“No,” Mircea said flatly. “I told you all of this to avoid your involvement, not to solicit it. You needed to know how high the stakes were; now that you do, you must understand that—”

“I understand that you need all the help you can get!”

“You have a number of useful talents, none of which will work on anyone on that list!” he told me, suddenly angry. Or maybe he’d been so all along and just hadn’t shown it. Mircea was one person whose emotions I’d never been able to read with any accuracy. “You will not get in to see them, and if by some chance you did, they wouldn’t tell you anything.”

“The vampires, maybe. But I can talk to the mage—”

“I am not concerned about the mage. If he wants the stone for personal protection, all well and good. In that case, it will not interfere with the outcome of the competition. But you will stay away from the rest, the fey prince in particular.”

“Why does everyone assume I plan to go after subrand? I’m insane, not stupid.”

“I have never assumed you to be either. But you wish to help your friend.”

“I don’t recall mentioning any friends.” And if Louis-Cesare had, I was going to skin him.

Those dark eyes met mine. “I am not stupid, either, Dorina. When the stone is recovered, assuming it is, it will be returned to its owners. I have no wish to make an enemy of the fey. In the meantime, you are to stay out of this. Once you are no longer in competition with him for the rune, subrand will have no reason to trouble you.”

There was no safe reply to that, so I didn’t make one.

“I’ll get people on it,” Marlowe said. “But it isn’t going to be easy. Not with that group. Our best bet may be to wait and see whose candidates start cleaning up at the challenges. Although what we’re supposed to do about it then, I don’t know. Prying it loose from any one of them, with the possible exception of the mage, will not be easy.”

Funny thing, that’s exactly what I’d been thinking about Marlowe.

Chapter Twenty-two

Anthony made his rather flamboyant departure a moment later, surrounded by a passel of genuflecting flunkies. “Not coming?” he asked, peering in the door at Mircea.

“I will be along presently.”

“Oh, good. We’d hate to have to start without you.” He strode away, cheerfully chatting with Jérôme, 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.”

I blinked. “You could have had her beaten for that. Or worse.”

Romanian women of the time had had few rights over the males of the species. A woman could not join her husband at the dining table, but had to stay behind his chair, waiting to serve him. She ate what was left—which in peasant homes wasn’t much—when he was finished. She walked behind him when they went out, and if she went alone and a male walked in front of her in the street, she had to wait to continue on until he passed. Even if she was wealthy and he was a beggar.

Women’s lib hadn’t been big in old Romania.

Mircea had been tapping his ashes into a crystal tray, but at my comment he stopped and looked up, his face blanking. “Sometimes, Dorina, I wonder what it is you think of me.”

I didn’t answer that, since half the time I didn’t know myself.

And the other half would only get us in another argument.

After a moment, he continued. “She informed me that she was not there to be a gentleman’s amusement, but to save money toward a respectable marriage. And that she did not intend to lose her virginity price over me.”

I’d almost forgotten the old custom of rewarding virgins the Monday after the marriage for their chastity. They received jewels, clothes, and sometimes money, which they were allowed to keep even if the marriage ended in divorce. It had been a lot more effective than the modern virginity pacts for ensuring abstinence.

Well, that and fearsome Romanian fathers.

“And what did you say to that?”

He shrugged. “I was young and foolish, and had yet to realize that my vaunted success with women was due at least as much to my name and position as to my person. I informed her that I would gladly reimburse her for any losses she might incur.”

“I take it she agreed.”

He arched an expressive brow. “No. She slapped me again.”

“And you found that attractive?”

“Oddly, yes. Most of the women I had encountered were docile to the point of boredom. It was a chore to get them to so much as look at me when we were speaking. I had been intimate with women whom I do not believe could have described my face in any detail had their lives depended on it. That was especially true of noblewomen, who were taught from childhood that good breeding meant utter passivity.”

“So she was a challenge.”

“She was alive, Dorina, in a way none of the other women, and damn few of the men, I knew were. She fascinated me. She infuriated me…. Eventually, she enchanted me.”

“I guess she got over the slapping part.”

“Never entirely.” He smiled again. A soft, odd expression on a face that so seldom wore any at all.