PROLOGUE
“The only difference between angels and demons is who wrote the book.” — M.F
Red mist slowly started to coat the already stained and grime-covered crisscrossed wallpaper. The old ramshackle hostelry on top of Hampstead Heath, where my life both truly began and ultimately ended.
I had been through enough already in this life. I didn’t care. It had always been kill or be killed even as a child. And now, twenty-eight miserable years later, I’d had enough.
All I heard was muffled yelling and screaming. The loud crack of my right sleeve had dazed me. This wasn’t the first time I’d shot a gun, but it was the first time I’d killed a man.
The glass of wine tipped over, unbalanced, and fell to the table and sloshed the red wine all over the red and white checkered cloth that covered the old wooden table. The wine glass rolled to the floor, shattering. That drenched tablecloth dripped both blood and wine long after we had made our escape.
CHAPTER ONE — 1847
“Alessio Salvatore Agostino Marchetti!”
My mother’s voice carried the length of the corridor like a bell someone had struck twice. I laid the newspaper on the sitting room table and rose, feeling the familiar tug of being summoned, twenty-five years old and still, under this roof, a boy.
The house met me with its usual grandeur: marble floors veined in smoke, a red-and-gold runner soft under my bare feet, gaslights flickering in the sconces as if the house breathed.
My mother, Vittoria Amedea Edwards, stood with a pan of pastries cooling behind her. The pan told the story: two missing, and the culprit nowhere in sight.
“Why couldn’t you wait for dinner?” she snapped, eyes on me. I put on contrition because it was easier than the alternative. “I was starving. Besides, your baking is lethal.”