“That . . .” I stopped, chills breaking out on my skin. “That . . . was a dress rehearsal?”
“No.” Mircea’s eyes widened. “My brother was . . . We were already going to the same place he was imprisoned, you and I, on that errand of the senate’s. It was the perfect opportunity, a chance that might never come again—”
I got up. I couldn’t sit there anymore.
Mircea caught my hands. “What would be the harm? Tell me! None of the others would say. They said no, no, no, but never a reason! How will the rescue of one woman, one innocent woman, make any difference? And I know how to find her now. Vlad wouldn’t tell me. He told me about the Pythias, that they had the power to save her, but would only tell me where she died if I helped him. But I couldn’t put that monster back in power, and he wouldn’t help me until the crown was back on his head—”
“I understand.”
“Yes, you do.” Mircea nodded. “You saw how I kept him alive for so long, waiting him out, yet he was implacable. He knew I needed a day, a place, a time, and he wouldn’t give it to me. Wanted to force me to kill him without it, a final victory. A way to punish me for refusing him the crown. But with your help—”
I pulled away and walked a few feet, dazed. I had nowhere to go, but I needed some space. And some air; the room was stifling.
I felt him come up behind me, but I didn’t turn around. “You told me once that Radu was your only family,” I said. “Yet you had a daughter—”
“A daughter who was not part of my life. Who was more than half-mad, who despised me, and saw me as little as possible. Perhaps once a decade, and only when I forced the issue—”
“But she existed.”
“And still does. Don’t make her pay for my mistake. I should have told you about her, but I was afraid that would bring up a conversation about her mother, and I—every time I would think I should tell her, I have to tell her, I would also think, this is my last chance. If a girl I helped to bring up, who knows me, who—”
He stopped, but not in time.
“Who loves you,” I finished for him, turning around, my voice breaking. “And I do. Because you made sure I would. To get that yes.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, my feelings changed—”
“And now I’m supposed to go get your wife?”
“She isn’t my wife, Cassie! Till death do us part was quite literal in my case. But she is my only chance to atone for youthful stupidity that destroyed my entire family! She died a tragic death because of me. I can’t save my parents, I can’t put my family back together, but I can save her.”
“And if I do this,” I said, my voice trembling with something I couldn’t name, “if I give you your yes, you’ll give me the potion?”
“Yes.”
“Now? Right now?”
“I will get it for you. I swear it—”
“Then you don’t have it.”
“Our contact in the Circle was purged with Jonas’ coup. And even had he not been, he said he would have no chance to get any more. But I will find—”
I shifted.
Chapter Forty-one
I landed in a corridor somewhere. I wasn’t sure where. The pain of a shift I couldn’t afford was debilitating, sending me stumbling into a wall and dropping to my knees. Or maybe that was something else.
I stayed there, in semidarkness, breathing hard. I felt stunned, sick, more than slightly nauseous. I’d heard that old saying, about words feeling like a strike to the gut, but had never really understood. How could emotion hit like a fist?
Like this, I thought, just like this, fighting to breathe while scenes and images and clues I’d ignored or pushed away crowded in from all sides.
Mircea visiting Tony’s when I was a kid, and staying for a year. A man with worldwide business interests, a huge family, responsibilities to the senate, yet he takes off a year to sit in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Even Marlowe hadn’t understood it.
I’d overheard them talking while on a trip to the past. Jonas had wanted to ransack Tony’s office for something he hoped could help in the war. And while he was doing that, I’d overheard a conversation between Mircea and Marlowe, the latter having shown up after his friend had lingered at his disreputable child’s house for months.
Marlowe hadn’t been happy to discover that I was there, or that my mother had once been heir to the Pythian throne. It had sounded like he thought Mircea was holding out on him, and hiding me in the boonies to avoid sharing a potential Pythia with the rest of the senate. There’d also been something about all those Pythias Mircea had visited, but I’d had to make a run for it before I heard the whole story.
Well, I had it now.
A pretty little thing, I thought, remembering what he’d said about Eudoxia. Like he’d called Isabeau an auburn-haired beauty. Had he charmed them, too? Had he spent time with them, talked to them, held them? Had he—
Of course he had. Like he’d spent a year at Tony’s, charming a lonely little girl. God, it must have been so easy! Nobody had ever spent time with me before; most scarcely seemed to notice me. My friends were Rafe, one of Tony’s vampires who was rarely there; my governess, Eugenie; and Laura, a little ghost girl I used to talk to when she showed herself; because there was no one else.
Until suddenly, there was. A handsome, charismatic stranger, with laughing dark eyes and a kind face, and—and I was panting again, holding on to the wall, fingers curling into my palms because I’d loved him, God, I had! From the start, from the first moment he’d smiled at me; he’d changed everything.
Anyone else would have been grooming me, with an eye on the future, but not Mircea. He wasn’t stupid. It’s a little hard to tell someone in love with you that you want her to go retrieve your wife.
No, he’d wanted me to think well of him, to remember him fondly, to be willing to do him a hell of a favor someday. He’d never realized that the affection-starved child had fallen in love with him. If he had, he wouldn’t have used the geis, which thrives on emotion, as a protection spell. Not when it can magnify, if something goes wrong, binding two people into a permanent master-and-slave arrangement, with the “master” being whoever had the most power.
Mircea had backed off quickly when he discovered that, years later, after I was an adult. Because, with the Pythian power on my side, who would be master and who slave? But that was after the spell had been doubled, and was close to driving him mad. He’d been glad to cooperate with me to get it lifted, to find a way out of the trap he’d inadvertently laid for himself. But by then the damage had been done, hadn’t it?
By then I was wearing his mark.