“My, that was quick,” she teased.

“Let’s go,” I grumbled, dropping the wet clothes and bag into the trunk with a heavy thud. I picked up my leather jacket and shrugged into it.

“You could have ridden naked, you know. I wouldn’t mind,” she continued, shutting the trunk. She pulled the remote out of her jacket pocket and unlocked the doors. I tried to ignore Mira’s comments, but it wasn’t the easiest thing. It had been too many years since a woman had last made a pass at me. Most took one look at me and quickly scampered away in fear. I bit back the urge to smile as I pulled open the passenger-side door. Sliding into the car, I pulled on my boots over my bare feet.

Jumping into the car, Mira made a tight U-turn and headed back into downtown. I remained silent, content to watch the lights blur past my window and think about what had occurred since I had landed in the vampire’s domain. I had been accosted by the lycans, attended a First Communion, searched for clues in a dead girl’s apartment before looking over her corpse, interrogated a vampire, and then killed some naturi hiding out in a conservatory. It had been a full night. And the worst of it all was that I still didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. It also didn’t help that Mira was acting strange. Despite her occasional quip and sarcastic remark, she was more reserved than usual.

Mira parked her car on the street in front of the three-story town house I had stayed in the last time I had been in town. Popping open the trunk, she grabbed one of my bags and tossed me my ball of wet clothes before handing me my second bag of weapons. I followed her up the stairs and onto the porch where she unlocked the door and gave it a little shove open with her foot.

“You can stay here while you’re in town,” she said.

“I can just as easily maintain my room at the hotel with James,” I reminded her.

“We discussed this,” Mira said with an irritated sigh. “You’re likely to run across fewer problems while you’re staying in town if you’re at my residence.” Any comment I would have made was cut off by her slamming the door behind me. My only concern was that maybe I didn’t like the signal it was sending to everyone within her domain. It certainly didn’t help my reputation as a ruthless vampire hunter.

The town house was still the same elegant yet functional place that I remembered, with its mix of marble and dark hardwoods. On the right side of the hall was the parlor with a comfortable leather sofa and a mix of older high-backed chairs settled around a dark wood coffee table. The walls were lined with paintings. They were all modern pieces, realistic paintings of people. Nearly all of the paintings were of women alone. Their faces were mostly hidden or limited to just a glimpse of their profile. Yet there was something in the way those women held their sinuous frames that implied that the artist had caught them in a moment of deep contemplation, a second in time where their individual futures hung by a slender thread.

Frowning, I followed Mira through the adjoining dining room, with its large table, into the kitchen. It was decorated in various shades of dark blue, steel gray, and black, from the marble countertops to the appliances, which I seriously doubted had ever been used. Everything about this room was dark and cold, threatening to swamp anyone who dared to enter the room.

The nightwalker paused for a moment as if in thought, then jerked open one of the drawers by the sink. Grabbing a set of keys, she tossed them to me and motioned for me to precede her back into the living room.

“Those keys are to the town house and to the red Lexus parked around the block,” she said, leading me back to the only hallway off the living room. Tromping up the stairs, she stopped in the first bedroom off to the right and dropped my duffel bag at the foot of the king-sized sleigh bed made of dark cherry. In here, the colors were a combination of deep burgundy and dark gray, except for the carpet, which was as black as night. Even the various lamps that were scattered about failed to pierce the darkness that pervaded the room.

“I expect that you’ll find this place comfortable enough again,” she announced to the air. Her eyes skimmed the room for a moment, as if taking in her surroundings for the first time. All the paintings in the bedroom were abstracts with the same color scheme as the room. “If you make a mess, you have to clean it up. I don’t currently have a cleaning service.”

“Yes, it must be difficult to find someone who can get out the bloodstains,” I muttered.

Mira chuckled softly. “First rule of being a vampire: never eat where you sleep,” she said lightly. “If something were to happen that prevented you from wiping your prey’s memory, he or she would know your resting place.”

“But you’ve never slept here, have you?” I guessed. The question wiped the smile from Mira’s face and she stared at me silently for a couple of seconds. The only sound that could be heard was the soft hum of the heater pumping warm air into the town house.

“No,” she admitted at last. “I don’t sleep here. Never have.” Mira stepped around me and walked back down into the living room. I shed my jacket and tossed it onto the bed before I followed her. She stood in front of the large windows that looked out onto the nearby square with its enormous live oak trees, their arms stretched out to encompass the entire park. The streets were nearly barren of people, leaving the traffic lights to go vainly through their cycles without anyone to pay them heed.

I stood behind the sofa, watching Mira for a minute. Her arms were folded under her breasts, and her shoulder was propped against the glass. I could see only her profile, but her expression was blank of emotion. In that moment, she was human to me. There was nothing other about her, nothing to expose her for the dark threat that she was. For the single breath, she was just a woman weighed down by the world that she existed in.

It was when I was precariously balanced in that moment of forgetfulness that I hated her the most. I loathed the fact that she could lull me into sympathizing with her. It was locked in those silent seconds of weakness that all my hopes of regaining possession of my soul were threatened.

“Have you always lived like this?” I suddenly demanded, trying to redirect my thoughts from the way the light from one of the nearby lamps fell across her cheek, highlighting her high cheekbones. Her gaze drifted back to me. Her expression remained carefully blank and the current of concern running through her seemed to quiet, as if she was battening down ahead of a storm.

“Like what?”

“This,” I repeated, throwing out my arms to encompass the opulent town house. “Do you have any concept of what it means to be poor?”

One corner of Mira’s mouth quirked in a surprised grin. She pushed off the window and turned to fully face me, her hands slipping into her jean pockets. “I was born in a two-room house with a leaky thatched roof. In the summer, I slept in the stable with our one horse and sheep. In the winter, I slept on the floor in front of the fireplace or snuggled with my parents in our one bed. I never expected to have any better than that.”

“But…” I prodded. As I leaned forward, my hands sank into the back of the sofa. The cool leather crackled and grumbled in the quiet.

“Sadira demanded luxury.” She shrugged. It was one of the rare times she managed to mention her maker without oozing animosity. “One becomes accustomed to it. What about you? Always been a wandering sword for hire?”

Frowning, I looked away from her toward the sofa before me. My life had begun at the opposite end of the spectrum. The only child of a successful politician, I had lived with my mother in a lavish estate a couple of days’ ride outside of Rome. I had every luxury at my fingertips until I entered the military, and even then I would never describe my situation as dire. It wasn’t until I left the military and started to wander that my situation grew grim. Then food was a matter of what I could catch and money came from what random odd jobs I could find. Vast expanses of time were lost to one-room hovels and tiny monastic cells with little more than a straw pallet and a washbasin.