampire who belonged to her, so that news of this does not get out.”