14. Posy
— ? —
Posy
Breakfast is a hostage negotiation.
Mircea holds court at my kitchen table with coffee he made himself, in an espresso contraption he produced from his own luggage, because of course he travels with one.
I asked my questions. He answered every single one of them in complete sentences that contained no information whatsoever.
How did he know the seal broke: “A hundred-year lock snapped, little queen. Everything old on this continent felt it. I just own the fastest car.” What does he know about the curse: “Less than your grandmother, more than your boyfriend will admit.” Why did he really come: “Family is sacred,” delivered with a hand over his heart and a wink that undercut it completely.
Valerian stands at the counter the entire time, arms crossed, contributing nothing but atmosphere. The atmosphere is load-bearing.
“You could sit,” Mircea offers him at one point.
“I could.”
“He looms,” Mircea tells me confidentially. “Always has. Council meetings, coronations, birthdays with too many candles to count. Looming in the corner with opinions. Some things survive even a box.”
“The box did not improve my opinion of you,” Valerian says.
“And yet here I am, making your bride superior coffee.” Mircea slides a cup across the table to me, watching his cousin over the rim of his own. “One of us is contributing to the household, cousin. History will judge.”
The muscle in Valerian’s jaw could crack walnuts. I drink my coffee and pretend the room isn’t a chessboard.
“Oh, before I forget,” Mircea says, in the idle tone I’m learning means the opposite. “Lady Ondine sends her regards. Word reached the scattered families before I left the coast. She was devastated to hear the seal broke and she wasn’t the one to… welcome you home.”
Valerian’s jaw goes from walnuts to granite. “Ondine is irrelevant.”
“Who’s Ondine?” The words are out before I can stop them, and they come out sharper than I planned, sharp enough that both vampires look at me.
“No one of consequence.”
“She doesn’t sound like no one. That’s very specific language for no one.” I take a sip of coffee that has decided to taste of battery acid. “‘Welcome you home’ is a whole agenda.”
“There were arrangements. At court. Political in nature.” Valerian’s voice could frost the windows. “I never…”
“But she wanted you to.”
“Many people wanted many things.”
“That’s not a denial.”
Mircea is watching this exchange with naked front-row delight, and I’m going to kill him the moment I’m done being irrationally furious at a woman I’ve never met who may not even be alive anymore. I put down my coffee with extreme care, because the alternative is throwing it.
“For the record,” I tell Valerian, “if Lady Ondine ever shows up at this door, I want you to know that I will fight her. I will lose, obviously. She’s probably eight feet tall and drinks duels for breakfast. But I’ll do it, and it’ll be embarrassing for everyone, and you’ll have to live with that.”
The granite cracks. His whole face opens, jaw unclenching into a wonder so unguarded it’s nearly indecent at a breakfast table, and I realize with dawning horror what I’ve just confessed to.
“You’re jealous,” he says.
“I’m hypothetically territorial. It’s different.”
“Little bride.” His voice has gone warm and absolutely insufferable. “No one is eight feet tall.”
“I’m not talking about this anymore.”
“She does not drink duels.”
“Here’s the thing,” I say, gathering my mug and my dignity, “we’re out of everything. Mircea drank the last of the coffee, I used the last eggs, and the nearest store is a county away.”
“I’ll drive you,” Mircea says instantly.
The temperature at the counter drops by a season.
“Absolutely not,” Valerian says.
“Cousin, be reasonable. You can’t leave the grounds without redecorating the boundary in your own blood, she needs supplies, and I have a very fast car.” Mircea spreads his hands. “This is what family is for.”
“Family is sacred,” Valerian repeats, with the warmth of a crypt.
“Also I want to see the town. I’ve been informed it has a diner.” He looks at me. “Does it have a diner?”
“It has a diner.”
“Civilization at last.” He’s already up, keys spinning around one tattooed finger. “Coming, little queen?”
I look at Valerian. His jaw is doing structural damage to itself, and his eyes are saying a great many things, none of which are yes, all of which I understand. His cousin appears out of a century of silence, and the first morning, I drive off with him.
But we do need food. And two hours in a car with Mircea might get me more answers than breakfast did, because charming people get careless when they’re performing.
“I’ll be careful,” I tell Valerian quietly, crossing to him. “Two-hour rule. You text if you need anything.”
“I do not like this.”
“I know. I’m doing it anyway.” I rise up and kiss his cheek, and his hand comes to my waist and holds on one beat past casual, thumb pressing into the fabric of my shirt, a small possessive underline that goes straight through me.
“Guard the manor. Alphabetize the pantry. I’ll be back before you finish composing your first complaint. ”
“My first complaint is already composed.”
Behind us, Mircea makes a sound of profound entertainment that both of us ignore.
The car is absurd. It’s black and looks illegal parked, and it goes from the gate to the main road in the time it takes me to find the seatbelt.
“So,” Mircea says, driving with one wrist draped over the wheel, wind tearing at his hair. “You’re sleeping with my cousin.”
“We’re not talking about that.”
“We’re absolutely talking about that. It’s the most interesting thing to happen to him in three hundred years and I’ve been bored for one hundred of them.
” He glances over, grinning at whatever my face is doing.
“Relax. I’m delighted. Genuinely. The last time I saw him he was a king with a court full of knives, and this morning I watched him memorize your coffee order. It’s disgusting. I’m thrilled.”
Despite everything, I laugh. That’s the problem with Mircea. He’s engineered for it.
Town rolls in around us, and he’s charming at everyone, the gas station attendant, the woman at the bakery, Agnes at Miller’s Market, who looks him over and says “You’re not from here” in a tone that files him somewhere specific.
He carries my bags without being asked and pays for my coffee before I can find my wallet and navigates the modern world with the fluency Valerian has to fight for, contactless payment, a phone he actually understands.
“A century of practice,” he says when I mention it. “The first decade was rough. I fought a vending machine. It won.”
“Valerian fought our blender.”
“Did he lose?”
“The blender was given a burial at sea. In the sink. Full honors.”
Mircea laughs so hard he has to stop walking, propping himself against a lamppost, and for a second the shine drops and he’s only a man hearing about his family after a long time away.
“Tell me about him,” I say, while the shine is down. “Before. What was he like?”
“Insufferable,” Mircea says fondly. “Proud. Fair, which is rarer than you’d think in kings. The court loved him and hated him for the same reason: you couldn’t buy him.” He picks up my last bag, and we walk. “He wrote poetry, you know.”
I stop walking. “He did not.”
“Dreadful poetry. About moonlight and longing. I mocked him for a century and I’d have mocked him for another if…” The sentence closes without finishing. “Anyway. If he ever offers to read you his verses, feign a headache. Some things should stay in the box.”
My phone buzzes.
Has he mentioned the poetry. Do not believe the poetry.
I bite down on a smile. Another buzz.
Whatever he has told you, the blender incident was worse in his version of events than in reality.
A third buzz, moments later.
The two-hour interval has not elapsed. I am aware of this. I am simply confirming the device functions.
“He’s texting you,” Mircea observes.
“He’s texting me.”
“He learned to text for you.” He shakes his head slowly. “You have no idea what you’ve done to him, do you?”
We get lunch at the counter of the diner, because Mircea insists on experiencing it, and he interrogates the menu with an enthusiasm that earns him free pie from the waitress.
Between bites he asks about me. My job, my apartment, my life before the manor.
My friends. Whether anyone’s expecting me back.
It’s easy and idle, and I answer most of it before I notice the shape of the questions, a man taking inventory of what tethers me to the world.
“You know,” he says at one point, gesturing at me with his fork, “the court would riot if they could see this. Duchesses spent decades angling for one unscheduled minute of his attention. Entire seasons were built around getting seated beside him. He never once looked up from whatever he was reading.” A bite of pie.
“And here you are, getting glared at through a gate for taking a day trip.”
The twinge arrives before I can screen it, hot and armed, decades of duchesses I’ve never met suddenly requiring my immediate jealous review. Then the second half of his sentence catches up.
He never once looked up.
Decades of them. And he never chose any of them, and a woman with library fines and a dying succulent has him pacing a boundary line. The twinge converts to warmth so smug I have to hide it in my coffee cup.
He asks the rest lightly, in the gaps between pie and coffee refills, and I catch myself answering the way you answer a friendly stranger on a plane.
My best friend Riley, who thinks I’ve joined a cult.
My mother, who doesn’t call. The apartment with the dying succulent and the lease I haven’t thought about since I got here.
No one expecting me, is what it adds up to, and I hear it out loud only after I’ve already said it.
“You’re nosy,” I tell him.
“I’m interested. Family trait.” He steals a fry off my plate. “And you? How are you managing all this? Curses. Forever. It’s a great deal to put on a woman who came to sell a house.”
“I’m managing.”
“Are you. Because forever is a long word, little human.” His voice stays light, and his eyes don’t.
“He’s been alone since before either of us mattered.
That changes a person. When he loves you, it won’t be a hobby.
It’ll be a medical event, for both of you, and there’s no version of it that ends casually.
So.” He salutes me with his coffee cup. “Just… be sure.”
“You really came all this way to check on him,” I say.
“I came for many reasons.” He smiles, and the shine is back up, seamless. “That’s one of them.”
I let him deflect. But I file it, the way he’s been filing me all day.
“One more stop,” he says as we load the car. “Your grandmother kept papers, yes? Journals, wards, that class of thing. Is it all still at the house, or did the estate scatter it?” The question is idle, offhand, tucked between closing the trunk and checking his mirrors.
“It’s all still there. Why?”
“Professional curiosity. Keepers were rare. Good ones were rarer.” He slides into the driver’s seat. “Home, then. Before your king reduces my arrival gift to gravel.”
The drive back is faster, the sun dropping gold and long over the hills, and I spend it half listening to Mircea narrate the county’s speed limits as personal insults and half composing answers to a question nobody asked me out loud.
Be sure. As if sure is a place you park.
As if I haven’t been driving toward it since a box opened and the whole world changed lanes.
We round the last bend at dusk.
Valerian is at the gate.
Not waiting at the gate. At the gate, filling it, exactly where the boundary allows him to exist and not one inch farther, and he is perfectly, completely still in the way that nothing living is still. The headlights slide across him and his eyes catch silver and flat, fixed not on me.
On Mircea.
The car rolls up the drive and stops. The engine dies. Gravel ticks under the cooling hood, and Valerian doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, doesn’t come to my door the way he did last time, when he was there before I’d touched the handle.
I’ve seen him wounded. I’ve seen him starving, dying on a marble floor, held together by pride and nothing.
I have never seen him like this. His fists hang at his sides, knuckles bleached.
His jaw is set hard enough to crack stone.
The dusk wind moves his hair and nothing else about him, and every line of his body is a sentence he hasn’t decided how to say yet.
It should frighten me. A creature this still, this coiled, this barely leashed is a threat by every definition the daylight world uses.
My body doesn’t get the memo. My body takes one look at all that controlled violence and files it directly between my legs, because apparently a seething vampire king with murder in his eyes is a thing I have feelings about now.
Later. I’ll examine that later, in privacy, possibly with a support group.
Beside me, very quietly, Mircea exhales.
I reach for the door handle.
Valerian’s eyes never leave his cousin.
He doesn’t say a word.
That’s the scariest part.