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Dominique?”
    “We heard noises in your chamber hall, my queen. Dante went to check. When he did not return, I left my post in search of him. That is when they grabbed me.”
    “How many of them, do you reckon?” Vasco rocked back eagerly on his heels.
    “I do not know. They caught me unaware.” Dominique shook his head as if shaking away a buzzing thought. “At a guess, I’d say four of them. I did not see Dante.”
    Iliaria cursed so heatedly that for a moment I thought she’d drive her fist through the wall. She did not, thankfully. “They are toying with us.” Her voice was an angry hiss.
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “I think she means,” Vasco said, “that because Dominique is unharmed and yet the Donatore do not remain so, that this has become a game of proving their ability to infiltrate our clan and hurt, or spare, whomever they choose.
    “But what of Dante?” I asked. “Do you think they would have killed him just for sport?”
    Iliaria considered my words. “I do not know,” she said. “Damokles hates vampires and murdered his own sister for being the lover of one. If that is any indication—”
    “There is the chance that they are using him to gather information for further use against us.” Nirena stepped away from the stone wall and circle of light, sending a ripple of energy through the air.
    “There is that,” Iliaria agreed.
    Renata took rein of the situation. “The other Elders will wake soon. It will be easier to find Dante with more of us looking for him. Do you have a problem with restoring the Donatore before our Elders wake?” she asked Savina.
    “No.”
    We left the hallway of the purgatorio, for which I was relieved. My memories of such a place were not so terrible, but I had not seen it in two hundred years and didn’t much care to see it again. I remembered a man who had beseeched Renata when I had been held there. He had knelt on the rough stone. His face had been dirty and his eyes hollowed from lack of sleep.
    “Please, great lady, I have a family to provide for, mouths to feed…”
    I remembered her cold response. “As do I.”
    Whatever became of his family, I do not know, nor do I know what became of him. Like as not, he became nothing more than food in our bellies, as the Donatore were chosen with care and the man had been too desperate, lost in his concern for his family. Too desperate to survive meant he would’ve been all too eager to run away and return to the life and love he had known. For that reason alone, he would not have been chosen as Donatore. Those that became Donatore became such consensually and were, more often than not, mortals who had nothing to lose in the human world.
    I did not know this, Piph, Cuinn’s androgynous voice whispered, tempered with compassion. He was a part of me, my little fox, and when I remembered something, he shared in those memories.
    It was a very long time ago, Cuinn.
    Aye, he said, and though you serve her, you are not like her.
    His words made me focus my attention on Renata.
    Her magnificent eyes met my gaze and held it. The midnight fragments in her irises were nigh black in the dancing torchlight, shadowing the soft ocean blue flecks like Caribbean waters and a starry sky. The expression she gave me was unreadable.
    I am not as strong as she is.
    Nay, Cuinn said, ’tis not that, Epiphany. You do not share the same cold practicality.
    I severed the eye contact with Renata, afraid that she would hear.
    For a long time, I did not understand it—her cold practicality. I did not comprehend how she could seem so cruel, and yet, she showed me compassion when I had not asked for it.
    A hand touched my hair to tuck a curl gently behind my ear.
    Light and dark run through us all , Renata said.

Chapter Three
     
    We made it safely back to Renata’s chambers, and she left Vasco in charge to oversee the Donatore’s restoration. Those that were not with his party overseeing the restoration stood guard in the