Dark Song

A slumber for the ages, hidden within your retreat;

Awaken from your nightmare, feel the ground beneath your feet.

Ferro looked down at the top of Elisabeta’s dark, gleaming head of silky hair. He could feel fear coming off of her in waves. His woman was no mouse. She thought herself closed off to him, terrified that he would think she wasn’t worth anything at all to a man as “ferocious” as she thought him. She considered him a true Carpathian warrior and he supposed he was, although he didn’t think much about it. He had passed far too many centuries hunting and destroying vampires. It was simply what he did.

She had been little more than a child when Sergey Malinov had taken her from her home and placed her in a cage away from the world. Everyone had thought she was dead. Her brother, Traian, had searched for centuries for her, but no trace of her had been found. No one suspected the Malinovs were in any way connected to her disappearance. Sergey had hidden her from his own brothers. Not even they had suspected she existed.

The little glimpses into the past Ferro had caught in her mind were more than disturbing. They were horrific, and he’d encountered many terrible things in his lifetime. She was so alone and could only rely on the vampire who had taken her prisoner for everything needed to sustain her life. It was no wonder she was terrified to go out into the world.

Right now, as they paused before stepping from the healing grounds into the actual gardens of the compound where the main house, the lake and the smaller homes were located, he knew the wide-open space, without the bars of her cage, made her feel a little sick and disoriented. He pulled her close to his body, beneath his shoulder, to give her more of a feeling of being surrounded. He locked his arm around her waist while they stood there, just looking over the gardens.

“It’s really quite beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked, to distract her.

He’d never really noticed the beauty of nature, at least not in centuries. He hadn’t seen in color until he’d heard her voice, that low moaning beneath the healing grounds when she’d called out to try to keep from having to emerge to be fed. Now, the various shades of color on the leaves intrigued him. The blue of the lake, the surface shimmering silver and frost in the moonlight.

What he really wanted to do was pick her up in his arms, take to the sky and carry her back to the monastery secreted high in the Carpathian Mountains. He would have no problem telling his beautiful, fractured woman what to do and guiding her gently into the world they would create together, but he was her lifemate and he provided what she needed. She needed to know that she had her own power.

After centuries of being enslaved by a vampire and treated so cruelly, Elisabeta would never be like Andor’s wife, Lorraine, a very modern woman who Ferro respected and admired but would never be compatible with. He wouldn’t want that. He couldn’t live with that. He was too protective, but he didn’t want Elisabeta to feel fear, not of the world around her and never of him. He would seek every solution possible to figure out a way to help her find what was taken from her—her own power.

Already a plan had formed in his mind. He’d allowed Elisabeta to stay hidden in the healing grounds longer than was strictly necessary while he thought out his strategy to find a way to empower her. In the beginning, he knew the world around her would be too big for her. After being in such a confined space, just being out in the open would be disorienting and frightening. He would have to go slow, introducing her to small portions of the compound rather than all of it at once.

Everyone was eager to meet her, but she couldn’t be overwhelmed with too many people. He would have to shield her, although he knew others would misinterpret what he was doing, thinking he was keeping his fragile lifemate from them because he was an ancient and held to the old ways. Opinions didn’t bother him in the least. He was ancient and he did hold to the old ways.

Ferro also had a strange foreboding. Elisabeta had been given blood by several of the ancients before he had discovered he was her lifemate. That had been an accident. He had heard her moaning. That soft little sound of distress had opened an entire new world for him, but it had also triggered his very sensitive alarms. There was danger stalking his woman—and it wasn’t coming only from the master vampire. He felt a vague threat to her coming from inside the compound. From someone he trusted. Someone who should be protecting her. The threat was so vague, almost as if it wasn’t fully formed, but it was enough to put him on alert.