Page 78 of My Big Fat Vampire Wedding

With that in mind, she hurried back into the dining room, hoping there were no fires that needed putting out.

Only to find Victor missing.

“Where’s Victor?” she asked Dante.

“Oh, I think he was going for more wine,” Dante said, clearly distracted by trying to keep an ear on the conversation between Uncle Reginald and Robert. It seemed as if Ravenna and Lucy were speaking to Mary.

Everything seemed all right.

Until Pandora noticed another empty chair at the table.

Bellatrix’s one.

There was no logical explanation for the way panic surged through her system – for the bone-deep certainty that something had gone wrong.

No, not just wrong.

Horribly wrong.

Unable to shake the feeling, she made her way along the chair backs, making a beeline for the kitchen, not sure what she was going to find, but knowing she needed to find Victor.

She moved into the kitchen, but found it empty.

There were several bottles of wine gathered on the island, the corkscrew still sticking out of the top of one. As if whoever was uncorking it had got ten distracted by something.

Or someone.

“Why are you marrying Pandora?” Bellatrix’s voice carried to Pandora during a slight lull in conversation in the dining room.

“I … like her,” Victor answered, voice slow and thick.

Were they in the pantry?

Pandora rushed over in that direction, but paused as her hand went for the doorknob.

Yes, eavesdropping was wrong.

But so was cornering Pandora’s fiancé when she wasn’t around.

“Fine,” Bellatrix said, sounding frustrated. “But there’s something else you’re not saying. What are you two keeping from everyone?”

“It’s a secret,” Victor said in that same slow, slurred voice. Like he was drunk.

No.

Like he’d done with Ambrosia.

When she’d glamoured him.

Bellatrix was glamouring Victor. To try to get information out of him.

“Yes, but what is the secret?” Bellatrix asked.

Pandora threw open the door, knocking Bellatrix in the back with it, making her stumble forward toward Victor.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Pandora snapped at her cousin as Victor visibly jolted when the glamour broke.

“Pandora,” Victor said, brows scrunched as he looked at her. Then he cast a confused glance around the pantry. And, finally, at Bellatrix. “This isn’t … It isn’t what it looks like,” he said, but he seemed uncertain.