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Mircea had started to reply, something sharp, judging by his expression, but he caught himself. I a
lways got under his skin somehow, and I wasn’t even trying. I didn’t want him angry; I just wanted the truth. I needed it, because this was so much bigger than he seemed to think.
“I can hardly blame you for assuming that,” he’d said, after a moment. “But no. I was desperate before. I knew how badly our conversation had gone, when I told you about Elena. I thought I’d lost my last chance—”
“And if you get desperate again?”
“I won’t. You must believe me!”
And the thing was, I did believe Mircea. Or, rather, I believed that Mircea believed Mircea. Maybe I was hopelessly naive, but he was right: he hadn’t had to tell me about that spell. He had plenty of mages under his control. He could have had any one of them cast it on him, which would have also put it on me, through the link between us.
And we did have a link. Our recent breakup had made no difference, magically speaking, not with the marks I still bore on my neck. He might have put them there when he was out of his head, but they had still created a bond that nothing could undo. Under vampire law, I was his.
Whether that would be good enough for this particular spell no one knew, because Mircea hadn’t tried it. He’d said that he wouldn’t risk destroying time for a single woman’s life, and right now, I believed him. But next week? Next month? Next year?
Rian had told me about the insidious nature of the obsession that plagued older vamps, how it crept up on them. How it grew over time, little by little, because of course it did. No master would have been caught out if it was obvious. But if the changes were slight, building up slowly, would Mircea notice? Would anyone?
And when the obsession took him, and he couldn’t see anything but her, what would he do then?
I sat forward and put my elbows back on my knees and my head in my hands, because I didn’t need to ask that question. I already knew. Mircea hadn’t been called Mircea the Bold when he was alive for nothing.
He could say whatever he liked, and even mean it. But when push came to shove, when he didn’t think he had another choice, he would act. That was just who he was: the daring leader of men, not the diplomat standing on the sidelines, as he’d been pretending. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
The consul knew him, too, and arguably better than me. She’d certainly known him longer, and she was worried. I’d thought she was just being paranoid—it’s a popular vampire pastime, and she had more reason than most. But now I wondered: what if she’d seen something I hadn’t?
At least, that I hadn’t before today. There had definitely been a different Mircea in that senate chamber. The diplomat act had been wearing thin, maybe because it had never been more than a veneer anyway. Mircea had told me so himself, how carefully he’d cultivated it over many years, learning how to smile, to dissemble, to persuade. He’d done it because he had to—it had literally been his job with the senate—and because he’d wanted to talk some Pythia into breaking every rule there was.
He hadn’t succeeded with the latter, but he’d had spectacular success with the former, adroitly navigating centuries of vampire infighting and political maneuvering and a whole flurry of knives headed straight for his back. He’d done it through charm, cunning, and occasional dirty dealing, if some of the rumors I’d heard were true. But he’d always, always, done it subtly. It was practically his trademark.
Until today.
Suddenly, all that had been thrown out the window, cast aside like that hair clip. I didn’t know why, but that one small detail kept coming back to me, maybe because I’d always been slightly obsessed with Mircea’s hair. In fairness, it was goddamned beautiful hair. And now it was free, no longer confined or restrained in any way.
Like the man himself, staring down a consul.
What was it Marco had said? “Sometimes it’s about who is willing to step up, to go toe-to-toe, to push back.” Mircea had certainly done that, and unlike me, I didn’t think he’d been bluffing. He’d made it sound that way to Marlowe, but I’d seen his face when Parendra was approaching our room.
Maybe the consul had something to worry about after all.
And so did I. Because Mircea the Bold wasn’t the patient man I knew. The one who had spent an entire year at Tony’s crappy court, making friends with a kid on the off chance that she might become Pythia someday. That man would wait to see what I’d do about the blackmail, because I hadn’t made a decision yet. But this man?
He’d immediately pushed on to another source of pressure—and a far better one. I hated the idea of Pritkin’s real identity getting out, because I knew he’d hate it. An intensely private man, he would find it incredibly galling to be mobbed wherever he went and have his privacy permanently invaded. But while I’d been upset on his behalf, I hadn’t been afraid.
I was now.
This Mircea wasn’t going to wait around forever. Not when he had the means to get what he’d wanted for five hundred years actually in his hands—or in that clever, twisty brain of his. The one that ran circles around me without even trying.
Or maybe I’d been wrong before; maybe he was trying. Because even after I’d made my position plain, even after Lizzie, he just kept right on making the same point: he wasn’t going to do anything, he wasn’t going to risk it. Not that he couldn’t; that he wouldn’t. Until he changed his mind, because it was entirely in his hands, wasn’t it? It was all down to his choice now.
And mine.
A shudder took me, because the thin cotton throw was doing nothing. I fought with it, trying to get more coverage, and then someone touched my arm. I looked up to see that Marco was back and gazing down at me in concern.
“Hey. You okay?”
I nodded, but couldn’t speak.
“You don’t have to do this now,” he told me, crouching down. And looking at the skin under his palm with a frown. “You’re ice-cold. You need to be in bed.”
