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“Constantia.” He managed a smile for her; it was bent and uncertain, but that was all right. She wouldn’t have believed an overly enthusiastic welcome. “May I come in?”
Instead of welcoming him, Constantia merely stepped backward. Balthazar walked into that space and shut the door behind him. They stood very close. She was the only woman he’d ever known tall enough to look him in the eyes.
“Where’s Charity?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.
“Wandering the streets, as usual. She can hunt on her own now. Quite well, in fact. You’d be proud of her.”
Proud wasn’t exactly the word. Still, his sister had followed the plan. She was away from the house, away from any potential blame should he fail. Already he could see that her description of this place had been entirely accurate; she could focus better than he’d realized before. Celadon paper wreathed with white vines covered each wall, and the home possessed newfangled electric lighting and a broad stairwell just next to the door. That meant the room he could barely glimpse upstairs was the bedroom Charity and Constantia weren’t using … the one his sister would have hidden the stakes in.
All he had to do was get Constantia upstairs.
To judge by the quick rise and fall of her breath as she looked at him, Balthazar thought he could manage.
“You’re finally done with Redgrave,” he said.
“We don’t always travel together. You know that by now.”
“I realize that. I meant it as … a suggestion.”
Constantia cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t want to come back to Redgrave’s tribe. You want us to start a tribe of our own.”
“You and me and Charity. A good place to start, don’t you think?” Balthazar leaned forward, slid one hand along her waist. Apparently she’d joined the fad of doing without corsets; only thin fabric separated his skin from her flesh.
She whispered, “You hate me.”
“I hate Redgrave. You—you I miss, from time to time.”
A lie mixed with the truth. He hated his old desire for her; that didn’t meant it wasn’t still a part of him.
“You wouldn’t want us to hunt the same way.”
“There are other ways to hunt, Constantia. Ways that let us lead lives almost like normal.”
“Since when did we care about normal?”
“You can’t like existing this way,” Balthazar insisted. “Always on the fringes. Always in the dark. Always coming and going at Redgrave’s command. Take control, Constantia.”
He came closer still to her, so close that their lips almost touched.
Balthazar finished, “Take me.”
Impossible to say who kissed whom first, or where the lies ended and the truth began. For a few moments, he knew only that Constantia was familiar to him, darkly beautiful even now, and how good it had felt to drown his soul in her night after night.
But even as he backed her toward the stairs, Balthazar reminded himself, I’m about to kill her.
Conscience pricked at him, but not as much as the need to finally rescue his sister. He could finally do it—set them both free. Constantia had helped imprison them to begin with; now she had to pay the price.
They found their way into the bedroom and fell together on the bed. Balthazar cupped her face in his hands, kissing her deeply even as he opened his eyes to look for the bedside table on the right. That was where Charity would have hidden the stakes. Once he’d staked Constantia and paralyzed her, he could burn this house down.
He pushed her back, not roughly, but an old signal he thought she’d recognize. Sure enough, Constantia began to shrug off her dove-gray dress, laughing throatily. Her perfect body could still move him. “You haven’t learned any new tricks these past centuries, have you?” She grinned at Balthazar as she scooted across the bed, the better to undress. “I see I still have a lot to teach you.”
“I’m ready to learn.” Taking off his shirt gave Balthazar the cover he needed for the swift movement toward the bedside table. In a flash he opened the drawer to find—nothing.
He looked up to see Constantia sitting still on the other side of the bed. Where the drawer of the bedside table on the left was open. And where she’d no doubt found the stake now in her hand.
Her eyes were almost sad. “Do you know, I’d hoped Charity was lying?”
She betrayed me, Balthazar thought in the split second before the stake slammed into his chest.
