“I wasn’t hurt. I was barely four.”

“You were hurt,” he insisted. “But you do not deal with such emotions, Cassie. You ignore them.”

“That isn’t true!”

“That has always been true. It is one of the defining aspects of your character.”

I scowled at his reflection in the window, but if he saw, he didn’t react. He took the empty champagne glass from my hand and sat it on a nearby table. Then his arms folded around me again, trapping me, although it didn’t feel that way. I didn’t want to talk about this. But suddenly I didn’t want to move, either.

“Do you recall when I visited Antonio’s court when you were a child?” he asked.

“Of course.” He’d been there for a year, from the time I was eleven until I was almost twelve. It had been a lengthy visit, even by vampire standards. At the time, I hadn’t thought much of it; Tony often had visitors, and it had made sense to me that his master would eventually be one of them. It was only later that I found out Mircea had an ulterior motive.

He’d discovered that the little clairvoyant Tony had at court was the daughter of the former heir to the Pythian throne. My mother had run away from her position and her responsibilities to marry a dark mage in Tony’s service. That effectively barred her from any chance of succeeding, but made no difference as far as my own odds were concerned.

“You hoped I’d become Pythia one day.”

Mircea didn’t bother to deny it. He was a vampire. Utilizing whatever resources were available within the family was considered a virtue in their culture, and a possible Pythia was a hell of a resource. “Yes, but you were also interesting in your own right.”

I snorted. “I was eleven. No eleven-year-old is interesting.”

“Most eleven-year-olds do not wander about talking with ghosts,” he said wryly. “Or pipe up at the dining table to casually mention that one of the guests is an assassin—”

“I think Tony would have had heart failure,” I said, remembering his face. “You know, if he had a heart.”

“—or lead me to a cache of Civil War jewelry hidden in a wall that no one else knew about.”

“The guy who put it there did.”

“My point is that you were a fascinating child, not least of which for the way you dealt with pain. Or, more accurately, the way you avoided dealing with it.”

“I deal with it fine.”

Mircea didn’t comment, but a hand covered the fist I’d bunched at my waist, finger pads resting on sharp knuckles. “I had been there perhaps a month,” he said softly, “when I chanced to be passing your room. It was late and you were supposed to be asleep, but I heard you cry out. I went in to find you sitting in bed, your arms wrapped around your knees, staring at the wall. Do you recall what you told me when I asked what was wrong?”

“No.” I’d been watching images flickering on the wall and ceiling, like reflections of headlights on a road. Only there was no highway near Tony’s farmhouse, which was set well back from a two-lane dirt track in the Pennsylvania countryside. But the scenes had washed over the room nonetheless, like the stuttering frames of a silent movie.

They’d looked sort of like one, too, the colors mostly leached away by the night. Except for the blood. For some reason, it had been in bright, brilliant Technicolor, standing out starkly against the blacks and browns and dull, asphalt gray.

But as horrible as it had been, it hadn’t been particularly unusual. I’d had visions almost every day, until I grew up enough to learn to control them, until I learned how not to see. I probably wouldn’t even remember that one, except that Mircea had been there, jolting me out of it.

Tony’s people didn’t do that. They had standing orders not to interrupt, because I might see something he’d find profitable. So it had been the strangest of strange sensations, to suddenly feel a touch, human soft and blood warm, on my shoulder.

“It was just a nightmare,” I told him.

“You said you had seen a multicar accident. Or, as you described it, blood leaching into puddles of oil; broken bodies lying on shattered glass; and the smell of gasoline, burnt rubber and charred meat. The next morning, the news reported a ten-car pileup on the New Jersey Turnpike.”

“Did it?” I asked, suddenly wishing I had another drink.

“I wondered then what it would be like, to grow up as a child who saw things no child should ever see. Who, every time she closed her eyes, was surrounded by pain, by horror, by death—”

“That’s a serious exaggeration.”

“—by sights that kept her up at night, shivering in fear, and staring at a blank wall.”

“It wasn’t blank,” I said shortly. “Rafe drew things on it.”

Our resident artist at court had been none other than the Renaissance master Raphael, who had been turned after unwisely refusing a job for Florentine up-and-comer Antonio Gallina. It had been the last time he’d refused one of Tony’s commissions, not that he’d been given many. Appreciating art required a soul, something I was pretty sure Tony had been born without.

“Yes,” Mircea agreed. “Because I asked him to.”

I frowned. I hadn’t known that. “You asked him? Why?”

“I thought a child should have something to look at besides death.”

Dark eyes met mine in the window for an instant, until I looked away. “I want another drink,” I told him, but Mircea’s arms didn’t budge.

“Of course you do,” he said. “I wish to discuss your feelings about your mother, so naturally you become thirsty. Or hungry. Or suddenly recall an errand that you need to perform.”

I struggled, Mircea’s hold no longer feeling quite so comforting. “Let me go.”

“To get a drink, or to avoid the conversation?”

“I’m not avoiding it!” I snapped. I just hadn’t expected this to be so hard.

Mircea and I had crashed the party, if walking in escorted by a gushing butler can be termed such, because I’d wanted to see my mother. Not talk to, not interact with, not do anything that might possibly mess up the timeline. Just see.

Because I never had, other than in that one lousy photo. But now that I was here, seeing wasn’t enough. I wanted to get close. Wanted to find out if she still smelled like honey and lilac, with a hint of waxy lipstick.

Wanted her to see me, too.

But even more, I wanted to ask her things. Why she gave up a job most people would have killed for to marry a man most people would have liked to kill. Why she’d had me. Why she’d died and left me with fucking Tony.

If she’d ever loved me at all.

“Let me go,” I said unevenly. Mircea released me and I moved away, needing space, needing air.

I hugged my arms around myself and stared across the party, an almost physical ache gnawing at my insides. Her hair was dark, as I’d assumed from the photo, but it wasn’t brown. The lights were shining on it now, and it was a deep, rich, coppery bronze, as rare and striking as her sapphire eyes.

I wondered if that was where the red threads in my own hair came from, if maybe it ran in the family. I wondered if I had a family, distant cousins or something, floating around.... I’d never really thought about it before, maybe because I’d grown up surrounded by people who never mentioned theirs.

Vampires usually acted as if their lives started with the Change, instead of ending with it. And in a real sense, they were right. Most masters Changed an individual because they possessed a talent they needed, or strength or intellect or wealth they wanted, none of which included a human family. And few were willing to Change a bunch of hangers-on who could be of no real use and who might be a danger, since a master was responsible for the actions of his children.

As a result, most families got left behind when a baby vamp joined his or her new clan. And I guessed that, after a while, you must stop wondering about people long dead, whom you probably had nothing in common with anymore, anyway. After a while, you must stop missing them.

Only I didn’t think I was going to live that long.

“My mother was also quite beautiful.”

I’d been so lost in thought that it took me a moment to realize that Mircea had spoken.

And then another few seconds for what he’d said to sink in. “Your mother?”

He smiled slightly. “You look surprised.”

“I just . . . you never mention her.” In fact, I’d never thought about Mircea having a mother. Stupid; of course he had. But somehow I’d never imagined him as a boy.

It was surprisingly easy.

The mahogany hair had a faint wave to it that might once have been curls. The sculpted lips, so sensual in an adult, had probably been a cupid’s bow then. And the dark, liquid eyes must have been irresistible in a child’s face.

“I bet you got away with murder,” I said, and he laughed.

“Not at all. My parents were quite strict.”

“I don’t believe it.” I tried to be strict with Mircea, I really did, but somehow it never worked. And I doubted that anybody else had better luck.

“It’s true,” he insisted, settling us into chairs by the wall. I didn’t stay in mine more than a few seconds. I felt too antsy, too oddly keyed up.

Mircea started to get up when I did, but I pushed him back down. “A gentleman doesn’t sit while a lady is standing,” he admonished.

I put a knee on his leg to keep him in place. “And if the lady insists?”

“Hm. A quandary.” A strong hand clasped my thigh through the silk. “Since a gentleman always accedes to a lady’s wishes.”

“Always?” That could come in handy.

He laughed and kissed my hand. “Unfortunately, I am not always a gentleman.”

“Close enough,” I told him honestly, and slipped the clip out of his hair.

A dusky wave fell over his shoulders. He looked up at me, dark eyes amused. I’d always had this weird fetish about his hair, which we didn’t talk about. But he knew.