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 Twenty-three

“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 ideal: 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.

But those emotions hadn’t been part of the memory, had they? That had been a happy time, a stolen morning away from responsibilities. No reason for pain, for loss. Not when he had no way of knowing what was coming. And by the time he did know, he was vampire. But they didn’t, couldn’t feel that kind of—

“Hello? Anybody home?” Ray’s strident tones cut through the endless loop in my head. For once, I was almost grateful.

“I thought you were supposed to be a witness?” I said, pushing off the door. “Why are you still here?”

“They said they didn’t need me, after all. Something about having plenty of other stuff to talk about.”

“I bet.”

“So can we go? This place is giving me the creeps.”

“It is unsettling,” someone said from beside the hall door.

I looked over to see Christine sitting on a mountain of luggage. She’d been so quiet, I hadn’t even noticed her. “They left you, too, huh?” I asked, dropping Ray in the duffel. What the hell? He didn’t take up much room.

“They said my testimony would not be helpful,” she told me. “I did not see anything, and I am close to Louis-Cesare. I believe they think that I would lie for him.”

“So all that packing for nothing.”

“Oh, no. Not for nothing,” she said as I dug around beside Ray’s gory self. As always, the keys had migrated to the farthest reaches of the bag. “I have been informed that the family doesn’t want me here. They have… What is the term? Knocked me out.”

“Kicked you out,” I corrected. “So where to now?”

“I do not know. Where are we going?”

I hadn’t found the keys, but at that, I looked up. “Come again?”

“Louis-Cesare said that I should stay with you.”

“Oh, boy,” Ray muttered.

“He said what?” I asked, very carefully.

“I am sure he will come for me, when this trial is over. Do you live far?”

“You can’t come with me,” I explained, my fist finally closing on the damn keys.

She frowned slightly, a small dent forming between those beautiful eyes. “But I must. Louis-Cesare said—”

“I don’t care what Louis-Cesare said. And neither should you. You’re three hundred years old, for God’s sake. Go out. Live a little.”

I grabbed the duffel and started for the door, but a delicate hand shot out, snaring my wrist in a motion too fast to see. It was the only indication I’d seen so far of what she really was. Well, that and the tensile strength of that grip.

But her face was lost, panic-stricken, and innocently distressed. “But… but I cannot fail him! Not on his first command in… I cannot!”

“You probably misunderstood,” I said, striving for patience.

“No, no! I know what he said! And dawn approaches, and I have nowhere else to go, and they will throw me out on the street!”

God, she was crying again.

“Louis-Cesare probably wanted me to drop you off at his place.” Not that the bastard had bothered to ask. Or to mention it.

“H-his place?”

“He’s staying at the Club. Come on; I’ll give you a lift.”

“Oh, thank you!” Christine looked so relieved, I felt a little guilty suddenly. What would it be like to live for a century being told every single thing to do and not to do? It had to erode a person’s self-confidence, after a while. And it wasn’t Christine’s fault that her master was a complete—

“What are you doing?” I demanded. Christine had jumped up and started to gather up some of that mountain of luggage. She looked at me blankly. “That’s not all going to fit in the car.”

She gazed at her cheerfully mismatched cases. “But… but what should I do?”

“Pick the stuff you need for today and Elyas’s people can send the rest on.”

“But they won’t. They’ve been horrid! What if they throw it out? What if they never…” Her lower lip began quivering.

“Oh, shit,” Ray said. “Squash it in! Squash it in!”

We squashed it in. After three trips, a lot of cursing, and no help at all from the family, we somehow got me, Ray, Ray’s body, Christine and her worldly possessions all inside the car. Fortunately, the Club wasn’t far, and they had porters.

Or make that had.

Fifteen minutes later I sat staring at the burned-out hulk of what had once been a luxury hotel, wondering why the universe hated me. I couldn’t see much, because there were still some emergency vehicles scattered around, although it appeared that most had trundled off. But the acrid, waterlogged smell in the air would have been enough.

“What is it?” Ray demanded.

“A curse,” I muttered. “It’s the only possible explanation.”

“The master burned it down, didn’t he?” he asked. “He likes burning stuff.”

Now he told me.

“I’m going to have to take you to a hotel,” I told Christine.

Her eyes got wide. “A human hotel?” she asked, like I’d suggested throwing her in a snake pit.