“What is it?”
“Little spoon.”
“You are hungry?”
I didn’t answer, because he wasn’t making sense. I just arranged him the way I wanted, needed. A big, warm, muscle-y pillow that I could drape myself around, like a child with a favorite toy.
A toy with a lot of hair. A mass like silk hit me in the face, making it hard to breathe. I pushed it up and over the soft mound of the pillow, and then snuggled up behind him, pressing my face to a neck that smelled like—
Yes.
Yes.
I took a deep breath, and sighed it out into his ear.
“Ah,” he said, a hand covering the one I’d placed on his stomach, as I pulled him back against me. “I see.”
I sighed again, my whole body relaxing. The pain, the confusion, all of it releasing, slipping away. Like the room. And then a thought occurred, right on the edge of sleep.
“If I’m not supposed to be awake, why are you here?” I mumbled.
“To be the little spoon.”
And okay, that made sense.
I pulled him closer and fell off the cliff. And this time, I didn’t dream.
Chapter Twenty-nine
I awoke a second time to sunlight seeping over the bed, which freaked me out until I realized that Louis-Cesare wasn’t there. Nobody was. I lay in the middle of an orgy-sized bed without the orgy, or anybody for company except a butterfly flirting with the sheers over the window.
I was hugging a comforter, which was big and plushy, but a lot less satisfying than its owner would have been. And Louis-Cesare was its owner, I thought blearily, gazing around. Because if ever a room had matched the man…
The walls were cream, topped by an elaborate molding done in little rosettes and curlicues and swags, to match the surround on a fireplace and the thin stripe on the blue Louis-the-something chairs in front of it. It would have been a little too precious, a little too feminine—except for the heavy curtains framing the tall French windows.
They were thick, midnight blue velvet, a huge stretch of it, easily twelve feet long, and not the synthetic stuff, either. Plush and buttery and vaguely medieval, they looked like they should have been gracing a Roman emperor’s tent, or some barbaric king’s chamber. Like the exposed beams in the ceiling and the rough planks on the floor.
The room reminded me of its owner, all genteel old-world manners on the surface but something more primitive below. I preferred the primitive, but I couldn’t deny that the veneer had its charms. Like the view outside the windows, where garlands of fat white roses were nodding in a breeze. Possibly the one stirred up by the yellow butterflies that were feasting on the abundance, so thick in places that they looked like another kind of flower.
It was…well, it was stupidly beautiful.
It was also really weird.
Not the view, but the fact tha
t I was looking at it. I’d expected to wake up at the consul’s, despite the fact that that would not have been fun for so very many reasons. Like the last time I’d visited, when I’d thought my head was going to explode. The sheer number of vampires—strong, highly ranked ones—buzzing around in there had set my dhampir blood to boiling, and made me feel like a few thousand ants were running across my skin.
Bitey, angry ants.
But we’d been headed there, since as far as I knew, that was the only place Central’s portal went. And since I wasn’t dead, I assumed we’d made it. So why was I lying in a bed that smelled like Louis-Cesare? In a room that looked like it had been designed for him?
I didn’t know, and right then I didn’t care. Possibly because I was starving to death. Or maybe for another reason. I sat up and the world went swimmy, a slur of yellow and white and midnight blue that would have been pretty if I hadn’t thought that maybe I was going to throw up.
I flopped back against the pillows, wondering what the hell? Because I hadn’t been hurt that bad, had I? I couldn’t remember anything after being plucked off my feet by Radu, but I didn’t think so. And all the parts seemed to be accounted for, which was always a good sign. And while my rash of bruises had acquired another layer, I could live with it. I could live with a lot if the room would just stop spinning already.
But there was nothing to do except lie there and admire the view while it did its thing, until it finally got bored and quit. I stayed put a few more minutes, just to make sure, because puking in somebody’s bed is not the way to get invited back. But my stomach felt okay all of a sudden. In fact, it was up and ready to rumble—or to yell at me to feed it something already.
I fell out of bed, because it was becoming kind of a habit now. And because the mattress gave me a support to help get me to my feet. And because my stomach was demanding that I follow the fragrance of frying butter that was seeping in from…somewhere.