I looked up at him to find the dark hair dusted with snow. It clung to his high, arched brows, trembled on his lashes. “You love me?”
He just looked at me for a moment. And then he reared back his head and laughed, a rich, mellow sound, unreserved and unashamed. “No, not at all. I regularly battle gods for women I dislike!”
I just stood there, snow melting on my cheeks like tears.
“What is it?” he asked, after a moment.
“I—Nothing.” Except that no one had ever said that to me before. Not Eugenie, not even Rafe. They had acted like it, had shown it in a lot of little ways, but no one had ever said it.
No one at all.
Mircea pulled me against him, and I laid my head on his chest.
He was silent for a moment. “I have had . . . difficulty . . . with this season, ever since.”
“Perhaps you need a good memory in place of the bad ones.”
A corner of his lips quirked. “And where would I obtain such a thing?”
I buried my head in his chest. “I think we can figure something out.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
“You brought that thing?” I asked the next morning, sitting up in bed. I was looking at a battered old suitcase with a burn scar on its bum that was hovering near the foot of the bed.
“I could hardly leave it, dulceață,” Mircea said, pouring coffee at a little table by the window. “The charm still works.”
“Sort of.” It was drooping like a week-old bouquet or a half-deflated balloon. I pushed it with a finger, and it bobbed a little in the air, giving off a nasty smell. I wrinkled my nose, wrapped a sheet around myself and went to see what was for breakfast.
Watery sunlight was leaking in through the glass, gleaming off white china and solid silver, and a wire basket that was leaking mouthwatering smells. Fresh scones. Yum.
Mircea handed me a cup of coffee. “And I thought you might want to keep it, as it belonged to your mother.”
“What, the suitcase?”
He nodded.
I shook my head, mouth full of scone. “It was the mage’s.”
Mircea raised a dark brow. “Not unless he used her perfume.”
I swallowed and pulled the little case over. I didn’t smell anything but charred leather and smoke, but I trusted Mircea’s nose. And sure enough, there was a pile of lingerie and a few obviously female outfits inside. A pair of shoes a size too big for me. And tucked into a pocket along the side, a bunch of old letters.
“But . . . how would she have had time to pack?” I asked, sorting through them. “It’s not like she knew she was being kidnapped!”
“If that was, in fact, what we saw.”
I looked up. “What do you mean?”
“Dulceață, I have seen many people under a compulsion, and without fail, they are blanks. Almost robotic in their movements, their speech . . . they do not make decisions; they wait for orders. And they do not tell their captors to hush.”
“You’re saying . . . she went with him on purpose?”
“It would seem the only answer.”
“But . . . why? How would she even know someone like that? She was the Pythian heir!”
“Perhaps the letters will tell you.”
I shook my head, opening one after another. “No. These were all written by my father. It looks like he’d been writing to her for a while and she’d kept them. . . .” I frowned. “But that doesn’t make sense, either. Jonas said that my parents barely knew each other a week before they ran away together. And these . . .” I checked a few more. “They go back more than a decade.”
Mircea hesitated. I wouldn’t have noticed, but I was looking right at him. And he definitely started to say something and then stopped.
“What?” I demanded.
“I could be wrong,” he said carefully. “It has been many years, and I had no reason to pay particular attention at the time—”
“Attention to what?”
“To your father’s individual scent.”
I frowned harder. “What does that have—”
“I did not notice it at the party. Things were too fraught and there were too many other scents in the vicinity. But last night, when I was standing by the mage, I thought I recognized—”
“No.” I looked at him in horror.
“—the same tobacco, the same cologne, the same brand of hair pomade—”
“No!”
That damned eyebrow went up again. I was starting to hate that thing. “Would you prefer to have been sired by a dangerous dark mage?”
“Yes! If the alternative is . . . is him. He was—”
“Quite capable.”
I stared at him. “Are you—Did you see?”
“I saw him protect your mother from four demigods for a protracted period of time.”
“He did no such thing! She was driving the carriage—”
“Yes. Because it is difficult for anyone other than war mages to keep up a shield and to concentrate on anything else at the same time.”
“I didn’t see a shield.”
“No more did I. But I saw several direct hits bounce off of something. He wasn’t able to keep it up for the entire chase, but he certainly helped. And last night—”
“All he did was enchant a suitcase.”
“And it proved useful, did it not? The Spartoi must have had them cornered, but he broke through their ranks—”
“Because he was acting like a crazy man!”
“—and protected your mother during a firestorm of spells such as I have rarely seen.”
“He was screaming the entire time!”
Mircea’s lips quirked. “It is only in the cinema that heroes have to look a certain way. I have been in many battles, dulceață, and can tell you from experience that what matters is what works. Ladislas’s charge looked heroic—banners streaming, armor glinting, five hundred horses galloping in one great wave—but it was the height of folly. Your father’s tactics were . . . less impressive . . . but they succeeded. Which is the most heroic, in the end?”
“But he didn’t look anything like that!” I said, grasping for straws. Because Mircea could say whatever he liked, but being related to that guy . . . no. Just no. “The kidnapper was tall and blond and you said my father was—”
“I told you how he appeared to me. But he was in hiding; it would not be surprising if he used a glamourie. In fact, it would have been more so if he had not.”
“But you said nothing was supposed to happen at the party—that your men had checked! If he was my father, if he was supposed to be there, to elope with my mother or whatever the hell they were doing, wouldn’t your people have known?”
“By all accounts, the party was supposed to be uneventful,” Mircea agreed. “I would hardly have taken you there otherwise. Your mother was not reported missing for several months.”
“There. You see? He can’t be my father!”
“Yes, but, dulceață, the important term is ‘reported.’ My people were not at the party; they did not see for themselves. They were going on the official reports. Reports that may well have been . . . adjusted.”
“Adjusted? But why—”
“To give them time to find her.” He waved a hand. “The Pythian court likes to appear infallible, mysterious, all knowing. This is not a reputation that would be enhanced by losing their heir to a set of circumstances none of them foresaw. It would not be surprising for them to wait some time before admitting that they had lost her. They would want a chance to locate her and bring her back without anyone realizing there had ever been a problem.”
“You think they lied about when she left.”
He shrugged. “I think it possible, yes. I always found it odd that they maintained that your father knew her for such a short time before they eloped. Eight days is not much in which to persuade the heir to the Pythian throne to leave it all behind for a life on the run!”