The Mephisto Club

make almost anyone plead guilty to his charges. Whether the accusation was practicing witchcraft, or casting spells against your neighbors, or consorting with the Devil, confessing to any and all of it was the only way to make the pain stop, to be granted the mercy of death. Which, in itself, was not so merciful, since most of them were burned alive.” He gazed around the room, at the portraits. The faces of the dead. “All these people you see here suffered at his hand. Men, women, children—he made no distinction. It’s said he awakened each day, eager for the task, that he cheerfully fortified himself with a hearty morning meal of bread and meat. Then he’d don his blood-splattered robes and go to work, rooting out heretics. On the street outside, even through thick stone walls, passersby could hear the screams.”
    Maura’s gaze circled the room, taking in the faces of the doomed, and she imagined these same faces bruised and contorted in pain. How long had they resisted? How long had they clung to the hope of escape, a chance to live?
    “Antonino defeated them all,” he said. “Except for one.” His gaze was back on the woman with the luminous eyes.
    “Isabella survived?”
    “Oh, no. No one survived his attentions. Like all the others, she died. But she was never conquered.”
    “She refused to confess?”
    “Or submit. She had only to implicate her husband. Renounce him, accuse him of sorcery, and she might have lived. Because what Antonino really wanted wasn’t her confession. He wanted Isabella herself.”
    Her beauty was her misfortune.
That’s what he’d meant.
    “A year and a month,” he said. “That’s how long she survived in a cell without heat, without light. Every day, another session with her torturer.” He looked at Maura. “I’ve seen the instruments from those times. I can’t imagine any version of Hell that could be worse.”
    “And he never defeated her?”
    “She resisted until the end. Even when they took away her newborn baby. Even when they crushed her hands, scourged the skin from her back, wrenched apart her joints. Every brutality was meticulously recorded in Antonino’s personal journals.”
    “You’ve actually seen those journals?”
    “Yes. They’ve been passed down through our family. They’re stored in a vault now, with other unpleasant heirlooms from that era.”
    “What a horrible legacy.”
    “That’s what I meant when I told you we had common interests, common concerns. We both inherited poisoned blood.”
    Her gaze was back on Isabella’s face, and suddenly she registered something that he had said only moments ago.
They took away her newborn baby.
    She looked at him. “You said she had a baby in prison.”
    “Yes. A son.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “He was placed in the care of a local convent, where he was raised.”
    “But he was the son of a heretic. Why was he allowed to live?”
    “Because of who his father was.”
    She looked at him with stunned comprehension. “Antonino Sansone?”
    He nodded. “The boy was born eleven months into his mother’s imprisonment.”
    A child of rape,
she thought.
So this is the Sansone bloodline. It goes back to the child of a doomed woman.
    And a monster.
    She gazed around the room at the other portraits. “I don’t think I’d want these portraits hanging in my home.”
    “You think it’s morbid.”
    “Every day, I’d be reminded. I’d be haunted by how they died.”
    “So you’d hide them in a closet? Avoid even looking at them, the way you avoid thinking about your mother?”
    She stiffened. “I have no reason to think about her. She has no part in my life.”
    “But she does. And you
do
think about her, don’t you? You can’t avoid it.”
    “I sure as hell don’t hang her portrait in my living room.” She set down her wineglass on the table. “This is a bizarre form of ancestor worship you’re practicing. Displaying the family torturer in the front parlor, like some kind of icon, someone you’re proud of. And here in the dining room, you keep a gallery of his victims. All these faces staring at you, like a trophy collection. It’s the kind of thing a—”
    A hunter would display.
    She paused, staring down at her empty glass, aware of the silence in the house. Five place settings were on the table, yet she was the only guest who’d arrived, perhaps the only guest who’d actually been invited.
    She flinched as he brushed her arm and reached for her empty glass. He