His eyes settled between my legs and I could feel myself blushing. I tried to wiggle out from under his touch, but it only caused him to bend and kiss the inside of my thigh over the pulse point. His lips worked gently and I felt no fangs, but that light brush of his mouth caused the trickle of liquid heat that had been building in me to suddenly become a flood. "Mircea, please…" I wasn't even sure what I was asking for, but he only smiled grimly.

"No, I will answer the question in full." He inhaled deeply. "And then I will pleasure you in full." I writhed under his hands, and he closed his eyes. "Cassie, please don't move. The vibrations are… disturbing, and my concentration is ragged as it is."

"I never agreed to sex if you answered the question! This isn't fair!"

Mircea paused and cocked an eyebrow. "Forgive me, dulceaţă, but precisely what is it you think we are doing now?"

"You know what I mean." I took a deep breath and tried to ignore the pleading my body was doing. "No intercourse."

Mircea ran his tongue along the crease of my knee and up my leg, stopping just short of where I suddenly, desperately wanted him to be. He raised his head slightly to meet my eyes, but his breath still glided over my most intimate places. My body trembled, and his fingers dug more firmly into my thighs. "You want me as badly as I want you, dulceaţă. Why deny us both?"

"You know why. It's not just about pleasure—this is setting myself up for something I'm not sure I can do." As soon as I said it, I realized I'd told the truth. The only reason I wasn't attacking Mircea was the strings that went with him. Having sex meant throwing in the towel on my independence, possibly forever. Either way I looked at it, I lost. The Senate might be a kinder, gentler alternative to the Circle, and Mircea beat the hell out of Pritkin as a jailer, but it would be a jail all the same. But if I wasn't Pythia, there would be a lot less interest in where I was and what I was doing.

"And if you do not accept your calling, how do you plan to persuade the Circle to help with your father?"

I sighed. There, as Shakespeare would have said, was the rub. I didn't want to be Pythia. The office had helped to get my mother killed and promised me only life in a gilded cage—assuming the Circle didn't kill me. Besides, Pritkin was right: I hadn't been trained. I didn't know if I could handle Seeing any more than I already did. I hadn't liked the new powers I'd obtained, and I doubted I'd enjoy the others any better, whatever they were. But, if I refused the position, I wasn't sure I could do anything to help my father. I knew Tony well enough to know how vindictive he could be. He would view my father's imprisonment as serving the double purpose of torturing both him and me, and he'd never voluntarily give him up.

"I'm not saying no," I told Mircea truthfully. "I just need some time. No intercourse yet; pick something else."

He placed a kiss on my lower stomach. "That will not be difficult, Cassie. You are a feast for the senses."

"Just answer the question."

He looked surprised, then laughed. "Do you know, I had actually entertained the notion that I would be in charge of these proceedings? I will know better next time." He grinned at me, rubbing slow, languid circles on my stomach, causing that delicious heat to build even more. I writhed under that light stroke, and it obviously pleased him. "My beautiful, fiery dulceaţă."

"I am not yours."

Mircea smirked. "On the contrary, you have always been mine. I assure you I did not stay at Antonio's court for almost a year for the pleasure of his company."

At my startled look, he laughed again, a low, touchable chuckle that tightened things low down. "I had heard of your gifts and arranged to meet you. I knew that a clairvoyant of your reputed strength would be a useful addition to my staff, but wanted to be sure what I was gaining before negotiating with Antonio. Once I met you, I suspected that I might be looking at the next Pythia, but I could not know for certain until you grew up."

He looked off into the distance and sighed. "I made a mistake in not immediately adding you to my household, but I feared that it was too prominent, and that I would not be able to keep you from coming to the Circle's attention. I left you with Antonio and ordered him to continue to hide your identity. I planned to retrieve you when you matured, but by then you had rather complicated things, had you not?"

"Wait a minute. You knew about my parents' murder?"

"I only learned after the fact, and at the time it seemed a trifling affair." He saw my frown and sighed. "Would you prefer me to lie to you? I did not know about you then, Cassie, and I could not chastise Antonio for dealing with his servant as he wished. Although I thought it a waste, it was his right. I was told that a woman had been with him in the car, but she had taken your father's name and I did not connect her with the runaway heir. Forgive me, but although your father was the most trusted of Antonio's humans, frankly that is not saying much. There was no reason to connect his wife with the Pythia's court."

"What about me? When did you learn that they had a child?" If Mircea had left a helpless baby in Tony's fat hands, my opinion of him would go down considerably.

"Not until years later," he said seriously, as if realizing how important the question was to me. "I spoke with Raphael a few months before my visit. Antonio had sent him on an errand to my court, and he took the opportunity to inform me of the truth. Of course, I immediately arranged to meet you."

I believed him, and not only because I wanted it to be true. Mircea would have protected my parents had they run to him for help. He wouldn't have permitted a valuable asset like my mother to be killed if he'd known about her. If for no other reason, it would have been bad business to annoy the Pythia and the mages when he could easily put them in his debt by returning her. "How did Tony find me?"

Mircea grinned. "How indeed, Cassie. Here I was, worried about your safety, when I should have been concerned about what dastardly plans you had for my defenseless servant. What you did to Antonio was rather well reported, even in the human press. My people immediately began searching for you, and I had a watch put on his retainers in case he stumbled over you and was foolish enough not to mention it. In that case, they were to distract him and contact me, but luck intervened. A member of a family allied with him was stranded in Atlanta overnight because of an airline delay, and saw you at a nightclub. You were telling fortunes and it jogged his memory of the young girl he had seen at court. He informed his master, who sold the information to Antonio. Fortunately I had already found you, with help from the Senate's intelligence network."

"Marlowe."

"Indeed." Mircea laughed. "The man is a marvel, although you were devilish difficult to trace, even for him. He wants to meet you, by the way. He said that you must have almost as devious a mind as he does—a rare compliment, dulceaţă. We located you less than a year ago, but it seemed safer to leave you where you were and guard you rather than to risk the Circle discovering that we had you, and invoking the treaty as they are attempting to do now." He looked sober again. "The Consul is stalling, but it will not last. We cannot fight both the Black and the White Circles at once, Cassie. You understand?"

"Yes." I thought back to the number of heart attacks I'd almost had through the years, thinking I'd sensed a vamp here or there, and it had been Mircea's people all the time. "You could have saved me a lot of trouble if you'd told me what was going on." Mircea just looked at me. He didn't bother to say what we both knew: no master vamp, much less a Senate member, would discuss anything with a mere servant. Her life would be planned out for her, and she'd be informed of it when the time was right. "Is that how you knew Tony had found me? Did your people tell you?"