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“Are you kidding? Kam’s besotted with Dominique. He would never hurt him.”

Besotted? Cassidy stood so fast, she bumped the coffee table, rattling the cups on their saucers. “I have to know what’s going on.”

“Wait. Where are you going?”

Heedless of a vamp bitch that might ambush her, she marched through the shadowy lobby, her rubber boots quiet on the glass tile floor. Monica’s sandals slapped in her wake. “Cassidy, stop! You can’t go up there.”

“I can, and I will.” She took the steps two at a time.

“No, you don’t understand. We’re not allowed up there without being called.” Monica’s legs were longer than Cassidy’s. She caught up to her at the top of the stairs and grabbed her elbow hard. “Listen to me. We have no business up here. We haven’t been summoned.”

“So much for your trust in your lord and master, I see.”

“Those are not his rules. This isn’t his house.”

“Bijou can go fuck herself.” She circled her arm in one of the martial arts moves Dominique had taught her and shook off Monica’s hold. Then she turned to face the iron-studded mahogany doors. Grabbing both handles, she shoved them open.

21

Lonely Old Man

Dominique opened his eyes and stared into the sky mural on the ceiling. An icy heat suffused his limbs, and his senses extended far past every limit he had ever known. It took some effort to filter out the onslaught of sounds from beyond the mansion’s walls, and the miasma of smells in his vicinity. Finally, only silence remained—and sweet cedar smoke.

He sat up on the leather sofa he didn’t remember lying down on. His swords lay across a nearby wingback chair. Kambyses sat in another, watching him over steepled fingers, one ankle propped on the opposite knee. “Do you see, Nico?”

Dominique nodded slowly. The impressions and emotions he had tasted in the firestorm still coated his mouth, though many details were lost to him, their depths too great for his mind to grasp. The ancient blood-drinker’s consciousness swirled in his awareness like a vast, dark sea, waiting for him to dive in, explore—and disappear.

No longer was Kambyses’s reluctance to share his blood a mystery. Over the millennia, his blood had grown in potency until it was more likely to kill a mortal than turn them. Or worse. The last two who survived a turning almost two thousand years ago had gone mad. In the grief-drenched memories Kambyses offered, Dominique witnessed their sanity disintegrate until they had to be destroyed. Even the ones he sired before—those who still existed—had turned away long ago, closing themselves off from the timeless chasm of his mind through distance and obscurity.

Which left Kambyses forever bereft of the profound psychic bond shared by sire and youngling. The price for his eternal power was eternal solitude.

Until now.

In Dominique, Kambyses believed he had found a blood-drinker strong enough to take his blood, share his mind, and be a true companion through the ages, one he wanted by his side willingly and without reservation.

“What of Bijou?” Dominique wondered.

Memories swirled on the surface of the dark sea. Bijou’s sire was another ancient one once dear to Kambyses, but now estranged. He thought of her as troublesome family, recruited to acquaint Dominique with his true nature. They would leave her to the existence his arrival had interrupted.

“We will travel the oceans together and watch this world change through the ages.” Quiet anticipation hummed in the rich voice. “We shall both see it through our eyes. Understand it in both our hearts.”

Dominique had no desire to return to a life aboard Apokryphos and its eerily compelled mortal crew. But now that he had glimpsed the lonely old man inside the unimaginably powerful blood-drinker, he was no longer so violently opposed to being in his sire’s presence. He understood the longing for companionship, could even sympathize.

To a point.

That lonely old man had caused unimaginable carnage for five millennia and harbored an unsettling lack of empathy toward anything he considered unworthy of his attention.

“Maybe we could—” Dominique’s half-formed olive branch died on his lips when a commotion of female voices in the hallway rose to a level he could no longer ignore.

The door burst open, and Cassidy charged in, battle mode engaged. “Dominique? Are you okay?”

The shock of seeing her here, in the same space with his sire, rendered him momentarily senseless. How had he lost track of her and the danger she was in?

Monica rushed past Cassidy and dropped a bow so deep the ends of her hair brushed the rug. “I’m so sorry, my lord. She is being completely unreasonable.”

The lonely old man vanished, replaced by the ancient vampire whose countenance revealed nothing. Even his mind shuttered against Dominique with a natural ease. Monica backed away, turned, and scurried out, closing the door behind her, no doubt at her master’s silent command.

Only now did Cassidy spot Kambyses in the shadows of his seat. She blanched.