Page 117 of Be Still My Unbeating Heart

Enzo silently looked at Bastian, then De Luca, then the body at his feet, his face morphing from fear back to confusion. He staggered backward, and Bastian saw a deeper darkness behind him. Another cave?

“Enzo,” De Luca said, moving toward his brother again, but then another voice entered the echoey space. Light and comforting and female.

“It’s okay, you’re okay,” the voice said as a shape emerged from the dark behind Enzo. A woman in a black apron, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Her large, Disney-princess eyes glinted in the gloom, and a silver cross hung about her neck. Bastian went rigid with shock.

Arianna.

She ignored them as she circled her arms around Enzo, pullinghim close. His head sank to her shoulder, and she put her mouth to his forehead, speaking into his skin.

“You’re okay, tesoro mio. Shhh, you’re okay.”

“What are you doing here?” De Luca demanded. “What’s going on?”

Arianna didn’t look at him. “I’m taking care of him, Inspector, like I promised I would. Because somebody has to.”

De Luca swore in Italian. “You brought him here? Why would you bring him here in his condition? You’ll kill him!”

“He’s getting stronger,” Arianna said, voice oddly dreamy. “You can see that for yourself.”

They could. Enzo was standing unaided, which De Luca had told Bastian was impossible. According to De Luca, Enzo hadn’t been out of bed in months. He was weakening by the day, had only a year or two to live. Now, though, he was in a cave beneath Vernazza, upright and conscious.

But how? And, perhaps more importantly,why?

“We have to get him home,” De Luca said. “We have to get out of here before the tide comes in.”

He seemed to have forgotten about Matteo and the blood painted on Enzo’s face. He could think only about his brother.

But Bastian saw it now. The savage glint in Arianna’s eye that hadn’t been there before. The strange tone in which she spoke. The consuming love evident in her embrace. The infinity symbols painted across Enzo’s skin.

The truth snapped around him like teeth.

It wasn’t a vampire who had been murdering townspeople. It wasn’t Matteo or the commissario or Enzo, it was—

“You,” he said, staring at Arianna. “You killed them.”

“What?” De Luca said.

“She’s the killer,” Bastian said. “She killed Luna and Emilio and the others.” He fought a surge of indignation and disbelief at whohad been trying to frame him. His mind crowded with questions as he tried to understand.I’m taking care of him, Arianna had said about Enzo, but how did murder fit into that equation? How did killing benefit Enzo?

“Agh!” Whitby cried, hopping back as water spat through a fissure in the wall. The tide must have risen farther because water gushed into the cave from a dozen holes in the wall. It slopped across the ground, lapping at Bastian’s shoes, extinguishing half the candles that guttered among the rocks.

Whitby chanted Latin under her breath, though Bastian couldn’t guess what she was attempting to conjure now.

“We have to get out of here,” De Luca said.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Arianna said, her gaze falling to Matteo, still lying on his side on the cave floor. “Not until I’ve finished. It’ll only take one more.”

“One more what?” De Luca demanded. He was inching closer to his brother now.

Arianna’s eyes glimmered at him as she reached behind her back with her free hand, revealing a curved six-inch blade with a small wooden handle at each end. Amezzaluna. Bastian recognized it because he had used one himself while cooking; you held both handles and rocked the blade in order to chop herbs. Something told him Arianna had put it to a darker use.

“Love always demands sacrifice,” Arianna said. “A show of faith. The giving up of one thing in order to gain something better.”

Bastian almost laughed at the clichés, but he was still processing her words.Sacrifice.He looked at Matteo. The note. The infinity symbols on Enzo’s skin. The deaths weren’t random. They weren’t the result of an insatiable vampire hunger. There was more to it than that.

“You sacrificed them,” he said, feeling like he was on the cusp of grasping her logic, despite its warped nature. “Why?”

Arianna’s chin lifted. Defiant. Proud. She turned to look at an object on the far side of the cave. Bastian saw a statue of a woman hewn from black marble. It rested on a flat section of rock, a couple of candles spitting at her feet. In the dancing light, the marble woman almost looked alive, and Bastian recognized her because of the rebellious expression on her face, not to mention the two snakes dangling in curling loops from her fist, their jaws extended in a venomous hiss.