Elisa could imagine it, because she saw it reflected in his eyes, the impact it made on him. “After the show, I went to his tent to see him and learn his story. He shared a cigarette with me, told me his people were confined to a reservation. He’d been told if he joined the show, the manager would give his starving people money, blankets, things to help them through their harsh, hungry winters. Even if the owner was a damned liar, the chief saw two options. He could stay in the cesspool and prison the reservation was, impotent to protect his people, stripped of all his power, or he could do the show, where at least he could send some of the money he was earning back home, and keep after the owner to make good on his promise.

“There was such a quiet dignity to him. Perhaps I was feeling less angry than I thought at that point, more adrift, and that’s what motivated me to seek him out. But after thirty seconds of sizing me up, he said this: ‘They may have taken your people away from you, but it is you who turned away from them, in your anger and pain. You are no longer one of them, and that was your choice, not the white man’s.’ Then he turned away, dismissing me the way he did any other white person who came to gawk at him, parents who would pay him a nickel if he shook his tomahawk for their wide-eyed children.”

Elisa wanted to put her arms back around him, but it was obvious he was contained in a man’s pain, and a woman’s comfort wouldn’t be welcome. So she kept listening, because she could offer him that.

“When I was six, I was branded with the name Malachi. My identity was beaten and starved away, and I became what they wanted me to be. But as he said, after a while I gave up trying to get it back, and by the time I learned better, it was too late.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “The worst day was when I realized I could no longer remember the name my mother called me. Every once in a while, I think I hear it on the edges of a dream, but when I wake, it’s gone. I keep thinking one day I’ll see my mother in those dreams and she’ll give it back to me, but I never dream of her, either. She carried me on her back when her feet were bleeding worse than mine, when she was sick, near frozen and starving. But I can’t remember her face, or the name she gave me.”

His gaze went to the window, his face hard, eyes even harder. “Because I gave up who I was, gave it away, I know I don’t deserve to remember that name. When I came out of his tent, I saw a tiger they had in a tiny cage. People were throwing bits of food and trash at him to get him to growl. Him, I could help. He deserved to be helped. I bought him, and that was the beginning, though it was decades before the island came to be. So here I am.”

“I’m sorry. I know you’ll say you don’t deserve to hear that,” she added quickly, “but that’s not the way I meant it. I mean that it’s a terrible world sometimes. But I do think whatever you may have been, you’re doing good things now. And that’s all any of us can do to make up for past mistakes, right?”

He looked at her, gave her a faint smile. “Of all the things about you, Irish flower, your ability to simplify matters is one I cherish the most.”

She shrugged. “I’ve been told I’m simple, plenty of times.”

He opened his mouth, but then he saw her eyes dancing, and his own lightened in response. More shyly, she reached out and touched his knee.

“Thank you for telling me that.”

He lifted a shoulder. “I’d heard having a third-marked servant allows a vampire a way to unburden his soul, because he can trust his servant more than any other, having her mind bound to his so irrevocably.” His gaze touched hers, the becoming flush in her cheeks his words evoked. “I thought it was romanticized nonsense. But I’ve never told anyone that story, atsilusgi. I think I’ve been needing to tell it. As well as to apologize, deeply, for the things I said right after Leonidas’s attack.”

Her eyes widened in surprise, but when her lips parted to speak, he shook his head. “The problem was I had more in common with your fledglings than I wanted to admit. Just like that chief, you made me face that harsh reality, made me see that I’d once again taken the wrong path. I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Glancing out the window as they pulled into the driveway of a sprawling, stucco waterway mansion, he made a quiet grunt, a comment on the house’s opulence or something else, she didn’t know, but then he turned his head, met her gaze squarely.

“I can’t remember my name, but I took the name they gave me, Malachi, and made it my own, not theirs. If we can manage it, we’ll give William, Matthew, Nerida and Miah the same chance.”

32

RETURNING to the present and that waterway view, she recalled she’d been moved by what he’d shared with her, enough to let it pass that he hadn’t mentioned Jeremiah. They’d stayed away from that subject for the several days before they left, even as she’d visited the boy at the enclosure as much as travel preparations permitted. Though he’d come to the fence for her, listened to her talk, he’d had little to say. Each time she went back to her Jeep, he moved back to his cell, disappeared into his shelter and belowground as if he’d simply come up for her comfort, not his. He wouldn’t speak in her mind.

Something would break loose, though. She would have faith, and pray. If God had any mercy at all, surely Jeremiah was deserving of it.

She saw lots of palm trees scattered over the short lawn behind the property and framing the view of the waterway. The swaying fronds made her think of the picture shows where Cleopatra and Egyptian pharaohs were fanned on silk couches. She could well imagine those pharaohs as vampires, so powerful and remote, yet tempting touch with their strange and exotic appearance.

The things Mal had had her do to prepare for this certainly qualified as strange and exotic, far beyond her normal experience. However, with those new experiences had come a new level of intimacy. Bedtime conversations they’d shared, things he’d told her about himself, like in the car. It was disturbingly like she’d imagined it would be between her and Willis once they gave themselves to each other, heart and soul, knowing each other like no one else ever would.

For her part, when she saw him, it was like her heart was pinned on her chest, beating so hard. One night right after dinner, a group of the staff, including Chumani and Kohana, had been gathered in the front room, listening to a radio show. Elisa had a pile of mending with her, but when she got to Mal’s shirt, one he’d ripped in one of his tussles with leopard cubs, her hands had lingered on it, smoothing the fabric. She’d looked up to see him watching her with an entirely unexpected expression. For a blink, she thought he was as absorbed in what she was doing as she’d been in his shirt, the rest of those in the room disappearing. Under his stare, she’d flushed, and quickly bent to her task.

She wasn’t entirely stupid. She knew how silly lust could make the mind, how it could dazzle with thoughts of love and emotion that didn’t exist. But just like that conversation in the car, those quiet moments in his bed, curled in his arms, hadn’t been all about sex. Not while listening to his voice rumble through his chest as he answered the questions she had, then asked his own, their conversations meandering like an easy river. She felt things from him during them, things she was hard put to explain.

The staff did act differently toward her now. They’d been affectionate and kind from the beginning, but the ones who’d been so casual about giving her a hand into the Jeep, or nudging her out of the way in the kitchen, were a little more circumspect. Even Kohana’s occasional hugs had that flavor. It had taken her a few days to put her finger on it, but she’d realized it was the way men treated a woman who’d clearly been claimed by another.

On top of all that, there was that third mark, the way it made her feel, so completely connected to him. He hadn’t said he wanted her to stay on the island forever, but he hadn’t said he wanted her to go back to the station when all this was over, either. He was leaving it up to her. She could stay, and every day that passed where she served as his third-mark servant was one day further from the life she’d once expected to have. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Sad or simply... accepting?

She thought about what Mal had said, about his past, present and future. Lord Marshall and Nadia, losing their babies. Danny and Dev, their fierce bond, how and what they’d fought, side by side. She and Willis, looking toward a simple, lovely future and having it all taken away in one terrible moment. Yes, they were all different, but they were the same, too, weren’t they? All of them wanting and needing, capable of being hurt and grieving. Capable of love.

Imagining William and Matthew here, as part of this household, she knew why Mal had reached out. He’d taken the risk of committing a severe offense with his presumption, because certainly two vampires who would never grow any older in appearance were far different from three born vampire babies who would have. But he had exceptional intuition. He thought this would be a good home for them and that, approached correctly, Lord Marshall and Nadia would consider the idea.

So when all was said and done, to make that happen, he needed her to set aside her trepidation about whatever might happen tonight. She wouldn’t let him down. Taking a deep breath, she took one last look at that view, the disappearing sun, and decided to head down to his room and give him a proper waking. Then she’d change into those tiny scraps of underwear and clothes designed to show her off as something she was not, but that she could be, if the reason was important enough. And it was.

She wasn’t surprised to find him still in the bed, since they’d arrived so close to dawn and he was young enough that such near-sun exposure could sap his strength. Even when he needed sleep, though, he slept restlessly. It was as if the human he’d once been ached to be out under the stars, rather than in a dark room like this, the curtains securely closed over special heavy blinds such that not a trace of light came through. Because they lived by the water, there were no subterranean rooms, but Lord Marshall had outfitted the rooms well for even his younger vampire guests. Another good sign for William and Matthew.