and put it to his lips. “Or we can vote on what to do with her.”
“Vote?” Matthew said, incredulous. “Since when did we vote in this family?”
“Since Marcus took over the Knights of Lazarus,” Gallowglass replied, drawing a silver lighter from his pocket. “We’ve been choking on democracy since the day you left.”
Fernando looked at him pointedly.
“What?” Gallowglass said, swinging the lighter open.
“This is a holy place, Gallowglass. And you know how Marcus feels about smoking when there are warmbloods in the house,” Fernando said reprovingly.
“And you can imagine my own thoughts on the matter, with my pregnant wife upstairs.” Matthew snatched the cigarette from Gallowglass’s mouth.
“This family was more fun when we had fewer medical degrees,” Gallowglass said darkly. “I remember the good old days, when we sewed ourselves up if we were wounded in battle and didn’t give a tinker’s dam about our iron levels and vitamin D.”
“Oh, yes.” Fernando held up his hand, displaying a ragged scar. “Those days were glorious indeed.
And your skills with the needle were legendary, Bife.
“I got better,” Gallowglass said defensively. “I was never as good as Matthew or Marcus, of course. But we can’t all go to university.”
“Not so long as Philippe was head of the family,” Fernando murmured. “He preferred that his children and grandchildren wield swords rather than ideas. It made you all so much more pliable.”
There was a grain of truth in the remark, and an ocean of pain behind it.
“I should get back to Diana.” Matthew rocked to his feet and rested his hand on Fernando’s shoulder for a brief moment before turning to leave.
“Waiting will not make it any easier to tell Marcus and Hamish about the blood rage, my friend,”
Fernando warned, stopping him.
“I thought after all these years my secret was safe,” Matthew said.
“Secrets, like the dead, do not always stay buried,” Fernando said sadly. “Tell them. Soon.”
Matthew returned to his tower more agitated than when he’d left.
Ysabeau frowned at the sight of him.
“Thank you for watching Diana, Maman,” he said, kissing Ysabeau’s cheek.
“And you, my son?” Ysabeau put her palm to his cheek, searching as Fernando had for signs of blood rage. “Should I be watching over you instead?”
“I’m fine. Truly,” Matthew said.
“Of course,” Ysabeau replied. This phrase meant many things in his mother’s private lexicon. What it never meant was that she agreed with you. “I will be in my room if you need me.”
When the sound of his mother’s quiet footfalls had faded, Matthew flung wide the windows and pulled his chair close to the open casement. He drank in the intense summer scents of catchfly and the last of the gillyflowers. The sound of Diana’s even breathing upstairs blended into the other night songs that only vampires could hear—the clack of stag beetles locking horns as they competed for females, the loirs’ wheezing as they ran across the battlements, the high-pitched squeaks of the death’s-head hawkmoth, the scrabbling of pine martens climbing the trees. Based on the grunts and snuffles Matthew heard in the garden, Gallowglass had been no more successful catching the wild boar uprooting Marthe’s vegetables than he had been in catching Corra.
Normally Matthew relished this quiet hour equidistant from midnight and dawn when the owls had stopped their hooting and even the most disciplined early risers had not yet peeled back the bedcovers.
Tonight not even the familiar scents and sounds of home could work their magic.
Only one thing could.
Matthew climbed the stairs to the tower’s top floor. There he looked down at Diana’s sleeping form. He smoothed her hair, smiling when his wife instinctively pressed her skull deeper into his waiting hand. Impossible as it was, they fit: vampire and witch, man and woman, husband and wife. The hard fist around his heart loosened a few precious millimeters.
Silently Matthew shucked off his clothes and slid into bed. The sheets were tangled around Diana’s legs, and he pulled the linen free, settling it over their bodies. Matthew tucked his knees behind Diana’s and drew her hips back into his. He drank in the soft, pleasing scent of her—honey and chamomile and willow sap—and feathered a kiss against her bright hair.
After only a few breaths, Matthew’s heart calmed and his restlessness seeped away as Diana provided the peace that was eluding him. Here, within the circle of his arms, was all that he had ever wanted. A wife. Children. A family of his own. He let the powerful rightness that he always felt in Diana’s presence sink into his soul.