Bound by Flames

To punctuate that point, Vlad stood. “I’m sure you would enjoy time alone with your sister before we leave in the morning. Gretchen”—a brief nod—“good night.”

I stared at Vlad as he left. Part of me wanted to go after him, but I hadn’t seen my sister in weeks and who knew when I’d get to spend time with her again? Our trip to Payns gave us an opportunity to swing by Tuscany, but I couldn’t visit often. We had to make sure Szilagyi didn’t get a hint of my family’s location, plus, with their war heating up, Vlad would rather I never left the lavish fortress he called home.

Besides, when Vlad was in a mood, sometimes it was better to leave him alone. At least for a little while.

I forced a smile as I turned back to Gretchen. “Let’s finish catching up over dessert. I think I smell someone hand-firing crème brûlées in the kitchen . . .”

Vlad’s Tuscan house was small compared to his Romanian castle, but it still had six bedrooms and a servants’ wing. After a couple hours chatting, Gretchen went to bed because she couldn’t contain her yawns. Unlike me, she wasn’t used to being awake all night. It was easy to figure out which of the remaining rooms Vlad was in. Even if I couldn’t tell by scent, I could feel him. His aura filled the house, the power he gave off ominous in its potency even when it also felt relaxed.

Like a sleeping dragon, I thought, spying him through the half-open door at the end of the hall. Vlad was in a chair, his long legs stretched out on a nearby ottoman. He didn’t stir as I came inside the room. He must have fallen asleep while using his tablet. It was still open on his lap, his hands resting on the attachable magnetic keyboard as if he’d drifted off in the middle of typing something.

I stared at him in silence. With the sun rendering me unconscious from dawn to dusk, I hadn’t seen him sleep since he’d changed me into a vampire. Even before that, it had been a rarity. Was it my new, super-sharp vision or did he look a little different with his features relaxed in slumber? Sure, those winged brows were just as prominent, but his lips were parted instead of curled into the sardonic half smile he usually wore. Dark stubble clung to the lower half of his face, but his jaw wasn’t set in its normal, unyielding lines. Closed eyelids hid the penetrating stare he so often leveled at others and for a few moments, the changes let me imagine that I could see hints of the innocence Vlad must have had, once upon a time when he was human.

I came closer, wondering what he’d been like before the brutalities of his life had hardened him into the complex, lethal man I’d fallen in love with. Did he have any happy memories from his childhood? Or had the dangerous political circumstances he’d been born into stolen that from him? As a child, had he ever been afraid of the dark? I leaned down, wanting to touch him but not wanting him to wake up yet—

Flames blasted into me. I screamed, throwing up my arms in instinctive defense before I remembered that I was currently fireproof. In the next instant, I was seized in a viselike grip, Vlad’s hard chest almost bruising my cheek from how forcefully he yanked me to him. Worse, the emotions that tore through my subconscious were so frenzied, I couldn’t tell if he was alarmed, enraged, or a seething combination of both.

Szilagyi must have found us! I braced for the next attack, wondering why Vlad wasn’t moving. Was he hurt? I tried to push him away to look, but he didn’t budge. Then water hit us, soaking our clothes and filling me with fresh panic.

“Vlad, what is it?” I almost screamed.

Shouts from his guards echoed my urgency. Just as abruptly, he let me go, barking out an order in Romanian that caused the guards rushing down the hallway to skid to a stop.

That’s when I saw what we were being soaked with. Ceiling sprinklers, activated by the fire that must have come from . . . Vlad, I realized as I glanced around the room. No one was in here with us and no one was attacking from outside. So why had he unleashed a fireball that reduced the area where he’d been sitting to smoldering ruins?

“Gretchen, Leila!” My father’s bellow cut through the guards’ confused replies. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” came Gretchen’s response, followed by a glimpse of my dad through the half-open door. He was trying to shoulder his way past the five vampire guards who looked as perplexed as I did over what had just happened.

“I’m fine, too,” I said, not adding “But still undead” only because I was too shocked to remind my dad this was the first time he’d spoken to me since he found out I’d become a vampire.

Vlad said something in Romanian that I loosely translated as “back to your stations” before he shut the bedroom door on everyone in the hallway. A door slammed on his emotions, too, cutting off the geyser that had erupted out of him almost as violently as those flames had.

The sprinklers, however, kept dousing us with water. I wiped some off my face before asking “What happened?” in as calm a tone as I could manage.

Vlad turned to me. His expression was closed off, but his features were sharpened with so much tension, I couldn’t believe I’d imagined that he looked innocent minutes before.

“Bad dream,” he said shortly.

“You flash-fried a ten-foot radius because of a dream?” Only the sounds from a nearby heartbeat, indicating my father’s lingering presence in the hallway kept me from raising my voice in disbelief.

His reply came out through gritted teeth. “Yes.”