“I never knew that.” I knew so little about my parents that the tiny piece of trivia felt like a revelation. In my mind, “mother” meant a cool hand, soft hair, and a sweet smell. It was my strongest memory of her. Unless I thought very hard, it was my only memory of her. And I recalled even less about my father.

“Piccolina mia, please to stop,” Rafe said in exasperation, pulling his tie away and substituting a pacifier before his squirming armful could protest. Luckily, the small tussle seemed to have worn her out, and she soon curled into his chest and went to sleep. “The visits ended when you were about two,” he added.

“Do you know why?”

Rafe started to shrug, then realized it might wake up his new girlfriend. “My guess would be that you began showing signs of your gift. Your father must have realized that Tony would take you if he knew.”

Which he had, only a couple of years later. “How did he find out?” I’d never known how Tony discovered that I might be worth acquiring. The idea that the tip-off could have been something I did was nauseating.

“Tony never trusted anyone, not even his longtime servants,” Rafe reassured me. “There were people watching your father, who doubtless also had people watching them. The only ones Antonio did not monitor were those of us with blood bonds to him, which he knew we were not strong enough to break.” The last was said with uncharacteristic bitterness.

“I don’t suppose…Can you tell me anything about them? About my parents?” It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him, but Rafe had never been able to answer. He’d been under orders to stay mute, and as the vampire who made him had given the order, the prohibition was even stronger than Mircea’s.

Rafe regarded me with compassion. “I’m sorry, Cassie.”

“I just thought, maybe, with Tony gone…”

“But he still lives,” Rafe reminded me softly. “As does his hold over me.”

“But maybe Billy could—”

“And Antonio’s ban includes communication through the spirit world.”

My ability to communicate with ghosts came from my father. It wasn’t surprising that Tony would have thought to add that little caveat. I’d always hated him, but I’d never thought him stupid. Disappointment settled into its usual place behind my rib cage.

“Can’t Mircea break the blood bond?” I asked after a moment.

“I haven’t asked him. In his condition…I don’t dare do anything to weaken him further.”

“Which kind of brings me to why I wanted to see you.” I glanced at the kids, but none of them was paying us any attention. Jesse was biting his lip and glaring at the board, where tiny foreclosure signs had just appeared on a bunch of his hotels. As quietly as possible, I brought Rafe up to speed.

“You want to storm a dark mage stronghold?” Rafe asked incredulously when I’d finished. “On your own?”

“Not on my own,” I corrected. A night’s rest had helped to clear my head and made me reevaluate my plan. I needed to get Mircea to the Codex, but trying to handle him by myself was foolhardy. Fortunately, there was another option.

Besides Rafe and a few other trophies, Tony had specialized in acquiring badasses, the kind with the skills and personalities to complement his network of highly illegal activities. And some of them had had several hundred years to hone their skills. I was going after the Codex, and I wasn’t going alone.

“But if you already know where it is, can you not simply—” Rafe made an indeterminate hand gesture that was supposed to indicate shifting.

I respected him enough not to roll my eyes, but it took an effort. “If I could just run in and grab it, yeah. But I somehow doubt it’s going to be that easy. I need Alphonse.”

Rafe only sat there, looking horrified, but some of his tension must have communicated itself to the baby, who woke up and started sniffling. I watched her warily, knowing what that meant. But Miranda, having terrorized the staff to her satisfaction, came and took her away before the explosion came. And Rafe was still just looking at me.

The reaction wasn’t exactly a surprise. Alphonse was Tony’s right-hand man and chief thug. After the boss did his disappearing act, Alphonse had taken control of the family’s East Coast operations as Casanova had in Vegas. And, no, on the surface, nothing about him was particularly reassuring.

For one thing, he looked like a boxer who’d lost one too many fights: his features were all slightly off-kilter, as if they’d been smashed too badly to ever fit together properly again. For another, he sounded scarily like Don Corleone. It was due to tracheal damage from a vicious elbow to the throat in his mortal days, but that didn’t change the fact that every time The Godfather was shown at Tony’s somebody lost it and ended up bleeding all over the floor. Which may account for why it was so often on the playlist.

Even more worrying was the stack of thick, well-thumbed photo albums in his room that were filled with neatly labeled black-and-white prints. Some showed people in coffins, staring sightlessly upwards, others were facedown in gutters or sprawled on cracked pavement, still bleeding out. Alphonse kept pictures of everyone he’d ever killed. There were a lot of albums.

The photos had originally been Tony’s idea. In the human world, Alphonse had been a monster, the kind they made movies about with car chases and explosions and enough gore to prompt news reports on the societal effects of violence in the media. In the vampire world, he was just good at his job. A little too good sometimes. Tony hadn’t wanted his chief enforcer to end up on the Senate’s bad side for going overboard once too often, but talking to him didn’t help much and there are no such things as therapists in the vampire world. Then someone joked one night at dinner that Alphonse needed a hobby, and Tony’s eyes lit up.

The unfortunate joker had been saddled with the job of finding something that Alphonse liked to do that didn’t concern killing—or provide the entertainment himself. Everyone had assumed he was a goner, including him. That had been especially true when the pets were hunted for sport, the piano was used for target practice and the golf clubs were wrapped around his neck. But then he bought a camera and set up a darkroom and nobody saw Alphonse for a week.

When Alphonse had no corpses to model for him, he’d photograph anyone hanging around court. He particularly loved surprising people, catching them doing something embarrassing or from the worst possible angle. Under Rafe’s beautiful ceiling in my bedroom had been walls papered with hideous images: me with eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed; with my mouth full of pizza; and with my jaw swollen to chipmunk size from a tooth extraction.

I’d hated them at first, hated waking up every day to grotesque versions of myself that I’d started to see reflected in the mirror whenever I looked too long. But I hadn’t dared to take down Alphonse’s offerings, which soon circled the room and started on another row. And, slowly, as my collection grew, I began to change my mind.

Alphonse’s favorite model was his girlfriend, a buxom blonde with arms as thickly muscled as a man’s, known as One-Eyed Sal. Her appearance lived up to her nickname, with the scar that ran through her left eye slanting down her cheek to just lift the corner of her mouth. She’d lost the eye in the California gold rush to another saloon girl who knew how to wield a broken bottle better than she did. Shortly thereafter, Tony had decided to add her to his stable. Body parts lost before the change don’t regenerate, so Sal was one-eyed permanently. Alphonse didn’t seem to mind, though, and her lopsided smile and scarred face featured prominently in his collection.

I’d been staring at his most recent shot of me one day, my eyes passing from my acne-covered cheeks and chin, which Alphonse had enhanced with a red filter to resemble a landscape on Mars, to a photo of Tony sprawled on his throne, looking even more bloated than usual. I’d barely even noticed Sal’s newest photo in the middle, despite the fact that the lens had lingered lovingly on her scars. Between the two of us, she’d looked perfectly normal. Through Alphonse’s lens, I’d realized, everyone was ugly; or maybe, through his lens, everyone was beautiful.

I still found it confusing, but I’d never looked at my photos quite the same way again. I’d even started to think that, compared to the frilly, posed shots my governess preferred, some of them were actually kind of interesting. Alphonse might be a murdering bastard, but unlike a certain war mage I could name, he occasionally made sense. And I was really getting tired of dealing with people I didn’t understand.

I’d spent the last few weeks wandering around Pritkin’s world, where I was supposed to belong, feeling like someone visiting a foreign country who only halfway spoke the language. Most of the time, I had no freaking clue what was going on, and once or twice I’d reached a state of confusion so severe that it felt like it might be causing brain damage. I couldn’t win the game—hell, I couldn’t even play—when I didn’t understand the rules. I needed to level the playing field. I needed the vamps.

“Alphonse might be a first-class badass, but he isn’t a first-level master,” I reminded Rafe. “If Mircea dies, he’ll be in the same boat with you, forced to fight for position within whatever family absorbs him.”

“He needn’t worry. There are many who would gladly add his…special talents…to their arsenal.”

“Yeah, but how many do you think would be willing to make him their second?” Alphonse might carve out a niche for himself sooner or later, but no way was he going to end up second in command again. Not for centuries, maybe not ever. And I didn’t think that would sit too well with the vamp I’d known.

“The Consul has forbidden anyone to help you,” Rafe reminded me.

“Alphonse isn’t so great at following orders,” I reminded him right back. “I think he’ll risk it.” If I’d been giving odds, I’d have put them at ten to one at least. I was his best chance to hold on to his current position, which made me his new best friend. No matter what the Consul said. “I need Alphonse and a team of his craziest thugs. Can you get him?”