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I just stared at him. It was pretty unforgettable. I’d tried to stab him, mistaking him for his brother—the man who had ordered my mother’s execution.
Mircea had fled the country after becoming a vampire, horrified at his transformation and afraid that he would hurt the ones he loved—including her. He hadn’t known she was pregnant at the time he left, and found out only when he returned—and saw an unmistakable resemblance in the features of the child trying to gut him. He had gotten the story out of me—what little I knew. That she had gone to ask for help from the local lord, who was the brother of her missing husband.
And been brutally murdered for her trouble.
“Of course you do,” Mircea said, looking at me. “It was a stupid question.”
He started to pace. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he was stalling, nervous. But Mircea didn’t get nervous. Or if he did, he never showed it.
“I took you to Italy,” he said, staring out the window. “I didn’t know what else to do. Vlad knew it was only a matter of time before I discovered his treachery, and he intended to kill me before I could kill him. If I had had a master, a family, to rely on, that would not have been a problem. But I did not.”
I nodded. Mircea had been cursed with vampirism, not made through a vampire’s bite, and therefore had been on his own from day one. I often wondered if that was what had made him as chary as he was, as loath to trust anyone. Maybe he’d never had a chance to get in the habit.
“I don’t remember Italy,” I told him.
“No. You wouldn’t.” Mircea had wiped my mind of all things related to Vlad, so that I wouldn’t go back and try to finish the job. And for some reason, it had taken a ton of other memories as well.
“I do,” Radu said suddenly. “We had a lovely villa. Not that I was there then, of course, but later…” He trailed off as everyone looked at him. “Er, I…I think I shall go get some fresh coffee. Kit?”
“I don’t want coffee,” Marlowe said shortly.
“Yes, but I could use the help.”
“Get a servant to help you.”
“Kit—”
“
Don’t bother,” I told Radu. “He’s probably got the room bugged, anyway.”
Marlowe didn’t bother to deny it.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked Mircea.
“It is…somewhat relevant to our current situation. But if you would prefer privacy—”
He looked almost hopeful.
“I would prefer to know what you’re talking about.”
Mircea never talked about the past—or almost never. I was getting what I could, while I could.
Before he changed his mind.
“Very well. We went to Italy,” he said, and then he stopped. But this time it was apparently just to gather his thoughts, because he continued a moment later. “We didn’t have a villa,” he told me. “Or a palazzo, as we were in Venice at the time. I had had to leave Wallachia with very little money, and much of that had been spent in the years before we met. But I made a tenuous living as a gambler—”
“A gambler?”
An eyebrow arched. “That surprises you?”
“No,” I said slowly. I could see it, strangely enough. Mircea always sounded like the voice of reason, a sea of calm in comparison to Marlowe’s tempest. But he took chances when he needed to. He just didn’t gamble on the small stuff.
“I discovered that it is easy, when you’re a vampire,” he said wryly. “Although I did not make as much as I would have liked. Venice was not so large in those days and word spread when someone never lost.”
“But we did okay,” I guessed.
“Financially, yes. But there were…problems.”
