“Oh, good. We’d hate to have to start without you.” He strode away, cheerfully chatting with Jér?me, and I suddenly realized that he was wearing a toga. His personality was so big that it had eclipsed everything else. I simply hadn’t noticed.
I did notice that Louis-Cesare didn’t even look in at me as he passed, however. It looked like some of Marlowe’s comments had gotten through, after all. Slumming with a dhampir was okay as long as nobody knew, but now it was clearly time for damage control.
I don’t know why it surprised me. No vampire had a dhampir lover. A few had tried to seduce me over the years, for the thrill or the bragging rights or just because they liked living dangerously. But anything more than a one-night stand? No.
And that wasn’t going to change. Best-case scenario, it would be social and political suicide. Worst-case, someone influential might start to wonder about said vampire’s sanity. And there was only one solution for insane vampires. I should know; I was the one called in to dish it out.
But it did surprise me. It also hurt, and that was unacceptable. I was tired and I was drunk off my ass and I was in danger of getting maudlin. It was clearly time to go.
I started to get up, when a cool hand slid onto my undamaged wrist. “Could you give us a moment, Kit?” Mircea asked.
Marlowe didn’t even bother to argue. I had the feeling he wasn’t exactly looking forward to facing the Senate. He went out the door, and Christine came back in. She was lugging two large suitcases and had a third under her arm.
“Christine. Dorina and I need to have a short conversation. Perhaps you could wait in the office?” Mircea asked politely.
Christine looked up, saw him and blinked. Then she smiled, the way women always smiled at Mircea. “Of course.”
“We’re not done?” I asked warily. This was already more than we’d talked in . . . well, ever. At least in one sitting.
Mircea selected a small cigarette—Turkish, by the smell—and proffered me the case. “Not quite.”
“Nasty habit,” I said, declining. I only smoke weed.
“There are worse ones.”
“Meaning?”
He put the case away and sat back in the chair, lighting up with an easy, unhurried motion.
For a long moment, he didn’t say anything, which wasn’t good. Mircea never has to gather his thoughts. Mircea has entirely too many thoughts. That’s his problem.
Well, one of them.
“I’ve never spoken to you much about your mother, have I?” he finally asked.
For a minute, I just sat there, frozen. Of all the things I’d expected him to come out with, that would have probably been dead last. I’d given up asking about her years ago, because the result was always the same: a few dead, dry facts that told me nothing more than I already knew, uttered with cold indifference. She’d been a peasant girl; they’d had a brief affair; he’d left when he discovered that he’d joined the life-challenged segment of the population, which, coincidentally, was about the same time she found out she was pregnant. The end.
Then, a month ago, he’d dropped the bombshell that she hadn’t died in a plague as I’d always assumed. His crazy brother Vlad had killed her by slow torture. And then Mircea had made Vlad a vampire so that he could torture him in return—for five hundred years.
Nobody ever said the family didn’t know how to hold a grudge.
It hadn’t been a fun conversation, and I wasn’t eager to repeat it. But I knew so damn little of her, thanks partly to him and the memory wipe. Not that I would have had direct recall anyway; we’d been separated when I was too young for that. But I’d gathered bits and pieces, from what little others recalled, later on. Almost none of which remained now.
Trust Mircea to pinpoint a person’s weak spots with surgical precision. He knew that one sentence would hold me, knew I wouldn’t jump up and leave, no matter what he wanted to discuss. Not if there was any chance of learning more.
“What about her?” I asked harshly.
“She was a beautiful woman,” he told me calmly. “You look a great deal like her.”
“You’re keeping the Senate waiting to tell me that?”
“She came to us when she was seventeen,” he said, ignoring me. Mircea would get to the point when he damn well felt like it. “Her father had been a wood carver, but he died early, and her mother had a hard time of it thereafter. She eventually found employment in our kitchens, and when Helena was old enough, she joined her there.”
“And you saw her and took her.” It wasn’t hard to imagine. Servant women were pretty much easy prey back then, particularly one with no close male relatives to defend her. And most would have thought themselves lucky to attract the attention of the family’s handsome, generous elder son.
“It was not quite as simple as that. When I first noticed her, I admit I did try to steal a kiss.”
“And?”
He blew out a thin stream of smoke, which drifted slowly skyward. “And she slapped me. Hard.”