He fell silent. She whispered, “Oh, no.”
“He was supposed to be my spiritual leader,” he told her softly, and somehow his wry, knowledgeable gaze hurt more than anything. “I was hoping for some kind of guidance or advice. Of course, I didn’t see things the way I would now—how tempting such a rich estate would have been to some, or how certain Church officials would have seen it as vulnerable, with its only male heir committed to the Church and unable to inherit. Also, I had never been in love. I couldn’t conceive of how strong a force love might be, or how transformative. Aeliana asked Inigo to turn her, and he did just after they married. I found out afterward, about both.”
The story carried her forward, with the inevitability of a train wreck.
“Once the decision was made, the Church acted quickly, for that time. There weren’t any trials, not for Vampyres. It was extermination. Inquisition officers seized the estate in the name of the Church. I found out afterward, when a servant who had been with my family for years came to tell me the news. There were no bodies to bury, of course. All the Vampyres had turned to ash.” He paused and took a deep breath. “He said the women had been brutalized by the soldiers before they’d been killed, and everything in that young, naive boy broke that day.”
She didn’t think before she acted. She put a hand over his as it rested against his lean thigh, and his fingers closed around hers in a strong grip. “They killed her and took everything? You didn’t have anything?”
“Nothing. I had no legal recourse either, as I had renounced all worldly possessions with my vows. Even my horse was technically the Church’s.”
“What a colossal betrayal,” she whispered.
He gave her a small, ironic smile. “I stole my horse, and a sword. I stole other things too, to sell, so I could make passage to Italy to where Julian resided at that time. He had been a famous commander of a Roman army, and I needed to know how to go to war. We made a bargain. I swore I would come back to serve him once I had done what I needed to do. He turned me, and taught me. Then he set me loose in the world and said, ‘Come back when you’re finished.’ It took me ten years, but I came back to him.”
She asked from the back of her throat, “Did you kill everyone responsible?”
His gaze turned fierce and hot, as it had the first time she had asked him if the stories were true, although his soft, even voice never altered. “Oh, yes.”
“And you’ve been serving Julian ever since.”
He inclined his head. “He’s my sire.”
She nodded. There were so many things she wanted to ask him. How had he put the pieces of himself back together?
Somehow the core of him had survived.
He wasn’t a monster. He was courteous and thoughtful. Self-disciplined and well-mannered. How had he coped with such a shattered faith?
She became aware of her hand, wrapped in his. Growing self-conscious, she tried to let go, but he tightened his grip and said, “I told you all this, because you have the right to know who your patron is. You should be able to reconcile in your mind all of those things you know about me, and you should know that no one who is under my care will ever come to harm like that again. Not ever. I swear it.”
Realization crushed down. He had taken so much time and effort, all to reassure her, when she had every intention of leaving anyway.
They weren’t going to make the dance lesson after all. She couldn’t go on without saying anything. Now it was her turn to grip his fingers. She met his gaze and said, “I have to leave in the morning.”
Surprise flared in his expression then settled into coldness, and he pulled away from her touch. “I see. My apologies, if I’ve offended you in any way.”
What? No!
She grabbed the sleeve of his jacket before he could stand. “Your story didn’t offend me. I was incredibly moved and saddened, and I wished I could do something to protect that boy from all the horrible things that happened to him.”
The coldness eased somewhat, but while he didn’t pull away, his body remained stiff. “Thank you,” he said. “But then why leave? I thought we had made progress. You’re no longer afraid, and you seemed pleased enough last night. When did you decide this?”
She put her face in her hands and rubbed eyes that had gone dry and gritty with tiredness. “This morning. I was going to tell you. I should never have put on the dress and shoes, but they were so pretty, and I wanted to see if we might be able to waltz again before I told you. Just ninety seconds more.”
He took both of her hands and pulled them down, and she saw that he had moved to straddle the bench to face her fully. Searching her expression, he asked, “What happened?”
She hesitated, her mind racing. She didn’t want to tell him, in case that provided some kind of buffer. But what if it didn’t? He had a right to know what kind of danger she had brought to his estate, so that he could guard against it. She couldn’t betray him, or the others, by leaving them in ignorance.
“I’ve made a powerful enemy,” she said. “And he’s vindictive. I thought I might be able to disappear, or if he found me, just being in your household would be enough to back him off, but this morning I realized I was being stupid. Just me being here has put you and everybody else in danger.”
He looked calm, but his gaze had turned deadly. If he had looked anything like that at the Vampyre’s Ball, she would have been terrified. As it was, her breath shortened.
“Who is it?”
She realized he still held both her wrists in a gentle, entirely unbreakable grip. “I think I’ve told you enough.”
“It’s Malphas, isn’t it?”
Hearing Xavier speak his name aloud shocked her, and her heart began a slow, hard clanging in her chest. Tightening her hands into fists, she pulled at his grip. Somewhat to her own surprise, he let her go. “How do you know that name?”
He gave her a quizzical look. “We ran a background check on you. You worked at a casino in Las Vegas. It was not difficult to find out who owned the casino.”
“Oh, God.” Black spots danced in front of her eyes. She bent forward, putting her forehead to her knees. “Can he trace that? I know that Djinn can get into computer systems somehow, and spy on Internet usage. He can trace that, can’t he?”
Xavier put a hand at the back of her neck, his touch steady and bracing. “Slow, deep breaths. No, don’t come up so fast. Give it a moment. Some Djinn have the ability to get into electronic systems, but only a few are tech savvy enough to understand how to read the bytes of information. Since he hasn’t shown up here, I think we can assume Malphas hasn’t tracked the interaction.”
“Okay,” she said, breathing slow and deep like he said. The black spots disappeared. “You can let me up now.”
The pressure on the back of her neck eased, and she sat upright. He rubbed her back, still watching her closely. “Better?”
She gave him a quick, stiff nod. “Yes.”
He gave her a smile that she could tell was meant to be reassuring, but his gaze was still deadly. Over the centuries, that broken naive boy had turned into something entirely honed and dangerous. Somehow, though, she could tell that the expression wasn’t meant for her. It didn’t frighten her, but a shiver ran down her back anyway.
He said, “This is where you tell me everything.”
“I don’t know,” she replied. She rubbed her arms. “I have to think.”
His smile widened. “Tess, you can’t possibly believe I’m going to let you walk out those front gates now, can you?”
Lifting her chin, she said, “Yes, I do. Any time during this trial year, either one of us can call it quits.”
He laughed, a quiet sound that shivered along her skin. “That was then. This is now.”
“What do you mean?” She stared at him, wide-eyed. “You can’t change our agreement like that.”
“I can do anything I want,” he told her. “And I will, including changing the terms of your stay. You’ve already said you intend to leave, which means we have no agreement.”
“What are you saying?” The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “You can’t keep me prisoner here.”
“Can’t I?” He looked entirely ruthless.
Her voice rose. “What happened to those fancy promises you made about not making me do something against my will?”
He shook his head. “But you don’t really want to go, do you?”
She glared at him and tried to force a denial out, but he had her with that one.
“You might as well start talking,” he told her. “If you don’t tell me what happened, I’ll go to Malphas and ask him.”
“Don’t!” Without thinking, she clutched at his lapel.
He took her by the shoulders and pulled her close, his hard, glittering eyes boring into hers. “Talk.”
“Who are you?” she said, staring. “Where has the soft-spoken, courteous man gone?”
“He’s right here in front of you, and he’s very angry. He just doesn’t know if he’s angry at you yet.” He gave her a thin-lipped smile. “Now, what is it going to be? Are you going to tell me what happened, or will Malphas?”
She knew who she was looking at. This was the man who chose to become a Vampyre in order to go to war for ten years. She said, calmly, “I can’t talk you into letting this go, can I?”
He shook his head slowly, his gaze never leaving her face.
“Fine. Fine.” She still held his lapel, and he still gripped her shoulders. They were much too close. She pushed against his chest, and this time he let her go. Swinging away, she rose to her feet and started to pace. “Remember how I said I was good with money? Malphas hired me to keep his books.”
While he still straddled the bench, he watched her with an unnerving attention. “Were you cooking them?”
“Oh no, there’s nothing on paper.” She waved a hand in the air, reached the edge of the ballroom and stalked back. “He looks like he’s completely in compliance with the gaming commission, and he pays taxes on all casino profits. That’s not the issue.”
He sat back and crossed his arms. “Then what is?”
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “What I saw and heard happened around the edges of casino life. People showed up for private appointments with Malphas, people who had racked up really large debts. I saw their expressions afterward, and I overheard things I wasn’t meant to hear.”
“Dear God, you eavesdropped?” said Xavier. His expression turned ironic. “I don’t know why I find myself shocked. You are far more talented at gathering information than I ever gave you credit for.”
She swung around to the end of the baby grand that was opposite from where he sat, wanting the illusion of something between her and his too-still figure. “Oh, I didn’t mean to, and nothing happened quite like what happened the night you and Melisande were talking. I just . . . I caught snippets of conversations here and there. I really tried not to notice what was happening or put two and two together. That was my first job out of college, and it paid damn well.” She laughed bitterly. “But I was flattered and excited that I could pay off my student loans so quickly, and I wanted it to be okay.”
“Tess,” Xavier said. “What the fuck was he doing?”
That brought her up short. Normally he was so courteous, the expletive seemed doubly shocking.
“He lured people into placing bigger and bigger bets, and they got more and more into debt. Then he would meet with them, and when they left, they looked sick to death, yet their debt would be forgiven.” She looked down at her blurred image in the polished dark wood of the piano. “On the surface, you might think that was no big deal. Casinos write off tens of millions of bad debt every year. But none of the people I saw looked like they had been given a reprieve. I heard one of them say he was going to be sick, and another one told his wife it was never going to be over.”
He leaned his crossed arms on the piano. His gaze never left her. “Was he cheating?”
“Maybe?” She shook her head. “I don’t know for sure. I’m not a gambler, and anyway, I didn’t watch the games. I just watched the money and the people.”
“All right,” he said. The soft-spoken man was back, only he had shotgun eyes that bore right at her, and he was the gun. “Do you have any idea what he was doing to them? Why was it never going to be over?”
Staring at him was too distracting. She looked down at her blurred self in the piano again. “I think he was extorting or coercing them somehow, only with their debts erased, I don’t know how.”
“Forget about trying to figure out how. I just want to hear what you think.”
“What I think . . . ?” Her voice died away. Nobody had asked her that before. She hadn’t had anybody to confide in, and the whole situation had come to feel so unstable and dangerous, she hadn’t dared verbalize her impressions, even to herself. She frowned as she considered, and he didn’t rush her. He simply watched and waited.
“I think . . . he liked the game too much. All of it. He was lit up and entirely focused when he was playing, like he needed it.”
“You’re talking about the gambling itself?” Xavier asked.
“Yes.” She ran the tip of one forefinger around the pale oval of her face in the reflection.
“So he acted like an addict might?”
She lifted her head up, and this time when she spoke, her voice was surer. “Yes. Maybe he’s a gambling addict, and the whole process matters to him. But it always ended in someone getting trapped.”
“Because the house always wins,” he said.
“Exactly.” She focused on him again and gave him an embarrassed, self-deprecating grimace. “Until the one time I got involved.”
THIRTEEN
Xavier was usually a patient, even-tempered man, but at the moment so many unruly emotions surged inside of him, he had to struggle to restrain himself.
She had messed with a pariah Djinn who played power games and was possibly a gambling addict?
He bit out, “What did you do?”
Her gaze wandered away. “I might have interfered with one of his marks.”
Holy Mother of God. He rubbed his eyes and forced himself to speak with some measure of control. “Interfered how?”
She tilted her head toward one of her shoulders and watched her finger as she drew circles on the piano’s polished surface again.
She said, “I might have called his parents to tell them what kind of debt their son was accruing, and with whom. He was only twenty-one, you see—old enough to drink and gamble and get into trouble, but he wasn’t even out of college yet.”
He rubbed the back of his neck as he watched her. “What happened?”
“Eathan’s father shut him down before it could go too far. He flew out to Vegas, paid off Eathan’s gambling debt and dragged him home again.”
“Is that when you left Las Vegas and ended up at the Vampyre’s Ball?”
She nodded.
He couldn’t look away from her dejected figure. She looked as beautiful in the dark blue dress as he knew she would. The cut of the gown highlighted the slender lines of her neck and shoulders, and the graceful wings of her collarbones.
“There’s something I’m missing,” he said, almost to himself. “This isn’t just a story about a boy who made mistakes. What’s the significance of all of this?”
She squared her shoulders and looked at him with equal parts dread and sadness. “His father was Senator Ryan Jackson. Malphas really, really wanted to trap Eathan.”
He was on his feet, around the piano and by her side before he knew it. As she turned to face him, he gripped her by the shoulders again. He couldn’t seem to stop himself from touching her. “Senator Jackson sits on several key subcommittees
in Washington. If Malphas had gotten control of Eathan, he could have used that as leverage to force Jackson into doing whatever he wanted.”
“I know.” She twisted her fingers together.
He scowled, his mind racing over everything she had told him. “I’m still not seeing something. All this happened weeks ago. Why did you decide today that you were going to leave?”
The corners of her mouth turned down, and her dark gaze took on a wet, overbright shine. “Because this morning I read in the Boston Herald that Eathan died in a boating accident while he was in Florida during Presidents’ Day weekend. None of his friends died, just him. The paper said it was a freak squall, but I know it wasn’t. It was Malphas, and he hasn’t forgiven or forgotten anything. If he was willing to do that to Eathan, he’ll be more than willing to do something similar to me, whether I’m one of your attendants or not.”
The pain in her eyes was too much to resist. He did what he’d been looking forward to doing all evening and pulled her into his arms, only this time he didn’t hold her at the proper prescribed distance for waltzing but clenched her tight. “I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t flinch or pull away. Instead, her arms crept around his waist, and she leaned against him. “If I hadn’t done anything, if I’d just kept my mouth shut, Eathan would probably still be alive.”
He felt in her tense body how she struggled not to cry, and he stroked her hair. “You can’t think like that. If you hadn’t stopped Malphas from trapping the boy and controlling the father, who knows what kind of harm could have come from that. The fact that he chose to retaliate is not your fault.”
“It feels like it is,” she whispered. A sob broke out of her. “It feels like I killed him, and while I think I could kill somebody in self-defense or if I really had to, he didn’t deserve to die like that and I didn’t mean to do it.”