“There was too much damage to the room to stay” was what I said, glad there were no cracks or wavers in my voice.

“Ah.”

Neither of us said anything after that. Instead, the silence filled with everything we couldn’t bring ourselves to say. Once, I heard him take in a breath as if about to speak, but then there was only more silence.

“I’m furious with you,” I finally said when the building tension became unbearable. “When this is over, we’re going to have a huge fight about your beyond unacceptable high-handedness, but even as I tear you a new one over killing Samir without exhausting all our other options, let alone having me physically restrained, cut off financially, and put on a no-fly list, for crying out loud . . .” I drew in a deep breath to get it all out, “I’m still no less in love with you, and we’re going to get through this one way or the other. No matter what.”

A short, harsh sound escaped him. I wished I could see him or be tied into his feelings to know what emotion had caused it.

“You madden me,” he said, which was something I’d heard before and knew he didn’t mean as a compliment. “Yet I will never love anyone as much as I love you, and you’re right. We will get through this, no matter what it takes.”

Now I was the one who let out a wordless noise as a sigh slipped from me. Our current problems still seemed insurmountable and we had more coming soon, yet the most important thing hadn’t changed. No matter what our adversaries threw at us, they were helpless when it came to ruining what Vlad and I felt for each other. As for the rest, it could be fought over, cried over, decided on and/or faced down later. Right now, even across a thousand miles, we were together, and the silence between us was soothing instead of stifling this time. We’d already said what had mattered most.

“If you’re not at the hotel, where are you?” he asked after several long moments.

“At Cat and Bones’s cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They’re away somewhere and Ian had a key—”

“Is this the cabin in Valle Crucis?” he interrupted me, his tone turning brisk again.

“You know it?” I asked, taken aback.

“I’ve been there,” was his even more surprising reply. “I’ll see you in ten hours.”

Then he hung up without saying good-bye, I love you, or anything else. I stared at the phone for a moment, feeling a hard little smile stretch my lips. Once again, Vlad had changed from loving husband back into medieval conqueror faster than I could blink. I’d add fixing that to my now very long to-do list.

Then I looked at the phone and debated calling him back. There were so many things I still had to tell him, like how Gretchen was now a vampire, or that Leotie, my long-lost ancestor, was here with us, or that I’d finally managed to connect to Mircea, or a thousand other things I’d discovered since I last saw him. Instead, I set the phone back on the nightstand.

Maybe Vlad needed all ten of those hours to help him recover from killing Samir. I probably needed them, too, for a lot of reasons, the biggest of those being the decision that had me feeling as if I were being torn right down the middle. How could I tell Vlad about the legacy transfer, knowing he’d try to make me give it to Gretchen to secure my own safety? Yet how could I continue to let Vlad kill people doing Mircea’s captors’ bidding because he believed that was his only option? It wasn’t, yet at the same time, my sister’s life wasn’t optional.

My best way around this terrible dilemma was to link to Mircea and find where the hell he was, yet for some reason, I hadn’t been able to after more hours of trying. Frustration had me clenching my fists. Since I hadn’t put my left glove back on, my fingernails stabbed right through my palm from the force I used. Blood began dripping onto the carpet and I let out a yelp as I frantically dabbed it with my shirt. Great, now I was trashing another room. Guess I’d have to add a new carpet to the sky-high list of things Mircea had cost me, either directly through his actions or indirectly by making me so damn mad—

I fell forward into a cave as if a hole had opened up in front of me.

Chapter 26

The bedroom disappeared and darkness surrounded me, broken only by faint glimmers of faraway torches. Mircea was here, still in that same tight circle of stones. It didn’t look comfortable. Maybe he couldn’t escape the cluster of rocks that surrounded him like tall obelisks.

Is this where they keep you locked up? I thought at Mircea, and his head jerked up as if I’d yanked it with a string.

Leila. My name was a sneer. So, you finally figured out the real way to connect to me. Thought you’d never put the obvious together, although it made me laugh to imagine you chasing me through essence links that would only boomerang back to you.

Is that why I couldn’t reach him before? Because the link binding us together kept rerouting me back to my own location? If so, how had I done it this time? Not that I was about to ask.

I might be new at this, but I’m getting better every day, I replied, glad that my bluff sounded confident.

Mircea held up his left hand, where bloody half moons that mirrored the injury in my own palm were already starting to heal. I’m surprised you were able to form a connection from such a weak conduit. Couldn’t stand to harm yourself more, hmm?

Conduit? What . . . ?

I would’ve smacked myself in the head if there wasn’t a chance that Mircea would feel it, too. How many times had I told people that the spell linking me and Mircea was bound to both our flesh and blood? So flesh and blood were the links I needed. That’s why I’d been able to reach him earlier when I smashed my hands to bleeding pulps while thinking about Mircea. Seems I’d done it again after accidentally stabbing myself with my nails.