“Yes. That would be . . . nice.” He stumbled over the last word, probably because Vlad was still smiling at him in a way that said he’d enjoy discovering how fast my father could bleed out.

“Take care of yourself,” I said, hoping that Vlad didn’t air any of those thoughts.

My father turned to go, then paused by the curtain. “I know what you’re doing is dangerous, so please, be careful. That video . . . I died a little inside watching it. I won’t ever be the father you deserve, but human or vampire, I still love you.”

He let the curtain fall behind him, not giving me a chance to respond. Maybe that was for the best. We’d both promised to forget the past before and hadn’t been able to, so perhaps it was time we stopped trying to do that and tried instead to accept each other for who we were, flaws, baggage, and all.

Gretchen barged through the curtain moments later. “Tell your goon to back down, he won’t listen to me,” she said with a wave at Samir, who was right behind her.

The guard said something rapidly in Romanian, and I’d heard versions of the same thing enough before to know that Samir was asking permission to bodily remove my sister.

“Leave her; she’s fine,” I told him.

Samir hesitated a moment before bowing to me, then going back behind the curtain.

“What happened with Dad?” Gretchen asked at once. “Did you two fight? He looked upset, and he was wiping his face.”

“No. We didn’t fight, although Vlad might have been a little rough on him,” I summarized.

He gave me a sardonic look. “Ask any of my former prisoners if that resembles what I do when I’m being ‘a little rough.’”

“Just because you didn’t torture him doesn’t mean you weren’t rough, but I know why you did it.” I threaded my fingers through his hair. “Thank you for trying to protect me.”

The barest smile touched his mouth. “I prefer simply killing people who hurt you. Much less complicated that way.”

“Then you showed a lot of restraint,” I said, smiling back because I knew that my dad had been in no danger. “And because I haven’t told you this nearly enough, I love you.”

His arms encircled me and he bent his head, but before his lips brushed mine, my sister’s voice rang out.

“In case Leila hasn’t made it clear, you’re not allowed to kill my dad,” Gretchen said, sounding aggravated.

I rolled my eyes as I turned to look at her. “You really think he’d do that?”

“If Dad pisses him off enough,” was Gretchen’s instant response. “Killing is kind of your husband’s thing, or haven’t you bothered to Google ‘Vlad Dracul’ yet?”

“At least you didn’t add an A at the end of the D-word, or I’d be talking him into not killing you next,” I said irreverently. At her widened gaze, I laughed.

“Gretchen! Vlad isn’t going to kill you, Dad, or anyone else who isn’t directly threatening him, okay? Stop believing everything you read online.”

“Notice how he isn’t agreeing to that,” she pointed out.

I looked at Vlad, whose brows rose in false innocence as if to say, Who, me?

“Vlad,” I drew out. “Come on. You’re scaring her.”

His mouth twitched. “Fear is the beginning of wisdom, and your sister needs to start somewhere.”

I made an exasperated noise. “He already promised not to hurt my family back when we started dating,” I told Gretchen. “You don’t have anything to worry about and neither does Dad.”

At that, her frown cleared. “Oh, okay. He’d do anything for you. That much I figured out.”

“Then you’re not as simple-minded as you appear,” Vlad murmured, but thankfully, Gretchen didn’t catch that. She was onto the next subject already.

“When do we land? The homeless guys you picked up ate all the food hours ago and I’m starving.”

As if on cue, the plane began to descend, dropping a little more abruptly than normal, but maybe we’d hit an air pocket.

“Looks like now—”

I didn’t finish my sentence. The plane went from a steeper-than-usual slant to a full nose dive, all so fast I would have slammed into the ceiling like Gretchen did, if not for Vlad’s grip on me. Gretchen screamed, hitting the seats next as the plane’s trajectory briefly made her bounce from the ceiling to the floor. My stomach lurched nauseatingly as I grabbed her, gripping her so hard she screamed in pain this time.

“Ce faci?” Samir’s shout rose above the other passengers’ screams. Some part of my mind translated it as “What are you doing?” but the rest of me was too shocked to care what he was saying. All I could focus on was what was happening. Moments ago, I hadn’t seen any lights outside the windows. Now, I did, and they looked like they were rushing toward us.

We weren’t landing. We were crashing.

Chapter 31

Everything that happened next happened so fast, it reminded me of the first time I’d seen Marty move with inhuman speed: I couldn’t do anything except stare, struck stupid by what my eyes were processing, yet my mind still refused to believe.

Vlad’s grip on me turned to steel, then he was flying us toward the front of the plane with me yanked against him and Gretchen clutched in my arms. We didn’t even reach the curtain before we were bombarded by bodies hurtling at us from the plane’s downward velocity. The horrible sound of overstressed metal mixed with screams, forming a deafening screech. Then the rapid changes in cabin pressure hit me with almost as much force as the multiple limbs that struck us as Vlad forced his way through the living barriers between him and the front of the plane.