Rebekah hesitated for the briefest of disapproving moments before shaking Lisette’s outstretched hand. Part of her wanted to shake some appropriate reverence into the girl...but the rest of her actually enjoyed the novelty. A fling would be great, but a friend...How long had it been since Rebekah had had a real friend? Her nature, her position, and her family made it virtually impossible to make girlfriends, much less keep them. Rebekah Mikaelson was dangerous, intimidating, immortal, and guarded. But Lisette didn’t seem to care.

“So tell me about yourself, Lisette,” she commanded, then bit her tongue and softened her tone. “Please?”

“Oh, me? There’s really nothing to tell,” Lisette ­giggled, but that didn’t prevent her from immediately producing a few chatty tidbits about the other partygoers.

She went on, and Rebekah basked in the normalcy of it. They might have been of an age: young women navigating society together. She listened raptly, asking questions whenever Lisette needed prompting, and Lisette obliged with an astonishing wealth of information about nearly all of the Mikaelsons’ guests. Most of Rebekah’s pets gave up and drifted away after a while, and even shy, smitten Efrain looked around as if he might prefer to be elsewhere.

But Rebekah didn’t care. Admiration was easy enough to come by these days, but Lisette was a rarer kind of fun. They were still talking when a commotion broke out near the sweeping main staircase, and Rebekah reluctantly decided she needed to investigate. She had put far too much work into making this house comfortable to let it go to ruin, no matter how much fun everyone was having.

When she reached the front hall, though, she realized that the newest vampires weren’t the problem at all. Klaus had returned from his sulk, and seemed determined to spread his misery around. A few nervous-looking vampires, in various states of undress, huddled together on the staircase, cowering as Klaus pushed past them. “If I find you’ve touched anything in those rooms I will slice you open from throat to ankles looking for it,” he threatened the nearest one, who could only tremble by way of reply.

Had something gone missing? Something of Klaus’s? Whatever it was, it must be important enough that he would search for it in the middle of a party. She could not imagine what would provoke him to act so bizarrely, except that maybe he’d simply gone too long without making a scene, and couldn’t help himself.

“My dear sister!” he greeted her, his voice a mockery of brotherly warmth. Then a thought seemed to occur to him. “You probably have it,” he told her cryptically, and climbed back up the staircase.

“I—do you think you’re going to my room?” Rebekah shrieked, running after him. “Niklaus, what the hell has gotten into you tonight?” Skipping the party to brood in his attic sounded like a brilliant plan in comparison to this.

He didn’t answer her. Instead, he threw open the door to her room and began tearing through her things. Her things; he couldn’t even leave this one, tiny corner of the house alone.

She grabbed his arm, but he shook her hand off and upended a jewelry box onto her vanity. Pearls and topazes spilled everywhere, and soft gold gleamed against the painted wood. “It’s nothing,” he muttered, not even bothering to lie convincingly. “There’s just a trinket I’ve lost, and it might have wound up here.”

He opened another box, rifling through it carelessly, dropping a ruby earring onto the carpet without even noticing. “Get out!” she cried, shoving him with all of her strength. His body flew backward, crashing into the door with a satisfying splintering. “Whatever it is you won’t find it here.”

Klaus moved on to the next room, and Rebekah heard another crash from down the hall. If she didn’t go after her brother, she realized, the damage would mount quickly. He hadn’t even bothered to throw out the occupants of the room this time. Rebekah found him throwing clothing out of a closet while two vampires watched him from the bed, an embroidered coverlet pulled up to their chins as if the thin silk would protect them from a lunatic vampire. “Stop this madness,” she ordered.

He waved her away dismissively and walked out to the top of the stairs, shouting that it was time for all of their guests to leave. Why was it up to Klaus to decide that the party was over? He had a special talent for ruining beautiful things.

Rebekah reached the bottom of the stairs just in time to see him disappearing into Elijah’s study. She felt sure Elijah would thank her for keeping him out, and so she gritted her teeth and pushed through the crowd.

Klaus had already forced open a drawer of Elijah’s desk, and Rebekah gasped. She had no idea where Elijah had gotten to, but the moment her brother saw what Klaus was doing, the house would not be big enough to hold the three of them.

“Don’t touch that,” she shouted, throwing her weight against the drawer to slam it closed. Klaus shoved her aside and broke open the lock on another drawer. Rebekah shoved him back, hard, and he tripped over one of the large candelabras that Elijah had along the walls. It swayed dangerously toward the window beside it, and Rebekah had just enough time to see a curl of smoke rise up from the fabric before Klaus sprang toward her.

The force of his attack knocked them both back out into the front hall, snarling and biting and scrabbling for purchase. Vampires scattered, and somewhere nearby Rebekah heard the sound of breaking glass. Tangy smoke drifted out of the open door of the study, and she guessed that the curtains had caught fire. Klaus destroyed everything.

She couldn’t live like this anymore, not with Klaus the terror. He didn’t appreciate anything she or Elijah did for him. He was so self-centered that he couldn’t imagine they might prefer to not spend their lives either cleaning up his current disaster or trying to predict his next one.

As she gasped for breath from Klaus’s armlock, Rebekah made up her mind: She’d find a way to destroy whatever was left of Klaus’s happiness just the way he always managed to ruin hers.

CHAPTER THREE

ELIJAH RAN AN idle finger up and down Ava’s bare arm, feeling perfectly at peace. It had not been easy, and the cost had been high, but he had persevered. He had held his siblings together and overcome every obstacle this city had thrown their way, and now it was time to reap the rewards.

The French had lost their grip on the region, and now Spain had seized power and established its own rule over New Orleans. But it quickly became clear that actually running the city was of no interest to King Carlos III, and the Spanish governor he’d sent over didn’t find the task especially appealing, either. The French colonists were disgusted by the regime change, and Elijah had always viewed human unrest as an opportunity.

As a result of his savvy and foresight, everything of consequence in New Orleans now had to go through him. Trade, construction, legal matters...Elijah Mikaelson was the city’s beating heart. And once he realized that the witches could no longer enforce their ban on siring new vampires, Elijah had taken particular delight in doing so. His family was the central core of his world, but there were benefits to building a community as well. He had everything he had wanted, and now he had Ava, who seemed determined to come up with all sorts of new things for him to desire.

She stretched contentedly across the four-poster bed, and dappled light from the fireplace painted curious patterns on her skin. Just as he reached for her again, he heard a crash and a scream coming from downstairs. He waited for a moment, hoping that it would fade back into the predictable sounds of a party, but the commotion only seemed to be growing louder. Vaguely, he recalled hearing some other thumps and shouts a few minutes before. Perhaps they had been more significant than he realized, but he’d been thoroughly distracted.