She wore the red dress Sybil had secretly packed for her.
The fabric slid over her body like shimmering liquid once she’d decided to pull it from the closet. She shivered beneath its silky touch negating the idea that she’d ever intended to wear the black dress at all. The red had been sewed for her, each stitch placed to complement her curves. She was slightly bustier now than she’d been before Michael, but Sybil never missed by a millimeter.
The dress seemed to love her new figure. Her fuller bust and rounder hips seemed to suit the simple cut of the flowing skirt and soft draped bodice. She had more cleavage where the V neckline dipped. She turned full circle to survey the effect and was surprised how feminine and sultry a figure she cut in the floor-length mirror. She wanted to wear this for Adam Turov. She wanted to see his hard, angular face soften in appreciation. She wanted to see if his color heightened, if his breath quickened. For long seconds she thought of how those things might happen in an intimate setting where she might see his paler skin, untouched by the sun, become flushed from her touch. But that was getting far too carried away.
The keys were her top priority. She had to find every locked door on the estate. But she couldn’t help if her imagination found Adam a locked door in many ways as well. Surely he was well beyond a mere mortal woman’s reach. Yet she had seemed to reach him. Again and again. In intimate ways. He hadn’t wanted to kiss her, but he had. Almost as if he couldn’t help himself. She wished she could pretend there was no allure in that.
She placed the keys in a small clutch embroidered with pavé crystals. Hiding the keys in plain sight was a bold move, but the clutch complemented her sandals perfectly, both glittering against the red simplicity of her dress.
She expected one of the vineyard’s ATVs to pick her up, but when she left the cottage and walked down to the pebbled drive she discovered a gleaming black vintage limousine instead. Its rounded fenders and narrow wheels looked like a vehicle that would take her to a speakeasy instead of a modern dinner. She could see her reflection in the glossy fender as she approached the liveried driver who also seemed out of a different time.
“Good evening, Ms. D’Arcy,” the older man greeted her as he opened the rear door.
“Thank you,” she replied as she sank down into buttery tan leather.
She’d thought Adam might be riding with her, but the backseat was hers alone. Only a fluted glass of pinot noir waited for her. The driver closed the door behind her and she reached for the glass to sip as the car smoothly pulled into the night. The tinted windows were so dark she couldn’t see their route.
Would her appearance hide her true intentions as well as the tinted windows hid the world outside the car? She had to admit one of her intentions was to look attractive for Turov. Actually playing with fire—his Brimstone blood and her affinity for it—was bolder than she’d been since before Michael was born.
Her skin flushed with the idea of enjoying their attraction in spite of her mission. She could still recall with total clarity the press of his lips and his white-knuckled grip as he’d held himself back from more. It was too bold to want him to release the grip he had on his control. But imagining how it would be between them if he did caused her breath to quicken and her pulse to jump.
She had a dark mission to fulfill at Nightingale Vineyards, one that made any relationship between her and Adam Turov impossible before it even began. But he drew her. Oh, he drew her. His lips could soften...for her. His eyes could focus on her with laser intensity as the rest of the dark world fell away. His pinot noir—so rich, so rooted in heritage and heart—could ripen and sweeten when shared between their lips and tongues.
Victoria closed her eyes and swallowed the last of the glass the driver had prepared as the car slowed and came to a smooth stop. She waited for the driver to exit and walk to her door. He opened it with a flourish and offered her a gloved hand. She accepted his help more to linger over the old-fashioned procedure and slow her arrival than because she needed help. She needed a pause. She needed to catch her breath. She needed to decide if she was experiencing anticipation or dread.
“Mr. Turov is waiting for you inside,” the driver said.
Victoria gathered herself and squared her shoulders. She held her clutch tight in her nervous fingers while she looked around. The car had stopped in front of a hillside slope where a massive set of double oaken doors was set into a curved semicircle wall made of stone block and concrete. Moss and grass grew on the stones, turning the wall verdant green in ever increasing patches. It was surreal to approach and take a hammered copper handle in her hand, as if she prepared to enter a fairy mound while the driver watched, stoic and still. He was another one of Adam’s loyal people. Did he often deliver unsuspecting women to a fey master?
It was a fanciful thought when she knew it wasn’t a fairy realm, but a hell dimension that Turov served.
The door opened easily, but she could see where a key would fit below the handle, more conscious than ever of the keys hidden in her clutch. Cool, earthy air met her as she stepped inside a long, lofted space carved out of the ground, lined with large, familiar stones. This man-made cave matched the main house down to the hammered copper fittings.
She paused as her eyes adjusted to the artificial light and as she paused her attention was drawn up, up, up where a giant chandelier made of twining branches dominated the room. It curved down from the stone ceiling glowing at each of a thousand tips in an artistic tangle of twinkling vines.
“I had it custom crafted from roots taken from some of our first vines,” Adam explained. “It’s a fitting reminder of our humble beginnings.”
The first vines. The first roots. Victoria could only absorb the idea of a chandelier created from beautiful twisting and twining grapevine roots preserved forever with lustrous varnish that glowed brightly with a thousand tiny bulbs. She could almost imagine the elaborate fixture was still connected to plants far above that fed its light directly from the sun.
“It’s perfect,” she breathed.
The chandelier drew the eye from the cavernous space that once must have held hundreds of barrels of wine. Now it was a banquet space complete with a highly polished dance floor that glowed with a sheen from the light high above it.
Adam had risen from the seat at the head of a large oak table. Its surface was smoothed by generations of use, but there were only two place settings beneath the chandelier. Hers and his. She walked beneath the chandelier’s glow to meet him. He watched her approach. The look in his eyes was hard to ascertain, but more than the appreciation she’d hoped for. Much more.
This place wasn’t meant for a casual dinner.
This was a place meant for family and celebration, for large gatherings of loved ones full of warmth and home. Yet he’d invited her here. He moved to hold out a heavy chair that matched the table. Much used. Much loved. The plain, enduring oak was the perfect complement to the delicate complexity of the root chandelier above it.
She looked from Turov’s face up to the light and back again. The glow and shadow from its coils painted his handsome face in mysterious ways. He was both young and old. Passing time was apparent in the depth of his eyes and the stone of his jaw. Even though his skin was smooth.
He was no daemon.
He wasn’t immortal.
But he seemed ageless and forever beneath his vineyard roots. Too planted for someone like her to understand.
“I’m glad you came,” he said.
As she sat his hand brushed her arm.
Just that. The softest, inadvertent touch and she hummed in response. Out loud. And they both froze as they burned.
“I should confess how I long to hear you sing,” he said.
This time, when he touched her arm, it was on purpose, the lightest caress. The heat of it flowed down her spine to liquefy everything in her—all resistance, all caution, all intention—until nothing was left but instinctive reaction.
“I’d like to sing...for you,” she replied.
It was an answering confession. One that caused him to take a step back. His retreat was a reminder that they weren’t free to explore the connection urging them otherwise.
Victoria sat, far too weak in the knees to stay on her feet, and he moved to take his own seat. Though they were at a giant table, the length of it wasn’t between them. Their place settings of delicate vintage china were close together. His chair on the end was only separated from hers on the side by a couple of feet.
“This is a lovely pattern,” she said. She traced the familiar crimson-and-gold firebird on her plate with a trembling finger.
“Do you know the story of the Russian firebird? There are several versions. My mother’s favorite was the one in which the firebird escaped a prince who had imprisoned it for greed and gold,” Turov said.
He watched her closely for a reaction. Too closely.
“I’ve noticed the birdcages. There are several in the cottage and the main house...” Victoria trailed off.
“There are dozens upon dozens. Hundreds. All open. All empty. My mother loved the symbolism of an empty cage,” Turov explained.
“And the firebird with its flaming feathers,” Victoria said, tracing the gilded scarlet tail.
“Yes. I hadn’t thought of that, but all the firebird art she favored was the flaming image. The glow of the free firebird in flight,” Turov said.
Victoria looked at the man beside her, at the glow of the chandelier on his face. He looked at her in the same moment and the blue of his eyes was vivid in the backlight of shadows.
“Did the firebird ever sing in the tales?” she asked.
“Burned mostly. I think singing is left to nightingales,” Turov said.
Several servers interrupted then, carrying food from an anteroom she hadn’t seen. Turov noticed her surprise.
“This was one of the original wine caves that we abandoned when we constructed newer ones in the ’50s because of more modern construction methods and better technology for temperature control. But I’m a nostalgic man. I didn’t want to give up on this first one completely. We reclaimed it as a dining hall. Although since my parents died I’m afraid it’s been mostly abandoned again,” Turov said.
He’d said “we” in the ’50s when he shouldn’t have been born. She didn’t correct him. The keys she’d borrowed were on the table in her sparkling clutch in plain sight. His near immortality was also in plain sight. Neither of them acknowledged their secrets, known or unknown.
After the food was served and the servers withdrew, Adam spoke quietly while she picked at the filet mignon.
“I found a recording of one of your performances as Juliet. I enjoy it. Immensely,” he said.
Her eyes moistened, but she didn’t allow any tears to fall. She cleared her throat, but she could still feel the scratchy tightening that had been with her since the fire.
“I would sound very different now. My voice is changed. I’m no longer the singer I once was,” she said.
“Your vocal cords may be different, but your expression, your emotion, your depth? Those would be the same,” Turov argued.
Victoria forgot about keys. About daemons and monks and filet mignon. Her fork paused in the air as she looked at Adam. She could feel the truth of his words in her chest where emotion tightened and squeezed.
“There are different ways of singing. When one song is taken from us, there’s always a new song. Every day,” he continued.
Victoria thought about the years ahead of her. She was young. She had never made a conscious decision to never sing again. But she felt to her bones the impossibility of singing opera again. It was indelibly tied to her past and her loss even if she regained her singing abilities. The urge to sing she felt with Turov, her affinity to his Brimstone, was a new song, full of hope but not despair, full of possibility not tragedy. She didn’t want to perform a part for him. She wanted to sing the truth from the depths of her heart.
And that’s why it scared her.
She didn’t understand it. She didn’t know how to trust it. She was a nightingale firmly locked in the safety of its cage.
“I hope you’ll sing for me one day. I burn to hear your voice live, smoky, sweet as I imagine it would be now. But even more I hope you’ll sing for you. To continue to express all that you have inside. All that I can sense sitting here with you, though you don’t make a sound,” he said.
Victoria had gone utterly silent and still. She was afraid to breathe lest she sing. She was afraid to move lest she break out in a sultry siren’s song that would break down all the protective bars of her cage.
She wasn’t here to play with the affinity and his Brimstone burn. Especially when all that was at stake felt too serious to be playing at all.
“I can’t,” she said.
The meal carried on in silence until the servers carried the last of the barely touched food away. Adam rose and moved to pull out her chair and she stood although it brought her humming body too close to his.
They paused there. He didn’t step away. He burned. She didn’t sing, but she burned too. She could feel the heat coming off his lean body and wondered how his perfectly tailored suit didn’t go up in flame.
Suddenly, one of the servers returned wheeling a large antique Victrola into the room. No. No. No. Not a good idea at all. Music, even music she didn’t create with her own voice, couldn’t be a good idea between them. But when the server started the music and the tinny sound of vintage jazz echoed from the fluted horn, she didn’t resist as Adam Turov pulled her into his arms.
The man had learned to waltz a hundred years ago, give or take. His grace and style was smooth perfection in motion. But it was the controlled passion she felt in his hand on the small of her back that seduced. The ferocious grip he took of her hand, his strength contained, but still a harder grip than it should have been.
Her whole body trembled in response. Her clutch was forgotten on the table, and she allowed herself to be gathered so close that her cheek rested on his chest against the steady rhythm of his Brimstone-fueled heart.
They moved around the room beneath the chandelier in a cocoon of heated sound until everything in the room except the two of them was unimportant, an indistinct blur.
“Victoria. You’re humming,” Turov said. It was a warning. She could hear the strain in his voice. She could feel the tension in his body beneath her trembling hands. But she could also feel the Brimstone heat that flared in response to her barely uttered song.
The servers had disappeared. They were alone with the Brimstone and the music beneath the light of a thousand grapevine roots.
“I’m no saint, Vic. I’ve made denial and duty my life’s work, but resisting your song is too much for even heaven to ask,” Turov growled.
He stopped in the middle of the floor where patterns of shadow and light were created and cast by the chandelier above them. When she looked up, his blue eyes were bright with a fever her own body answered with a hum of need.
“What do heaven and hell have to do with us? We aren’t caged. Who can dare tell the firebird not to flame and the nightingale not to sing?” Victoria whispered.
And for a second she believed it—that they were free.
Adam lifted her high toward the light and held her there. She braced her arms on his shoulders as if she would take flight, but he tilted his chin to watch her descend as he lowered her back down. She wrapped her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck and allowed herself to sink into his upturned lips.
Sweet, sweet wine so much the sweeter when shared between perspiration-moistened lips.
He cupped her silk-clad bottom to support her and met the gentle thrust of her tongue with a fierce thrust of his own. Then they hummed together, but it was a rough song of hunger and need.
She’d once loved a daemon who’d fallen from heaven to rule in hell and like the opera she’d also loved, he’d scorched most of her away until she was a vehicle of his passion and desire. She’d been a vehicle for the tragic stories she’d sung on the stage as well. Adam’s was a mortal song. He burned along with her and they experienced the blaze together, supporting each other, very aware of every groan and sigh. It wasn’t damnation Victoria tasted. It was a glimpse of heaven. She’d always been rootless and alone. She’d given herself to her craft because nothing else was allowed by the Order of Samuel. Then she’d been subsumed by Michael’s father. In Adam’s embrace, she was wholly herself for the first time. No role necessary, but more aware of roots than ever before.
But their kiss was interrupted.
Suddenly, there was another burn and it was an intrusive one. Victoria struggled to reject its pull. She cried out and Adam broke their kiss. She slid down his body and would have collapsed to the floor, but he held her until her legs firmed. She didn’t pull away from the strong arm he kept around her back.
“You make a mistake coming here, Rogue. You’re not welcome,” Adam said.
Victoria had known it wasn’t a man who had invaded the wine cave. She could feel the full force of the daemon’s Brimstone heart before she turned to see him.
“She calls to me, human. And I’ve come for her,” the daemon proclaimed.
He looked like a mortal man who had lost weeks of sleep to a drug habit he couldn’t shake. His clothes were rumpled and they hung on a body that was lean to the point of emaciation. But his red-rimmed eyes and the fiery glow in his pupils said that he wasn’t weakened by his lust for Victoria’s affinity. Rather, he was burned up from within by the desire to possess her as his own.
“Even a Rogue knows better than to threaten a daemon king’s daughter,” Adam said.
He had edged in front of her and now stood between her and the daemon who stalked restlessly in a pacing motion, back and forth across from them.
“What do you know of kings, human? You are a slave. Nothing more. I bow to no king. I answer to no slave,” the daemon said.
He moved closer and Victoria pushed away from Adam, moving to the side to stand on her own. The daemon’s words killed some of the pretense between her and her handsome host. Adam knew who she was and now she knew who he served. The daemon king was Adam’s master. The daemon who had loved her mother and adopted her and her sister because of that love.
“You will answer to worse than a daemon king if you harm me, Rogue. The Order of Samuel will hunt you down. I am under the protection of Malachi,” Victoria said.
At the name of the evil monk, the Rogue daemon and the man beside her stiffened.
“Trust me, Malachi is the least of your concerns if you harm this woman,” Adam said.
But Victoria could feel him distance himself from her. There was only a foot between them, but it suddenly seemed an impossible chasm.
“Leave, Victoria. Now. Go back to the cottage and lock the door,” Adam said.
“No,” she protested. It was for her protection, but she could tell it was also a rejection. Go. Run away. There is no place for a servant of Malachi here. “Unless the lock on the cottage is sanctified I won’t be any safer there.”
“I can handle this daemon. Alone. Your presence will only drive him to greater madness. See how he paces? He’s like an addict kept from his drug,” Adam said to Victoria.
“I fear no man. Least of all men who have no souls,” the daemon said. “Malachi is also a slave. A mere human seeking glory. Neither of you can stand between me and Samuel’s Kiss.”
Samuel had been a daemon hunter born with a natural affinity for daemons that he’d at first assumed was a call to hunt them. Later, he’d realized that daemons had as much a right to existence as humans. He’d gone against his fellow hunter, a man named Reynard, and Reynard had made a deal with Rogue daemons in order to kill Samuel. He’d sold his soul to defeat Samuel and afterward established the Order of Samuel to continue his quest for power. Reynard became Father Reynard, a self-proclaimed prophet. The Order’s name was a mockery against the man who had once been his partner. Before he died, Samuel passed his affinity for daemons to a random stranger he met on a train. Victoria’s grandmother was dying during a premature childbirth and Samuel gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. His “kiss” not only saved her, but bequeathed his special affinity for Brimstone blood to her and her descendants.
Samuel’s Kiss.
Adam was right. She’d seen daemons follow her to their death because of her affinity. Besides, the only way she could protect her son was to do as Malachi had commanded her to do. Adam didn’t matter. Her desire for him didn’t matter. She didn’t wait to see the outcome of the fight. She moved to the table and grabbed her clutch as the daemon leaped on Adam Turov.
Abandoned caves.
Caves.
More than one.
Where better to craft a dungeon for evil monks than in an abandoned cave crafted of heavy stone beneath tons of earth? While Adam and the Rogue daemon fought, Victoria slipped outside. She paused for one look back. She swayed on shaky legs when she saw the blood and steam rising from the two writhing forms.
There was no happily-ever-after for her here with Adam and his acres and acres of roots. But maybe she could avoid the kind of tragedy she’d portrayed as Juliet again and again. If she refused to allow herself to fall in love. If she ignored the affinity and found the imprisoned monks, she could free them and Michael would have a chance for a life of no running.
He was the son of a daemon. He would always be different. And no one knew how the affinity would react when carried by a person who actually had Brimstone in his blood. But maybe there was hope for him if she could fulfill her mission.
Outside, she ran from shadow to shadow. She had no way of knowing if the daemon had traveled alone or if there were more of his fellows out in the darkness. She’d been right about the caves. Carved into the banks of the rolling hills where the limo had dropped her were multiple wine caves. The doors were mostly covered with fifty years of moss and grass. Several of the walls around the doors had deteriorated to the point of crumbling ruin as the tendrils from the greenery had eaten into the stone.
She’d hidden the firebird keys in plain sight in her pavé clutch. Had Adam invited her to dinner where he had hidden his secret prison in plain sight as well? Or were the caves all abandoned except for the dining hall?
She passed cave after cave. Three in all with entrances that had obviously been left to rot. But when she reached a fourth cave she found an entrance much like the one she’d entered to dine with Adam. The oak door was solid and firm in its frame. The stone was mossy, but not completely covered. But when she reached for the hammered copper of the door’s handle she found it wouldn’t budge. Not because it was faulty, but because it had been locked.
She tried key after key until she finally found the one that slid home. She had to use both hands to turn it, but when she did the latch clicked and the door loosened. She wasn’t dressed for spelunking. Victoria opened the door just enough to see bright artificial light before she pulled it closed once more. Like the cave that had been renovated as a dining room, this cave had also been wired for electricity. For a more nefarious purpose? She would come back when she was better prepared to deal with what she may have found.
Suddenly, she heard approaching steps. She had just enough time to turn the key and lock the door back into place before Adam staggered into sight. She shoved the firebird key back into her clutch as her heart leaped. But she was dizzied by her heart’s sudden fall as Adam collapsed to the ground.
She forgot about her mission. She put his rejection out of her mind. She hurried to his side and dropped to her knees, but the heat of his body covered in Brimstone blood drove her back.
“Dr. Verenich. Call Dr. Verenich,” Adam said.
She crawled closer to better hear his voice, but an eternity seemed to pass and he said no more.