Innocent Blood by James Rollins, Rebecca Cantrell Read Free Book Online Page A

arms and carried her away from the soiled bed.
    She leaned her cheek against his, her lips near his ear. “It is good to be in your arms again,” she whispered, and he believed her. Her silver eyes shone up at him. “Will you break your vows once more?”
    She favored him with a slow, lazy smile, mesmerizingly beautiful. He responded, trapped for a moment by her charm.
    He remembered his love for her, how in a moment of hubris he had believed himself capable of breaking his vow as a Sanguinist, that he could lie with her like any ordinary man. But in his lust of that moment, locked to her, inside her, he had lost control and let the demon in him burst its bonds. Teeth ripped her soft throat and drank deeply until that font was nearly empty, the woman under him at death’s door. To save her, he had turned her into a monster, fed her his own blood to keep her with him, praying she would take the same vows he did and join the Sanguinist order alongside him.
    She did not.
    A rustle on the far side of the thick door brought his thoughts back to this room, to the dead girl on the bed, to the many others who had shared her fate.
    He knocked on the door with the toe of his boot, and the servants unlocked the way. He shouldered it open as they fled down the dark stairs of the tower.
    Left behind in their wake, placed outside the door, a marble sarcophagus rested atop the rush-covered floor. Earlier, he had filled the coffin with consecrated wine and left it open.
    Seeing what awaited her, she raised her head, dazed by bloodlust. “Rhun?”
    “It will save you,” he said. “And your soul.”
    “I don’t want my soul saved,” she said , her fingers clutching to him.
    Before she could fight him, he lifted her over the open sarcophagus and plunged her down into wine. She screamed when the consecrated wine first touched her skin. He set his jaw, knowing how it must pain her, wanting even now to take the agony from her and claim it for himself.
    She thrashed under his hands, but in her weakened state, she was no match for his strength. Wine splashed over the sides. He forced her against the stone bottom, ignoring the fiery burn of the wine. He was glad he could not see her face, drowned under that red tide.
    He held her there—until at last , she lay quiet.
    She would now sleep until such a time as he could find a way to reverse what he had done, to return life to her dead heart.
    With tears in his eyes, he fitted the heavy stone lid in place and secured it with silver straps. Once done, he rested his cold palms against the marble and prayed for her soul.
    And his own.
    Slowly Rhun returned to himself. He remembered fully how he had come to be here, imprisoned in the same sarcophagus he had used to trap the countess centuries ago. He recalled returning to his sarcophagus, to where he had entombed the coffin inside a bricked-up vault far beneath Vatican City, hiding his secret from all eyes.
    He had come here upon the words of a prophecy.
    It seemed the countess still had a role to play in this world.
    Following the battle for the Blood Gospel, he had ventured alone to where he had buried his greatest sin. He had hammered through the bricks, broken the seals of the sarcophagus, and decanted her from this bath of ancient wine. He pictured her silver eyes opening for the first time in centuries, gazing into his. For that brief moment, he allowed his defenses to fall, slipping back to long-ago summers, to a time when he dared to believe that he could become more than what he was, that one such as he could love without destruction.
    In that lapse, he had failed to see the shattered brick clutched in her hand. He moved too slowly as she swung the hard rock with a hatred that spanned centuries—or perhaps he simply knew he deserved it.
    Then he awoke here, and now he finally knew the truth.
    She sentenced me to this same prison.
    While a part of him knew he deserved this fate, he knew he must escape.
    If for no other reason than that