"Dreams. I fell in love with a guy from my dreams. It turned out to be you."

"You were looking for me."

"I was looking for that fucking bitch in there who killed my parents." Her expression softened. "Yeah, and you. But you're not all green, and you don't have pine needles for hair, and you smell like Christmas."

"I am free of the Kyn." He frowned. "I am homeless and almost penniless as well." He caressed her shoulder. "Perhaps I only want you for your money."

"Gabriel."

"Or I could want you for your body. And your mouth." He kissed it. "And your eyes. And your hair. And your smile." He rested his hand over her left breast. "And your heart."

Their eyes met. Gabriel saw hers warm slowly, timidly, as if she wanted to give him time to change his mind and leave her.

"I will never leave you."

"Fine." She stepped back and handed him the helmet. "Get on. I want to dump this bike as soon as we get to Dublin. You think the vampire king is good for a new Triumph Tiger?"

He waited for her to climb on in front of him, and wrapped his arms around her waist as she kicked up the center stand and took off down the road.

"I think eventually Gabriel and Nicola will come back to the Kyn," Michael Cyprien said. "They need time to be together, and to bond."

"From what I saw in front of the castle yesterday, they need a hotel room." Alexandra lifted her hair off the back of her neck. "Speaking of which…"

"I will not detain you." Richard looked down at his hand, which appeared half-human, half-feline. "Dr. Keller—"

"You're covered. I made up the next round of treatments and showed Korvel how to prepare more serum. If you can't trust him, you can't trust anyone." With a decided thump, she placed a small vial case on his desk. "I thought you might like to lock this batch up yourself."

That she had anticipated his request did not surprise him, but that she would grant it did. She had no allegiance to him.

"Will you ever forgive me?" he asked her.

"No." She met his gaze. "But I'm still your doctor. Call me if your symptoms change, you marry another psychotic bitch, or something else goes wrong."

She did care what happened to him. Richard thought of using that, then saw Cyprien's expression and decided against it. "Your generosity humbles me."

"Enjoy the novelty of the experience." She glanced at Michael. "I'll go wait in the car now." She left without looking back.

"That mouth." Richard breathed in a trace of lavender. "I will miss it."

"I will have her call you weekly, if you like. She loves to bend a sympathetic ear." Michael looked at the portrait on the wall behind Richard's desk. "What will you do with Elizabeth?"

"I will keep my promise to Nicola."

His surrogate son gave him a long, measuring look. "I will leave you to it." He executed a respectful bow. "Adieu, my lord."

"Adieu, seigneur."

After Michael departed, Richard took Alexandra's advice and carefully placed the alteration treatments in his safe. She had warned him that the rate of transformation could be slow, and consequently that his change back to human form might take months, even years, but he had all the time in the world.

Time had always been Richard's enemy. Now it would serve as his wife's executioner.

Richard left his study and walked over to the west wing. There he found Stefan hard at work with one of the recovering addicts now employed by Richard, filling in the spaces. He waited until there remained but one stone to mortar into place, and then called a halt to the work.

"Go," he told them. "I will do the rest."

Stefan nodded and took the new man's arm. The junkie gave the high lord a quick, uncertain look before leaving with his guard.

Richard inspected the mortar work to assure it was sound and made of the special mixture he had obtained from an old Dublin masonry yard that guaranteed it to last for five centuries or more.

He looked in through the last gap in the stone. The glorious Amber Room remained perfectly intact, except for the addition of some copper manacles welded around a large wooden cross, to which Elizabeth had been attached. She had first been dressed in her finest gown, her hair brushed so that it fell around her face in a cascade of gleaming curls.

Since she was facing eternity imprisoned in the Amber Room, Richard had felt his wife should look her best.

Elizabeth turned her head and saw his eyes looking in at her, and twisted against the copper chains binding her limbs to the wooden cross. The copper band that had been welded over the lower half of her face allowed her to make only outraged sounds in her throat.

In the center of the world's most beautiful room, Orson Leary's remains had been carefully arranged on Elizabeth's velvet settee directly in front of the cross. Beside him was a small pile of broken amber.

Satisfied that his orders had been carried out to the letter, and that his wife would spend whatever remained of her life facing her final victim and watching him rot more quickly than she did, Richard picked up the last stone, applied a generous amount of mortar, and slid it into place.