It was kind of obvious. It wasn’t like I got invited to these high-level meetings often. I should have known they were leading up to something.

But Mircea surprised me. “Not…precisely.”

He and Louis-Cesare exchanged a glance, and for some reason, it almost looked like Louis-Cesare was the aggressor. His lips tightened, his brows lowered, and he looked…well, he looked pissed. Which was not an expression Mircea was accustomed to getting from many people.

Even weirder, he didn’t object. He just sat there and took it, without saying anything, at least not audibly, and without glaring back. It was bizarre.

But not as much so as when he broke the eye contact to look at me. And his expression then…I’d never seen that expression. Not from Mircea. It was…raw. Pained. Almost…afraid.

Why would Mircea look afraid. Of me?

“There is something your father has to tell you,” Louis-Cesare said forcefully.

Mircea didn’t say anything.

“We discussed this,” Louis-Cesare prompted after a moment.

“Discussed me?” I asked. “When?”

“After your…after the events in the garden,” Louis-Cesare explained. “I was…confused.”

“About what?” I asked harshly. My little descents into madness weren’t my favorite subject. “You’d seen it before.”

“Yes, but you had not. And you were afraid—”

“I was not.”

He just looked at me.

I looked back. I wanted another topic. “If you want me to try to go back to the wharf, to see if I remember anything else—”

“Yes, but not yet,” Mircea said, finally speaking.

“Why? I’m willing to take the risk.” I hadn’t enjoyed the last trip, but Marlowe was right. We needed facts and we needed them now.

“I…am not sure you are.” Mircea got up and went to the bar, but then didn’t fix himself anything. He just turned around, his hands on the polished wood behind him, his face expressionless. And looked at me. “I am not sure that you know what the risk is.”

I glanced at the others, but didn’t get any help. Everyone else was looking at Mircea. Everyone but Louis-Cesare. He was looking at me, but he didn’t say anything.

Obviously, this was Mircea’s story to tell.

And he told it.

“Do you remember when we met for the first time?”

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.”

“What kind of problems?”

“The usual. I was a foreigner, and although Venice was a port city, there was a certain amount of prejudice in the human community. And among the vampires, there were always those wishing to add a lone, masterless vampire to their fold, if they thought he might be of use, whether he wished it or not. And then there was the difficulty of monitoring the situation back home from a distance, and health concerns with my old tutor, who was with me, and all of the things about my still relatively new condition that I had yet to figure out, and—” He looked up. “And then there was you.”

“What about me?”

“You were manageable, at first. Hostile at times, and suspicious, isolated in a new city where you did not speak the language, and resentful of the clothing I made you wear and the manners Horatiu was attempting to instill.”

“Like eating with a fork.”

“They were not common at the time, thankfully. Although you were no better with spoons, preferring to merely tip the bowl up and drink from it.”

“You had a little barbarian on your hands,” I said, embarrassed. Although I wasn’t exactly polished today.

“It was understandable. You had lived on your own, survived on your own, for years. It was not your manners that concerned me.”

“It was that I was dhampir.”

He was silent for a moment. “No,” he finally told me. “It was that you were dying.”

I blinked at him. “What?”

“I did not understand the problem, at first,” he said quietly, sitting on the hassock Ray had vacated. “I barely knew what a vampire was in those days, much less a dhampir. But something was clearly wrong. You were not eating. You were not sleeping. I woke more than once to find you missing, and had to scour the city for you. One time I found you, unconscious, surrounded by wild dogs. Had I arrived a few moments later—”

“I was sick?” I asked, confused. Because I was never sick.

“No. Or, rather, not in a human way.”

He got up again, as if he couldn’t stay seated, and then sat down again, as if he didn’t find anything helpful in pacing. “I finally came to realize that the two sides of your nature were out of balance, and competing with each other. Your vampire half was growing in power as quickly as mine had, like one who was on the fast track to becoming a master. But your human side…was human. It was becoming swamped by the other half of you, subsumed, undermined. And, I was very much afraid, would soon be completely overcome.”

“Why not let it be?” I said harshly. God knew, I’d tried, more than once.

But he was shaking his head. “You are not vampire, Dorina. You are not human. You are both and neither. Just as the mages go mad trying to feed from only part of their nature, you cannot exist without your vampire half. And it cannot exist without you. You need each other. But you were also killing each other. Or, to be more precise, it was killing you. Not intentionally, but that did not matter. It was growing too strong, too fast, and you could not keep up.”

“But obviously, I did.”

Mircea got up again. I felt like yelling at him to make up his damned mind, because the constant movement wasn’t doing my nerves any good. But I didn’t. He didn’t look like he was having fun with this, either.

“I tried to find help,” he told me. “But there was no one to help. No one who knew enough about dhampirs to tell me anything. Everywhere I went, the message was the same: she will not live. They never live. Do her a kindness and end her life, before the process drives her mad—and she ends the lives of everyone around her!”

His eyes flashed amber bright, as they usually did only when his power was surging, and his face stuck on a snarl. He looked angry, suddenly, furious, as I’d rarely seen him. I didn’t envy whoever it was who had told him that.