“You know, sometimes you’re a little scary,” I told him frankly. “I was there, and that still sounds strangely believable.”
“Let us hope the Senate thinks so. But no matter what persuasive skills you believe me to possess, you must see that I cannot continue to come up with plausible explanations for other such incidents. This must—”
Someone tapped on the door, and a second later Marlowe’s curly head poked in. The timing made me narrow my eyes suspiciously, but the look on his face was not slyly knowing, but maddened and frustrated. “Unless you want to let Louis-Cesare handle his own defense, we have to go, Mircea!”
“That I do not want,” Mircea said, getting up. “Dorina—”
I stood up, too. “It was business,” I told him. “He stole from me; I returned the favor. That’s all.”
Mircea didn’t look as pleased by that sentiment as I’d have liked. “This isn’t—” He stopped, and again seemed to be trying to marshal his thoughts. I didn’t know why he was bothering; I’d already agreed to what he wanted. Not that it was much. Louis-Cesare had Christine back; I wasn’t likely to be seeing much more of him anyway.
“I want you to be happy, Dorina,” he said suddenly—and strangely. I searched his face, wondering what this new game was, what the hell he wanted from me now. Like always, it was the perfect, beautiful mask, and told me nothing.
His hand rose hesitantly toward my face, and I unconsciously flinched. Mircea had never hurt me, but a lifetime of fighting and killing his kind provides a person with certain instincts. A flash of some emotion crossed his eyes, but it was gone before I could name it, and his hand dropped again.
And something lanced through me, brief and sharp, like a needle’s bite.
Sunlight streamed in a small, glassless window, painting a watercolor wash over a wooden table. A woman stood beside it, her arms moving in a circular motion, kneading a pile of dough with an unbroken rhythm. Every few moments she looked out the window, over a crenellated ridge of mountains, their sheer faces lined with snow and backlit by the sun.
It was a rising sun, I concluded as I watched it swell, gleaming and red as it broke free of the landscape and drifted into the liquid blue sky. The cottage stood on the edge of the small village, near a road that ran through the trees. But the road was empty, the dust undisturbed except for a slight wind.
The air that flowed in from the mountains outside was crisp, ruffling her hair as she worked to braid the dough into a long ribbon and then form it into a loaf. She set it aside and started the process over again, while the wind died and the flour hung in the air like mist. It clung to her dark lashes and brows, to the soft down of hair on her arms, and gloved her hands in a dusting of gold.
Two arms went around her from behind, pulling her back against a warm, familiar body. “Stop that,” she admonished, her voice liquid with laughter. “No baking, no bread for your morning meal.”
“But I am hungry now,” he said, smiling as he lifted her gilded hand to his lips, tracing the calluses there with his tongue.
Her hand came up, smearing flour against his cheek, gritty and warm from the motion of her hands. “Husband,” she breathed against his neck. “My Mircea.” And the love and loss that welled up inside him was so sweet and so painful, it was literally staggering.
“Mircea!” Marlowe’s voice was starting to sound a little panic-stricken. “They are beginning now!”
The memory shattered and broke with his voice, and I stumbled back into the seat. I bent low, hands on my knees, and gulped air, my eyes stinging with tears. Loneliness, vast, echoing and cold, opened up around me, but it was the resignation that made a hole in me, that hollowed me out. And I wasn’t even sure if it was my emotion or his.
Oh, Mircea, I thought. Oh, my God.
A hand slipped onto my shoulder, pale and cool. I looked up at him, blank disbelief in my mind. I don’t know what was on my face, but he frowned and squatted down beside the chair. “Dorina, what—”
“You married her?”
He stopped, his face registering blank shock. He said nothing, but he didn’t deny it. And that was just—
“I have to go,” I told him, jumping up and stumbling away, my hand somehow finding the doorknob to the office. I pulled it open and slipped through, and put my back against the door. Thankfully he didn’t try follow me.
I stood there, staring into space, seeing nothing. Other than the face of a woman I’d never known, a peasant girl with no family, no money, nothing—except a prince for a husband.
It felt like the room lurched sideways. It wasn’t so much a physical movement as a sheering of the mind as my brain tried to wrap itself around an impossible idea. I’d assumed he never spoke of her out of indifference. But he’d been his father’s firstborn, heir to a disputed throne. He was the last person on earth who could afford to take chances with his choice of wife. And yet he’d married a girl who could do nothing to help him politically, who could seal no treaties, gain him no armies, never be anything other than a liability.
Because he had loved her.
CHAPTER 23
“Can we get out of here already?” someone said crossly.
I looked up, feeling more than a little dazed, to see my duffel sitting on the desk. Not-a-butler must have been busy, because the area had been cleared of dead vampire parts. Except for one.
Ray was still on the desk, perched beside the duffel like a grotesque paperweight. For a moment, I ignored him. The past was tugging at me, a thousand questions suddenly shuffling through my very rattled brain.
It could be a lie, a fabrication to achieve some hidden objective. Mircea was certainly capable of mental manipulation, as I knew better than anyone. He’d used it on me before, even admitted to it. Why should I believe this to be any different?
But that had been erasing memories, not planting them. And while some vamps could create illusions almost as well as a mage could, tricking the mind into thinking all kinds of things, I’d never heard of Mircea having that ability. Not that vampires were in the habit of revealing all their secrets. He probably had all sorts of skills I didn’t know about. But if he could do that, why hadn’t he years ago? Why leave me with blank spaces in my memory he had to know I’d be curious about, when he could have merely spackled over them?
I’d been the victim of illusions a time or two before, and some could be damn real. But that hadn’t been real; it had been perfect, down to the tiniest details: the smell of the yeast, the buzzing of insects outside the window, the grittiness of the stone-ground flour. If it was an illusion, it was the best damned one I’d ever seen.
All of a sudden, nothing made sense anymore. If I was being played, I couldn’t see how, and that made it dangerous. And if I wasn’t…
But I had to be. People don’t change. Not that much, not that fast. And that was even more true for vamps. They were what they were, and letting myself believe anything else just because I wanted it so damn badly was a fool’s errand.
I’d spent a lifetime fighting vampires; I knew them, understood them as well as anyone could who wasn’t one of them. They were selfish, self-centered, power obsessed, false. They’d say anything, do anything, to get what they wanted, and Mircea was no exception to that rule. If anything, he pretty much epitomized the vamp ideaclass="underline" a cold, calculating head of a powerful house who destroyed his enemies, rewarded his allies and never let something as useless as sentiment get in his way.
Of course, he hadn’t been a vamp then. That scene had taken place in broad daylight, with the sun filtering in the window like a haze. It would have been like standing in a rain of fire for a baby vamp. He should have incinerated immediately, yet he hadn’t even flinched. So he’d been human. It was the Mircea I’d never known—the man he had been before the curse took effect, before it warped him, changed him.