“The receiving room is the old library?” Adam asked.

She gave him a surprised look before dropping her eyes. “Yes, sir.”

“It still smells of books,” Harris explained, touching his nose. “The wolves pay more attention to the scents of things than most people do. We won’t need a guide.”

The servants withdrew. Adam claimed the cart that held a tea service with a large, elaborately fashioned black-and-gold teapot that did not, according to his nose, hold anything like tea.

“I’ll take it in to them,” he said. He trusted that Marsilia and Stefan had enough control not to attack anyone even with their hunger riding them, but he wouldn’t send anyone else in. Just in case.

He knocked once—they would have heard the exchange with Bonarata’s servants—and went in. Marsilia was dressed and putting a diamond drop earring on. Stefan was buttoning his white silk shirt.

“Thank you,” Marsilia said.

There was no trace of the Hunger in either of their faces, but Adam knew what he’d seen. He pushed the cart all the way into the room and turned to leave them to it.

Marsilia said, “Wait.”

He stopped and looked at her.

“Please,” she said. Then she nodded to Stefan, who closed the door.

As soon as the door shut, she approached him. “Did you meet with a vampire in this house between the time we retired and awakened?”

“Guccio,” he said. “Mercy contacted Ben via e-mail using a stolen e-reader. She’s alive in Prague and likely to stay that way until we get there. I went to talk to Harris to let him know we’d be wheels up tonight as soon as you figure out what a proper leave-taking of Bonarata consists of. Sooner rather than later if you can manage.”

Marsilia absorbed all of that. While she did, Stefan said, “Guccio? In the day?”

“He had some sort of magical bag. Witchcraft. I want to ask Elizaveta about it.”

Stefan considered that. Then he said, “Did he do anything odd?”

“No bite marks,” Adam said. “I checked.” And he had. He knew about vampire mind tricks—and his wolf was even more agitated than it had been when he found out about Mercy.

Stefan nodded slowly. “Okay. Okay. You should be okay, then. You just—” He glanced over at Marsilia, who sighed.

“Vampires have scent markers,” she told him. “It’s not quite a secret, but not something we tell everyone about. We leave them involuntarily when we feed off a human, but we can also do it deliberately—a touch, a brush of skin on skin. A way of marking someone as ours. As soon as you walked into the bedroom, Stefan and I could tell you’d been marked by someone. I didn’t know Guccio well enough to remember how his scent marker smells.”

Adam sniffed himself, but he couldn’t detect anything different. It made him uneasy that the vampires could smell something he couldn’t, but that might be why his wolf was so upset.

“I showered,” he said, “and it’s still here?”