SWNOVELS Chapter Chapter Thirty-Five
“We can’t stop for long,” Duccio warned.
We’d not stopped running for days, pausing only for water and to orient ourselves and determine if our pursuers still followed. The flight had exhausted me even bolstered by the strength of my wolf form. Duccio understood I’d reached my limits and relented when he no longer heard Sforza’s soldiers advance.
His wolf receded in the early dawn hours when we came across a small lake in the Tuscan farmland.
“Modena and Luca are nothing to Sforza. His wolves cross those borders without hesitation. The Tuscans would fight against his army if given a chance, but their numbers diminished during the last war. The remaining troops are in Florence, long behind us. Our only play is for Rome.”
“Why do they chase you?” I managed as I reverted and fell to my knees, gasping for air as my wolf’s lungs withered to half their lycan capacity.
Duccio didn’t answer but stepped into the lake and submerged himself.
Glimpsing his naked lycan body in the new moonlight for only a moment, I slipped in after him and waited.
“Into Rome, they will not follow,” Duccio said when his head emerged from the water. “They would not dare, even if Sforza commanded it. We will stop running and hide when we make it past the Papal State border.”
“Why wouldn’t they follow us there?”
Duccio stared back for several moments without expression until the muscles in his jaw and face pulled into a wide, toothy grin.
“Because the Romans are insane,” he beamed. “They would kill each of Sforza’s wolves in the most violent ways possible. They wouldn’t even bother to ask who sent foreign troops into their realm. Their lust for blood borders on mindless frenzy.”
“And you choose them still?” I asked.
“The Romans aren’t looking for us. We could walk right into their heart, and they would not recognize us.”
“Why Sforza’s men but not us?”
“The wolves that hunt us are in a pack. Even if they were a pack of elders, they wouldn’t have the strength to mask a dozen minds flying at breakneck speeds through the countryside. That wild mental energy appears like a bonfire in the night to us. They couldn’t escape detection from a wolf half my age.”
“How old are you?” The question slipped out without my considering Duccio might not want me to know.
Despite my year among lycan, I still hadn’t reconciled the mechanics of age. When I saw Maximillian last, I called him my father because he asked for that designation and the respect it demanded. Not just because he had made me, welcoming me to join him in this false immortality by releasing my vovkulaka, my wolf. He desired the unique bond between a father and son. Somehow, it nourished him in ways I couldn’t understand. But I loved him because of how deeply he loved me—and for no other reason. To my eyes, Maximillian looked like a twenty-five-year-old man; Gabrielle looked even younger. Out of her cosmetics and finery, some might’ve believed her to be my younger sister.
The Vicomté du Chastain had accused me of disrespecting Gabrielle by not referring to her as my mother. He saw her as our pack’s leader and entitled to such respect. But I didn’t recognize her that way, certainly not with my eyes. Even while she instructed me as a pupil in her study, it was an act of will to remember she might be my great-grandmother and not the nineteen-year-old girl who cuddled with me in bed when I had a bad dream. Chastain’s accusation triggered thoughts of how she might have wanted me to think of her as a parent every bit as much as Maximillian had.
Duccio’s eyes shot off into the distance as if he were considering his response.
“Forgive me,” he said at last. “The number becomes more and more difficult to remember. It’s been so long since I cared about birthdays. It requires mathematics on my part to arrive at the sum.”
I might burst at the ridiculous statement if I were not so exhausted.
“The year is 1747, monsieur,” I said dryly, which sent him into the very fit of silent laughter I was incapable of right then.
“Very good,” he responded when it settled. “Then if it’s June…” His eyes lit up, though his smile receded. “I missed it.”
“Missed what?”
“Two hundred,” Duccio answered. “I missed observing it when it happened. I’m now two-hundred-one years old.”
Maximillian had been in his eighties. Gabrielle had been almost seventy. Their age had been hard enough to fathom, locked as they were in the visage of prime youth. But to Duccio’s answer, I could only stare back with disbelief. The number was meaningless to me. Somehow more meaningless than the fifteen hundred years their father had lived. Floating in the cool water beside Duccio and hearing the youthful exuberance in his voice, watching the warmth of his mischievous smile, I found the number he quoted impossible to reconcile.
“With my mind unguarded, even the young soldiers who pursue us can see me from leagues away. But my age allows me to mask my mind most of the time,” Duccio said. “Not when we run—the sensation of our speed, of the flight itself, is too intoxicating, and my focus wavers. However, it’d be you who they find here in this lake. Your mind is a much smaller light to them, but it’s uncontained. My faculties make me all but invisible to them.”
“Father taught me to close my mind,” I said.
“As much as he could, I’m sure. But you haven’t yet developed the mental muscles to hide for more than a few moments.”
I considered his point, now feeling more vulnerable than ever. Indeed, I couldn’t guard my thoughts without significant concentration.
“But we needn’t fear the limits of your ability—I can extend my camouflage out several paces around me. You’ll also be invisible to the Roman wolves when by my side. Just two ordinary men about town, one with a foreign accent.”
He offered another wide grin my lycan eyes couldn’t see well in the dim predawn light.
“Do you speak any of the tongues on the peninsula?”
“A little,” I answered in Milanese. “I can read it better than speak it. And I only really know Gabrielle’s dialect. I speak Latin much better. That was her favorite…”
I stopped as my memory of Gabrielle pacing about her study overtook me. The suffering I’d endured the past weeks returned with its biting hollowness, and I went silent.
As if sensing despair take me again, Duccio reached under the water to pull my shoulders close to him, just as he had the morning he told me of their demise. I didn’t want to weep again, but I buried my face into the crook of his neck.
His body’s warmth in the cool water, the smoky smell of his skin, and the hulking feel of his barrel chest and enormous arms around my slight frame were too much to ignore. My mind swam with the sensation, and it overwhelmed me.
I felt my cock awaken. At once, I moved my hips back from him in self-conscious embarrassment, wanting anything but for him to feel it stiffen against him.
I even focused to close my mind at the moment, but it was of little use. I had few mental muscles and nothing to stop him.
Duccio reached with one hand to take my head by the jaw and separated me from his neck. Holding me, he stared with perplexed eyes as if only now realizing my attraction to him. Had my despair made it impossible to notice all these weeks? I couldn’t ponder it for more than a moment before he drew my lips and kissed them.
I exhaled in confusion, not understanding his intent. Nothing about him had led me to believe he’d wanted such a thing from me. Even when he’d held my shivering body to his in bed, desperate to keep me warm after my painful blood loss, I’d felt nothing from him but a parental concern.
Then I felt his tongue slip between my lips and knew his desire must be true.
I let Duccio taste me, pushing into my body, leaving me no way to hide my growing erection.
A frenzy grew from him I couldn’t keep up with, and his tongue invaded me with greater force. It seemed he couldn’t get enough. His hand moved around to the back of my head to hold me to aid this invasion, and I relaxed to let him consume me. His whole body was a soft hardness pushed against me, and I gasped more than once from the feeling that I might break from his ravenous strength.
At once, Duccio stopped and shot his head toward the fields from which we’d come. Quiet as stone, he stared at something far away that only his mind could see.
“They’re on the move,” he said. “We must fly again. Follow me now.”