Italia dungeons, May 16, 210 A whip slashes across my back and I scream. 'Padre prega di smettere!(Father please stop!)' He looked back at me with menacing eyes. 'Tu sai che questo e cio che succede quando mi disobbedire. Anche se penso che mi sento l'altra guancia e ti faccio un favore, questo non e il modo in cui funzionano le cose nel mio regno.' (You know this is what happens when you disobey me. Even if I were to turn the other cheek and do you a favour, this is not the way things work in my kingdom.)
The leather bites again. I taste copper and salt and something deeper — the tang of old stone, the mineral grief that lives in dungeon walls. My fingers curl against the iron shackles, and I feel the rust flake beneath my nails like dried petals. Every nerve in my spine blooms white, a garden of agony flowering outward from the place where the whip has kissed me.
I press my forehead to the cold wall. Count the strikes. Seven. Eight. Nine.
My father's breathing is the only music in this place — heavy, deliberate, the rhythm of a man performing ritual rather than punishment. He does not sweat. His kind never do. The torchlight carves his jaw into something beautiful and terrible, a face chiselled from the same obsidian as the throne he occupies three floors above us. King Valdris. Sovereign of the Sangue Antico. My father, my tormentor, my blood.
"Dieci," (Ten,) he says, and the whip falls still.
I hear it coil against the floor like a serpent returning to sleep. The silence that follows is worse than the strikes — it is the silence of appraisal, the silence of a man deciding whether he is satisfied with his work.
"Guardami." (Look at me.)
I turn. The chains rattle, and the sound is swallowed by the vastness of the dungeon, consumed by darkness that pools in every corner like black water. My back screams with each degree of rotation, but I do not let him see. I learned that lesson young — younger than memory, younger than language. You do not show King Valdris your pain. You offer it to him like a gift already opened, already known, already boring.
His eyes are the colour of burnt amber. Mine are the same. This is the cruelty of inheritance — I cannot look at my own reflection without seeing the architecture of his face repeated in softer forms. The high cheekbones. The aristocratic bridge of the nose. The mouth that knows how to smile and how to sentence.
"Sei ancora la mia principessa preferita?" (Are you still my favourite princess?) he asks, and his voice is almost tender. Almost.
"Sono la tua unica principessa, padre." (I am your only princess, father.)
Something flickers behind his amber gaze. Amusement, perhaps. Or something colder — the recognition that even chained, even bleeding, I have a tongue sharp enough to draw its own kind of blood. He steps forward. The torch gutters in the draft his movement creates, and for a moment his shadow swells across the wall behind him, vast and winged, a shape that belongs to the old paintings in the upper corridors — the ones depicting the first vampires descending upon Roma like fallen seraphim.
His hand lifts. I brace for another blow. Instead, his fingers brush the blood from my cheek with the gentleness of a lover. He brings them to his lips and tastes.
"Il sangue dei re," (The blood of kings,) he murmurs. "Sempre dolce." (Always sweet.)
Then he turns and walks away. His boots echo on the stone steps — one, two, three, four — until the heavy oak door groans open and slams shut and I am alone with the rats and the torchlight and the slow arterial drip of water from somewhere above.
I count to one hundred before I let myself cry.
The dungeon beneath the palazzo is older than my father's reign. Older, perhaps, than the palazzo itself. The walls are Roman stone — massive blocks fitted so precisely that even after two centuries no mortar has cracked, no gap has widened enough to admit more than a whisper of wind. They say the Emperor Domitian held prisoners here when Italia was still the beating heart of the empire. They say the stones remember every scream.
I believe them. The stones remember mine.
I hang from the shackles and feel my blood cooling as it dries against my skin. The wounds will heal before dawn — they always do. This is the particular mercy and curse of our kind. The flesh knits. The scars fade. By morning I will look untouched, and my father will look at me across the breakfast table as though nothing happened, and the servants will avert their eyes as they always do, and the whole gilded machinery of the court will continue to turn as though the princess was not screaming in the dark three hours ago.
But blood remembers what skin forgets. The cells carry their trauma like scripture, rewriting themselves around each wound, and I wonder sometimes if I am more scar than girl now — if beneath the porcelain surface my entire body is a palimpsest of pain, layer upon layer of healed damage that has made me something harder than I was born to be.
The torch sputters and dies. Darkness descends like a veil — complete, absolute, the kind of darkness that has weight and texture. I can see perfectly in it. Another gift of the blood. The dungeon reveals itself in shades of grey and silver, every detail precise: the moisture beading on the walls, the spider rebuilding her web in the corner with patient geometric devotion, the rat watching me from the drainage gutter with eyes like tiny black mirrors.
"Ciao, piccolo." (Hello, little one.)
The rat twitches its whiskers and vanishes.
I wait. Time in the dungeon is measured not in hours but in pain — the slow recession of it, the way it ebbs like a tide retreating from shore, leaving behind the flotsam of bruised muscle and torn nerves. My back is a landscape of fire. I close my eyes and map it: the longest laceration runs from my left shoulder blade to the small of my back, a diagonal slash that must have taken real strength. My father is nothing if not committed to his craft.
Seven months ago, the offence was speaking out of turn at a council meeting. Three months before that, it was refusing to feed from the prisoner he selected for me — a girl my age with terrified brown eyes and a crucifix around her neck. Two weeks ago, it was simply existing in the wrong corridor at the wrong hour, catching him in a mood that needed an outlet.
The reasons change. The dungeon does not.
I hear her before I see her. The soft rustle of silk against stone. The careful placement of each foot on the stairs, precise as a dancer avoiding broken glass. Then the scrape of the iron bolt, the groan of ancient hinges, and a sliver of amber light cuts through the darkness.
"Lilja?"
My mother's voice is a thing of contradictions — it carries the warmth of summer and the chill of deep winter simultaneously, as though two women speak through the same throat. Isaveta. Queen of the Sangue Antico. The most beautiful creature in all of Italia, and the saddest.
"Sono qui, mamma." (I'm here, mamma.)
She descends. The candlelight she carries transforms the dungeon into a cathedral of shadow and gold, and she moves through it like a saint through her own martyrdom — serene, luminous, heartbreaking. Her gown is the deep crimson that court protocol demands, but she has thrown a plain woollen shawl over her shoulders, and I know that shawl. It smells of lavender and cedar. It is the one she wraps around me after every session in this place.
She sets the candle on the floor and produces a key from the folds of her dress. The shackles open with a click that sounds like a bone breaking in reverse — the sound of something being un-damaged. My arms fall to my sides and the blood rushes back into my hands with a sensation like fire ants swarming beneath the skin.
I do not fall. I have trained myself not to fall.
"Lasciami vedere." (Let me see.) She turns me gently, and I feel her fingers — cool, impossibly careful — tracing the wounds across my back. She does not gasp. She has seen worse. She has worn worse, though she thinks I do not know.
But I have heard them through the walls. The sound travels strangely in this palazzo — up through the stone, along the corridors, pooling in corners like water finding its level. I have heard her cry out in the night. I have heard the silence that follows, which is the silence of a woman putting herself back together in the dark, bone by bone, dignity by dignity.
"Non sono profondi," (They're not deep,) she says. A lie wrapped in medical assessment. They are deep enough. They always are.
She produces a cloth and a small bottle of something that smells of rosemary and iron. An old remedy — older than Rome, older than the blood courts, something from the eastern lands where she was born. She dabs the cloth against my back and the sting is exquisite, a bright clean pain that somehow cancels the darker one beneath it.
I study her face in the candlelight as she works. She is extraordinary. Hair like spun midnight, falling in loose waves past her waist. Skin the colour of fresh cream, luminous, poreless, the skin of the undying. Her eyes are not amber like mine and my father's — they are the deep green of forest pools, and they hold depths that I have spent my entire existence trying to fathom. She was turned young. Younger than she should have been. This is one of the court's many unspoken truths — that Queen Isaveta was made, not born, and that the making was not her choice.
"Mamma," I whisper. "Perche rimani?" (Why do you stay?)
She pauses. The cloth hovers above my skin. In the candlelight, her shadow on the wall is enormous, and for a moment she looks like something from the old stories — a dark madonna, a protector saint, a creature of infinite tenderness trapped in an architecture of infinite cruelty.
"Perche tu sei qui," (Because you are here,) she says. Simply. As though this explains everything.
And perhaps it does.
She finishes dressing my wounds in silence. Then she wraps the woollen shawl around my shoulders and pulls me against her, and I press my face into the hollow of her throat where her pulse should be but isn't — where there is only the cool marble stillness of the undead, smooth and permanent as a headstone. I breathe in lavender and cedar and the faintest trace of blood, and I allow myself to be small. I allow myself to be her daughter, just her daughter, and nothing more.
"Vieni," (Come,) she murmurs against my hair. "Andiamo di sopra prima che il sole si alzi." (Let us go upstairs before the sun rises.)
We climb the stairs together. The palazzo opens above us like a flower made of stone and candlelight — vaulted ceilings painted with scenes of celestial war, corridors lined with tapestries depicting the great bloodlines, rooms upon rooms upon rooms filled with the accumulated opulence of two centuries of vampiric rule. It is beautiful. It is a prison. Both things are true simultaneously, and I have learned to hold them in my mind without flinching.
My mother walks me to my chambers on the eastern wing. The doors are carved oak inlaid with silver — protective wards disguised as decoration, a precaution against both enemies and the sun. She opens them and guides me inside and settles me on the bed with the tenderness of someone handling a thing made of glass.
"Dormi," (Sleep,) she says.
"Non voglio dormire." (I don't want to sleep.)
"Lo so." (I know.) She sits on the edge of the bed and takes my hand. Her fingers are cool and smooth. "Ma il corpo ha bisogno di guarire, e il sonno e il suo strumento migliore." (But the body needs to heal, and sleep is its best instrument.)
"Il corpo guarisce comunque. Siamo vampiri." (The body heals anyway. We are vampires.)
A smile ghosts across her lips. "Il corpo, si. Ma l'anima ha bisogno di piu tempo." (The body, yes. But the soul needs more time.)
I look at her. In the pre-dawn light filtering through the heavy curtains, she is gilded in silver, a figure from a fresco, a creature caught between the sacred and the profane. I want to ask her how she survives it — not the physical wounds, which are trivial, but the daily architecture of living beside a monster while pretending he is a king. I want to ask her how she keeps the green in her eyes from going dark, how she maintains the quiet flame of herself in a house designed to extinguish it.
But I am fifteen years old — fifteen years of immortal life, which is a strange and elastic measure — and some questions are too heavy for my tongue.
"Buonanotte, mamma." (Good night, mamma.)
"Buonanotte, fiore mio." (Good night, my flower.)
She kisses my forehead. Her lips are cool as moonlight. Then she rises and moves to the door, and in the threshold she pauses and looks back at me with an expression I cannot read — something between sorrow and determination, between farewell and promise.
"Lilja," she says. "Ricorda. Il sangue dei re non e solo una maledizione." (Remember. The blood of kings is not only a curse.)
Then she is gone, and the door closes, and I am alone in the perfumed darkness of my chambers with the sound of my own healing and the weight of her words settling over me like a second shawl.
I do not sleep. Instead, I rise and move to the window — carefully, because the sun is beginning to assert itself beyond the mountains and even the heavy curtains cannot be fully trusted. I press my eye to the narrow gap where the fabric meets the wall and watch the world ignite.
Dawn in Italia is a violence. The light comes not gently but in a rush, a golden blade cutting across the valley, setting the olive groves ablaze and turning the river into a ribbon of molten copper. The village below the palazzo stirs — I can see the baker's chimney sending up its first smoke, the goatherd driving his flock through the narrow streets, the women carrying water from the well. Human life. Mortal life. A world measured in bread and labour and the slow accumulation of years that end in earth.
I press my palm flat against the glass. It is warm already. The warmth moves through my skin and into my blood and for a moment I feel almost alive — almost human — almost one of those girls in the village below who will grow and age and love and die in the span of a single century.
The thought is indulgent. Dangerous. My father would call it weakness. My father would say that to envy mortals is to misunderstand the gift of eternity, that we are the apex, the final form, the perfection that evolution abandoned and the blood completed. My father says many things from the comfort of his throne.
My father has never hung from chains in his own dungeon.
I let the curtain fall and turn back to the darkness. My back has already begun to heal — I can feel the skin drawing itself together like fabric being sewn by invisible hands, the deep tissue regenerating, the blood vessels reconnecting. By the time the sun sets and the palazzo awakens for the evening court, I will be flawless. Unmarked. The perfect princess.
I undress before the mirror. My reflection stares back at me — pale, angular, beautiful in the way that all our kind are beautiful, which is the beauty of a blade. The wounds on my back are already fading from angry red to dusky pink, the edges smoothing, the torn flesh surrendering to the relentless imperative of vampiric regeneration. In an hour they will be silver. In two they will be gone.
But I see them. I always see them. Even when the skin is smooth and unblemished, I see them — a map of every time I was not enough, or too much, or simply present when my father's darkness needed somewhere to land.
I trace the longest wound with my fingertips. From shoulder blade to waist. A line drawn by a king's hand across his daughter's body, as casual and possessive as a signature on a decree.
"Il sangue dei re," I whisper to my reflection.
My reflection does not answer. She is smarter than I am. She knows when to keep silent.
The palazzo sleeps through the day. This is the rhythm of our world — darkness animated, light endured, the sun treated as both enemy and exile. The servants draw the heavy curtains at dawn and do not open them until the last ember of daylight has died behind the western hills. In the hours between, the house is a tomb — gorgeous, gilded, scented with jasmine and old blood, but a tomb nonetheless.
I lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling. The fresco above me depicts the Ascension of the First Blood — the moment when the original vampires rose from their mortal deaths and became something new. They are rendered in the Byzantine style, flat and golden, their eyes enormous and empty, their mouths open in expressions that could be ecstasy or agony. I have stared at this painting every day of my life, and I still cannot tell which.
I think about my mother's words. Il sangue dei re non e solo una maledizione. The blood of kings is not only a curse. What else is it, then? A gift? A weapon? A promise?
I think about the girl with the brown eyes and the crucifix — the one my father wanted me to feed from three months ago. I refused, and the dungeon was my reward. She was taken away after that. I do not know where. I do not ask, because the answer will be one I cannot carry.
I think about the whip coiling against the floor. I think about my father's hand, gentle as a lover's, brushing blood from my cheek.
I think about the village below, where the baker is pulling loaves from his oven and the children are running through the streets and the sun is touching everything with its golden, mortal, unreachable warmth.
I close my eyes.
The blood heals. The blood always heals.
But my mother is right. The soul needs more time.
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