Page 572 of Flirting with Darkness

Perhaps in soul altogether.

Then again, she’d had a lot more exposure to their father than he had.

Whatever the case, Serafina herself felt increasingly irrelevant to him. All she’d done is impress upon him the reality that he likely wouldn’t leave his father’s house alive.

He definitely wouldn’t leave without blood being spilled.

A lot of blood.

He just hoped he would take the old man with him.

8

THE CASTLE

They arrived perhaps two hours later.

Ghost waited for the footman to help Serafina out of the carriage. He followed behind, waving off the proffered hand and using his ivory-tipped can.

Upon emerging from that perfumed darkness, he blinked in the early afternoon light.

Immediately, he looked up.

He had seen paintings before of the grounds, even a few sketches of the interior from one of his father’s previous Christmas balls. Those sketches depicted enormous, decorated, candle-covered trees inside the great banquet hall, and in the gardens below the back terrace. Ghost had seen woodcuts of a large fountain on that same terrace, a carved stone in the center of a pouncing lion. More stone lions stood at the top of sloping lawns that stretched as far as the perspective would show. Reportedly, statues of yet more lions could be found among his many flower gardens once the snows melted.

Now, Ghost found himself staring at two enormous marble lions practically the instant he could focus his eyes.

Life-sized and disconcertingly realistic, they perched on their haunches on either side of the stairs leading to the front door.

Lions sat like gargoyles along the balustrade railing on a balcony above.

More lions sat at the corner of each high wall.

Despite the research he’d done in coming here, and in the years prior, Ghost found himself looking over the castle with new eyes.

For it was a castle.

It appeared as both fortress and adornment in one forbidding breath.

Whoever built it, clearly they designed the exterior with the intention to intimidate.

The lions were only a small part of that.

High black walls loomed over the courtyard, merging into an exterior wall made of the same bleak stone. That castle wall embraced the courtyard, and ended in a tall, elaborate iron gate a few hundred yards behind him.

Ghost already noted the carriage passed through three gates on its way to the castle’s entrance. The first of those took them from the main road to a private track away from the public thoroughfare. The second gate took them into the estate’s interior grounds, and had a high wall that stretched seemingly without end to either side.

The third gate, the final one, protected the castle itself.

Ghost didn’t fully get the point of it, given the size of the lands behind the house.

It seemed inconceivable that anyone could havethatmany hounds.

It would take several large packs to guard even a fraction of the estate, and that didn’t take into account waterways, nor other natural impediments to building a wall. Nor did it take into account the lake said to occupy a quarter of his father’s holdings.

Surely no one, even one with as much money as Count Aslanov, would be so paranoid as to lock down every foot and dimple of land that he owned? His newly freed serfs couldn’t possibly all enter and leave through the same locked gates? Simply to reach their leased lands? Accessing their own homes only with express permission from the master?

Or did they never leave?

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