“Frankly,” Lucien said calmly, “I’ve never been able to read your mind, Meena. Your thoughts have always been a bit…jumbled.”

Meena, her fingers shaking convulsively, tightened her grip on the balcony railing. What had she done? What was happening? What was he doing there? Was he going to kill her?

“I thought vampires c-couldn’t enter a home unless invited,” she stammered through teeth that had begun to chatter. Was it her imagination, or did his dark eyes have a flicker of red in them, deep inside the pupils?

“That used to be true,” he said. The thunder had started up again, so loud it shook the metal railing beneath her fingers. The storm over their heads was beginning to crest. “At least in the days when people cared enough about their homes to have them blessed by their priests or rabbis. These days, when no one seems to bother anymore? It’s not really such a problem for us.”

“Oh,” Meena said. “Right.” Her gaze was fixed on his, though she fumbled surreptitiously with her bare foot along the balcony floor, searching for the knitting needle she’d dropped. If she found it, would she really have the courage-and the strength-to plunge it into his heart (or the place where his heart had once been)?

Maybe she should just jump. Death had to be preferable to this.

“But when we do encounter a sacred threshold,” Lucien said, continuing in the same detached, almost conversational tone, “we can find ways around it. We can use mind control to get the less…strong-willed to invite us inside. Some of us can even turn into mist and go through a keyhole, if we don’t care to be seen by others afterwards.”

“You can turn to mist?” she asked faintly.

His red-eyed gaze focused on her. “Yes,” he said. “I can turn to mist. I can turn into a wolf, too. And you’re not going to kill me, Meena. Not with a knitting needle. You’re not going to jump, and you’re not even going to scream for that Palatine Guard to come out here, even disgusting as you find me.” Now his dark eyebrows knit. “Why is that?”

He could read her thoughts. He could.

Almost, anyway.

Suddenly the world seemed to tilt crazily in front of her.

Lucien reached out and grabbed her around the waist, pulling her body against his. The feel of his hard muscles through the thin material of her nightgown caused her swaying universe to right itself.

But only a little.

Now his voice was a soothing tether. “I can understand why you’re upset…”

“No.” She craned her neck to look up at him. She was ashamed of the tears that were swimming in her eyes, but there wasn’t anything she could do to stop them. “I don’t think you can. A few hours ago I thought you were the best thing that ever happened to me. And now I just found out I never knew you at all.” Her conscience pricked her.

“And all right, you don’t really know me at all, either…but you aren’t even human.”

The sky lit up with a single brilliant streak of lightning and then gave a heaving shudder of thunder.

Then it began to rain. Fat, stinging drops that struck her head and shoulders.

Lucien said, “Meena.” He didn’t sound detached anymore. Now his voice, like the thunder, sounded angry and desperate. “I was human…once.” He’d turned so that his body blocked Meena’s from the rain, holding her in what dubious shelter the doorway to her bedroom offered from the downpour while the world continued to pitch sicken-ingly around her. Her dog, seeing them so close together, flew into a frenzy of snarls but didn’t seem to dare approach.

“Don’t you think I long to feel those things again?” Lucien asked her.

His voice was raw. He knew what he was-and clearly hated it.

But he had come to accept it…the exact same way, Meena knew in a moment of clarity, that she had come to accept what she was.

“Do you think I like what my father made me?” he asked her desperately. “No. But do you think I had any choice? I don’t know what unholy pact he made or who it was with…demons, witches, or the devil himself. All I know is that one night I died and woke to find myself…like this. He did the same to my brother Dimitri. He told us not to worry, because now we’d live forever. Unlike my mother…her death was what drove him to seek this grotesque half life for all of us.”

Meena stared up at him in horror from the shelter of his arms as behind him, the rain streamed down in a heavy curtain and thunder rolled relentlessly. She didn’t want to hear this. She didn’t want to hear any of it.

“Of course,” Lucien said with a wry smile, “it wasn’t as simple as that. There were…urges. I tried not to give in to them. But they were so strong. Father did nothing but encourage us, bring us…gifts. Dimitri, who had always been weak willed, didn’t care about letting the fever take over and allowing his baser instincts to rule him, slaughtering innocents and becoming more monster than man. But I…I don’t know. Maybe because I had the benefit of having been born of my mother, who, as you know, was rumored to have been part angel-”

“Lucien.”

She pitied him. She did. She raised a hand…she didn’t know why. Maybe to stroke his cheek.

She knew what he was. And she hated it.

But he was suffering.

He flinched before she could touch him and looked away, toward the rain.

“I’m not saying I’m a better man than my brother,” he said. “Or that my mother was a better woman than his. And I’m not saying that I couldn’t have done more to try to stop him and my father. I could have. I should have. Eventually I…did.”

He looked back at her, and his eyes were burning coals. Meena lowered her hand as hastily as if it had been burned.

“When my father was finally destroyed, and I became prince,” he said, “I told them all the killing had to stop.”

Meena didn’t want to hear it. The photos Alaric Wulf had shown her were fresh in her mind.

But she couldn’t just stand there while he broke down in shame in front of her, either. Especially as the storm lashed at his back, pelting them with a hurricane-like downpour.

Like he’d said-he might be a vampire now.

But he’d been human once.

“Come inside,” she whispered. “You’re getting soaked.”

He looked down at her, as if startled to see he was still holding her in his arms. Then his gaze focused with a laserlike intensity that she wasn’t sure she liked at all.

Was he seeing her finally as Meena, the woman he loved…or as his next meal?

She knew it might be the worst mistake she’d ever made in her life.

But she still opened the door to her bedroom.

Lucien followed her into the darkness.

“You think I’m a monster,” he said.

She couldn’t deny it.

So she feigned hospitality.

“I have a towel here somewhere,” she said as she lifted Jack Bauer, who’d followed them, still snarling, into the room. She deposited him inside the closet, grabbing a towel from there as well. Jack Bauer looked around confusedly at all of Meena’s shoes, then yipped, just once, as she closed the door. He’d be all right, she knew, in there. Safer than she was.

More important, no one would hear him, especially over the sound of the storm outside and the movie she could still hear blaring away in the living room.

“You did something to me.” Lucien accused her in a choked voice as she handed him the towel, then helped him shed his wet coat.

“What? I did something to you? I’m not the one who did anything,” Meena whispered incredulously, sinking to face him on the bed. “All I did was make the really big mistake of falling in love with you. Which, believe me, I am putting up there with my deepest, darkest regrets, like that perm I got in the eighth grade because I didn’t listen to Leisha, and going to the senior prom with Peter Delmonico. Okay? So just let’s chalk this whole thing up to one really bad decision and end it now. When it stops raining, you have to go. Trust me, I’m doing you a really big favor. Because one scream, and that guard in my living room will be in here like a shot to stake you.”