Page 61 of Bound in Blood
Mateo didn’t respond, he just stood watching the space where the boy had just been.
And suddenly, he wasn’t in a rainy alley in Boston anymore.
He was two weeks shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, hiding in the shadows of a narrow alley in northern Italy.
And those same black eyes were staring straight at him.
Chapter
Twenty
NORTHERN ITALY, 1939
MATEO
Everything happened way too fast.
The kind of too fast where you can’t think, and your instincts completely take over your actions. One second, Mateo and Marco were backing into an alley, staring down a man with pitch-black eyes. Marco’s grip was tight on Mateo’s shoulder, fear coursing through both of their veins. The next, Mateo watched as the man lunged, avoiding him entirely, going straight for Marco, tackling him to the ground.
Mateo barely had time to process what was going on. Marco struggled, trying his best to kick the man off him. It shouldn’t be hard, Mateo hadn’t gotten a great glimpse of the man before he tackled Marco, but he was short and looked quite a bit younger than the two of them. But Marco wasstruggling.Which meant something was very fucking wrong. Marco was on the ground, struggling, thrashing like his life depended on it, but the man didn’t budge.
And then…
Fuck… and then.
Mateo watched in horror as the man clamped his teeth onto Marco’s throat.
His stomach lurched, mind going blank. For a moment, he couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t fuckingthink.Marco screamed before going completely still, and Mateo finally snapped out of his fear-frozen state.
He lunged.
He didn’t feel his body move, didn’t remember making the decision. Within a split second he was on the man, yanking him off Marco, bringing them both to the dusty alley ground.
The other man fought and struggled, but Mateo had that adrenaline strength. The kind you got when babies were trapped under cars. This manbithis fucking brother, and Mateo was going to bite back.
He clamped down on their attacker’s forearm. He’d read once that skin was easy to bite through, you just had to clear the part of your mind that reminded you it was skin. So he did. His teeth tore through flesh and muscle, taking a bite-sized chunk from the man’s arm.
Blood filled his mouth, thick and metallic, and Mateo immediately spit it out, but not before swallowing some.
It tastedwrong.
Mateo had had blood in his mouth before. Split lips from playground fights, bloody noses from grown-up fights (he’d never learned to watch his mouth.) But this was different. Mateo wasn’t sure exactly how, just that it was different.
The man screamed in pain as he yanked his arm from Mateo, blood gettingeverywhere.All over himself, all over Mateo, and all over Marco, who was on the ground, not moving, lips parted and skin pale, like a corpse.
Their attacker, clearly angry, recovered from the shock of Mateo’s bite, lunging at Mateo again. Sharp, and inhumanly fast, Mateo didn’t have time to twist away. His head waspounding,stomach churning and before he could shove the man off him, a sharp, searing pain tore through his shoulder.
This fucking bastard just bit him, too!
It’s nothing like how he bit Marco. This was messy and brutal, more like a wounded animal attacking out of anger than some creature out of a horror novel trying to drink the blood of mortals. Mateo took advantage of his desperation, pulling his legs up and kicking the man straight in the groin with both feet, as hard as he could.
The man yelped, a choked-off, guttural sound of shock and agony, and Mateo didn’t waste a second. He scrambled backward toward his brother, holding his bleeding shoulder as pain burned through him like fire.
A dark streak of blood—Mateo’s blood—dribbled from the man’s lips as he staggered back, his expression flickering between fury and confusion and... fear? Mateo couldn’t process in time before the man turned and just… bolted.
He was there, and then he wasn’t.
Mateo’s breath rasped, his body trembling, his shoulder throbbing. His tongue couldn’t rid itself of the taste of blood, and everything felt heavy and exhausting and…
