One moment, Massioni was doubled over in agony and anger. The next, he had Pietro by the wrist, holding the little boy up like a prize. Like a slab of meat caught on a butcher’s hook.
Massioni’s amber eyes burned even brighter in his rage. He snorted and sniffled, his lips peeling back from his teeth and fangs. There was a deep madness in his transformed gaze. In his feral, blood-stained face.
Oh, shit.
He really was crazy. Worse than crazy, but she hadn’t realized it until now.
He had drunk too much blood since he escaped the blast.
Vito Massioni was lost to Bloodlust.
He was Rogue.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Arabella. Now, you’re really going to suffer.”
His tongue slid out, snakelike, as he eyed the Breed child that dangled from his grasp. Then he looked back at her as she slowly got to her feet from her stumble into the other room.
His head cocked at a chilling, exaggerated angle. “I think we’ll start by letting you watch me rip this boy’s heart out and eat it in front of you both.”
Chapter 13
“I don’t think so, asshole.”
Savage held a semiauto in his hand as he stood in the open doorway, his eyes lit up with fury, his fangs pulsing with the need to shred Vito Massioni to pieces.
He and Scythe had split up after leaving the sassi, working the attack from both ends of the city in order to contain the situation as best they could. Savage had just ashed his third Rogue of the night when all of a sudden it felt as if his heart was about to burst out of his chest in ice-cold terror.
Bella’s terror.
Their bond had told him instantly that she was in danger. He hadn’t been prepared for what he saw as he entered the sassi safe house and met with the hideous, Bloodlust-afflicted creature facing him now.
“Let the boy go, Massioni.”
Savage would have opened fire already if Bella wasn’t standing between him and a clear shot at the slavering Breed male.
Besides, in Massioni’s current condition, he was as volatile as a human on PCP. Putting him down cleanly would take a lot more rounds than Savage had left in his pistol.
Or a titanium dagger.
Unfortunately, he’d buried one a few minutes ago in the skull of a Rogue who’d ripped the throat out of a nun inside one of Matera’s old churches. His other blade he’d given to Bella.
He saw no trace of the gun or the knife he’d given her.
And there wasn’t time to consider alternatives so long as Massioni had little Pietro hanging painfully by his wrist while Chiara wept and pleaded for mercy on her son.
ot up to pace the rug, worrying about Ettore. And the more she worried, the more she wondered if this random Rogue attack was actually random at all.
What if Vito Massioni had something to do with it?
She didn’t want to think about the vision she had scried earlier, but the truth was his hideous face had been seared into her mind ever since.
And as much as she dreaded the idea of glimpsing him again, she needed to see if she could learn anything more that might help Ettore and the Order prepare to destroy him.