“Please tell me you left food, Mama,” she said, still talking to herself. Crossing her fingers, she opened the refrigerator and found a casserole just waiting to be heated. “Yes!” She threw it in the microwave, which her mother would never have done, picked a number of minutes at random, then went to wash the day’s sweat from her face and hands.
She gobbled down her dinner right out of the dish. She was already late for the meeting with Xavier, and feeling . . . not guilty. She had nothing to feel guilty about. But since she’d taken on this job, she was compelled to do it right, just as she did every other assignment.
Even worse was the image dawning in her brain of an impatient Xavier showing up at the apartment door and . . . Correction. He wouldn’t stop at the door. He’d simply stroll in and demand her attention. Xavier didn’t get angry. He just did what he wanted and assumed everyone else would go along with it.
“Merde!” She’d been working in France long enough that the curse came easily to her tongue. Grabbing the dirty dish, she dropped it into the sink with some soap and water, ran wet hands over her face and dried it with the dish towel. (Her mother would be appalled!) Then, tossing a breath mint into her mouth, she ran out the door.
XAVIER SIPPED A glass of red wine, liberally seasoned with blood, and waited for Layla. He’d kept track of her through the day. Not in detail, not the way he could have if they’d shared blood. But in monitoring the general ebb and flow of the Fortalesa and its people, he was confident in his assessment of her activities. She’d been diligent, which was nothing more than he’d expected. He’d known her for most of her life. She’d been born in the Fortalesa, though she hadn’t come to his attention until her father had been elevated to Commander of his daylight guard. He’d noticed her more after she was old enough to follow her father around, announcing to anyone who would listen that she was going to be a soldier just like her papa. No one had believed her then, not even her father. Her ambition had been dismissed as a young girl’s fancy, grown out of love for her father.
Xavier hadn’t dismissed it, though. He’d known she meant it. Even as a small child, she’d had a core of steel, a strength of character that drove her to excel at everything she did. And when she persisted in her determination to be a soldier, her parents winced and said nothing, hoping she’d leave it behind once she went to university and understood the full variety of professions available to her.
Even Xavier had privately hoped she’d seek a quieter vocation. Not because he’d thought she couldn’t do anything else, but because, above all, he’d wanted her safe. Humans were too fragile, too easy to kill. And no one knew better than he that even in the safest countries, the most secure cities, the world was a violent place. It was enough to survive a normal life of home and family, without courting death by throwing yourself in its path. Not that what he wanted mattered, in this case. Layla had always nodded and smiled at those who urged her to choose another path, that she was much too smart to become a common soldier.
There’d never been anything common about Layla. He’d seen her in a way that others didn’t—not even her parents. And though he’d fought the knowledge until the day she left for the U.S., he’d always sensed an indefinable something special about Layla. A connection that shouldn’t have been there, something unique to her and no one else.
Human mystics—those who claimed to speak to the dead or to see the future—would have said he’d known her in a past life, that their souls were drawn to each other. Xavier believed in magic. How could he not? He was a vampire who could stop a man’s heart with a thought, or tear that same heart from his enemy’s chest and force him to watch it burn. Maybe vampire abilities weren’t magic the way humans understood it. Maybe people simply hadn’t advanced enough to understand it for what it was. Some vampires believed that vampirism was an evolutionary change in the human race, that they were more advanced beings than ordinary humans.
Xavier didn’t know about evolution and didn’t spend much time worrying about it either. He knew who his parents were, knew who his Sire was, and how he’d changed from human to vampire. After that, he’d been too busy learning to use the new powers he’d been given, and then finding his place in a world dominated by a few extraordinarily powerful vampires. Because he was one of them. No one knew what factors determined which vampires would rule and which would go about their lives in much the same way they had before being turned, except for a few specific changes. For his part, Xavier had always known his destiny and had pursued it with the same single-minded ambition he saw in Layla.
Layla. The flame inside him flared with heat every time he thought of her. The unique connection he’d felt when she’d been a child hadn’t disappeared as he’d thought it would, when he’d dismissed it as a protectiveness for the child of close friends, which Ferran and Ramlah had grown to be.
His feelings for her had instead grown stronger. And he’d been forced to look for other explanations. He’d even considered the possibility that she was a danger to him, that his vampire senses, which far exceeded those of a regular human’s, were trying to warn him. He hadn’t been able to make himself believe the logic of that one. How could even the most finely tuned vampire brain know that a young girl would grow up to assassinate him? It made no sense.
He’d cautiously explored the topic with another vampire or two, those whose discretion he could count on. But he’d never told even them whom it concerned, or even if he was the one involved, not willing to risk drawing the wrong kind of attention to Layla. The unique was always desired by certain people—both vampire and human—but especially by vampires whose long lives sometimes made them subject to a desperate kind of ennui which lusted after anything to relieve the boredom.
But the inquiries turned out to be useless anyway, since none of those he’d spoken to had experienced anything like it, nor even heard of it happening to anyone else. So Xavier stopped worrying about it, deciding it was the product of a long-forgotten hindbrain fart that humans were no longer able to utilize, much less explain.
He looked up at the muted sound of a door closing far down the hallway and smiled. Layla had arrived at last. Standing, he picked up his wine and walked around his desk to the conference table where he took a seat facing the door. She’d be angry when she walked in, knowing she was late and choosing to take it out on him. He wondered if she treated others the same. If, for example, she’d snarled at her commanding officer when she’d been in the army. He doubted it. He’d observed her enough before she left to know her ire was reserved for him.
The door swung open without a knock and Layla rushed in, stopping short when she saw him sitting alone. She scowled and asked, “Is everybody late? I wish I’d known that. I have a million other things I need to take care of. You could have just texted when you were ready to start.”