Page 80 of Fastest Kill

Serapis ran a hand over his face. "I didn't know that Agrippa would take her. What I suspected about the Alesci women was something that shouldn't be possible."

"No fucking riddles. Just spit it out, Zio. We are all out of ideas here, and you are the only one who thinks like Agrippa." Dario pulled a chair out, turned it backward, and sat with his arms across the top of it. Around the table, the room went quiet. "Why did they target Despina? Your best guess."

Serapis looked at Frederica. "In 1535, when I stopped Agrippa's first ritual, there were women in his cult. They were witches, which meant women Agrippa had identified as having genuine gifts, latent magic, and bloodline power that he had spent years cultivating under the guise of protecting them from persecution."

He spoke carefully because the wound still hurt, but Dario didn't care anymore. His uncle was responsible for a lot of the mess they were in, and it didn't matter that he was trying to clean it up. Dario was tired of the lies, the lack of information, the helplessness that was building under his ribs.

"The witches were meant to be fuel for his spell," Serapis continued. "Disciples who believed they would ascend with him. The truth was that they would die to power his transformation, like us students. I got them out where I could, before Agrippa noticed they were gone. There was one I nearly didn't reach in time. A woman from Metz whom Agrippa had defended in the Witch Trials. Her name was Lisette Brun. Common records called her a peasant woman, old, no family, but the records lied. She was perhaps thirty-five. She had a daughter, already grown by then and living farther south. Lisette was meant to be Agrippa's first sacrifice. The one whose death would open the ritual. I pulled her out before the binding was complete."

Serapis paused, his eyes heavy with memory. "I put her on a road south with what money I could manage. I watched until she was clear of the city. After that—" he opened one hand, a small, helpless gesture that looked strange on him. "I had a great deal to manage in the immediate aftermath, and I lost track of her."

"You lost track of her," Frederica deadpanned.

"I assumed she lived out her life with her daughter, and that it was over for their family. At the Vienna auction, when Agrippa said you reminded him of someone, I think he might have been thinking of Lisette. Which means the one who got away from him was your ancestor."

"But why would he look for what happened to Lisette? Why go through the hassle? There are plenty of other witches out there," Dario argued, still not seeing why Agrippa would be obessessed over that one woman.

"Agrippa is too clever not to have tried. When he woke in the nineties, the first thing he would have done was account for the loose ends. Lisette was the greatest loose end of his life because he didn't know what happened to her." Serapis was thinking out loud now, making the connections as they appeared. "He would have traced her journey and bloodline south to Greece. He would have found⁠—"

"My mother," Frederica said, interrupting him.

"Yes."

"And my father, who just happened to be a world-class thief." Her voice had dropped flat in a way that was far more dangerous than anger. "While he was watching my mother, he had Tore running jobs for him. He had access to my family for years because you let a woman walk out of Metz and didn't make sure she was safe."

"Frederica—" Serapis began.

"He's been in my fucking family's house!" She set the rifle case on the table. "He knew who my father was. He had Tore moving artifacts for him, and the whole time he was building a file on where Lisette Brun's bloodline had ended up, because you lost track of her."

"I was meant to lose track of her! It was a way to keep her safe," he replied, voice soft but firm.

"You knew something was wrong when he touched me in Vienna. You knew he had put a compulsion on me for a reason. You just didn't make the connection fast enough."

Serapis didn't defend himself. "Yes. Despite what you may think, child, I am only human."

Frederica's eyes narrowed, but she didn't try to keep fighting him.

"Magic moves in circles," Serapis said finally when Frederica finally sat down. "What is unfinished does not stop. What was interrupted will try to complete itself. I got Lisette out, and I believed that was the end of her part in this. I was wrong. It was never the end because Agrippa was never stopped, only delayed. It won't end for any of us until he is dead."

Dario could tell by the set of Frederica's shoulders that she was still pissed, but some of the edge was gone. Serapis had fucked up, and the only reason she probably wasn't trying to shoot him was that Serapis owned up to it. They needed him to get Despina, but after that? That would be Despina's call.

"Agrippa recognized Frederica," Rodrigo said from his side of the room. "And identified Dario. She would be too hard a target to get, especially after his spell didn't work, so he went after Despina."

"It was a tactical move to make while he still could." Serapis nodded. "He's setting up his spell in a modified version of the original. He has always worked with iteration. He needs Lisette's descendant, sacrificed during the same cosmic alignment he failed in 1535. The symmetry of it would amplify the ritual beyond anything he could achieve without her because it removes another unknown variable."

The room was quiet except for the faint sound of the canal outside and the doctor's voice from the floor below.

Frederica looked around the table at them. Dario watched her take in each face of the found family that had assembled around the table.

"We take the fight to him before the eclipse and before he can complete anything," she said, clenching her fists. "He's not going to sacrifice my mother."

"We will find her," Rodrigo said, using his boss voice, which made everything sound under control. "We will rest, gather data, and make a plan once we have all the information."

The doctor came out of the guest room shortly after, pronounced Tore stable, uncomfortable, and likely to be deeply uncooperative as a patient. She left a list of instructions that Dario suspected Tore would ignore within twenty-four hours.

Leo showed her out, and the others dispersed to whatever bedroom they had claimed. Iz, Giana, Dante, and Leo set up together at the table, keeping up their efforts to find information on Agrippa's residence and anything else they could use against him.

Frederica went to see her father. Dario stayed in the hallway and gave her the time alone. He heard Tore's slightly slurred speech from the painkiller the doctor had administered, and Frederica's voice was quieter than usual. After a while, the voices stopped, and Frederica came out, pulling the door shut gently behind her.