Page 573 of Flirting with Darkness

The thought chilled him.

Seconds later, he pushed the question from his mind.

Ghost frowned up the stone stairs leading to the front door.

Steep and plentiful, they were hewn of the same black, smooth rock as the walls and castle. The doors themselves were painted blood red. Black iron formed their hinges and adornments. Enormous black handles lived on each of the tall doors.

Each of those black handles also bore a lion’s head.

Lions or no, it all evoked more the feel of a prison than a home.

“Are you coming, brother?”

Ghost looked to where Serafina had paused in her climb of those black, strangely-smooth steps. She quirked an eyebrow at him, and he looked her over in the velvet and lace dress, the violet hat with black feathers that exactly matched her eyes. The dress and shoes matched their color as well, but instead of being charming, it somehow made her look strangely unreal, nearly as unreal as the apparition he’d encountered on the train.

For the first time, he felt real misgiving here.

He didn’t doubt his ability to defend himself.

At the same time, he felt whispers of what the ghost on the train warned him about.

There was some malevolence here, in this house… he could feel it even now.

He wondered again about what Serafina told him.

His father certainly couldn’t bekillingpeople here.

Not as part of his yearly Christmas party, at least.

Not with the Tsar’s family members here, possibly even Alexander II himself.

Count Aslanov might be bold. He might be insane… even evil, as the apparition warned him… but he couldn’t possibly be that stupid. The entirety of the European nobility couldn’t be that stupid or unobservant, either. Someone would have noticed. Someone would have talked. A servant, a family member, someone who knew someone who had gone missing.

“Brother?”

Serafina’s voice held a touch of warning that time.

Ghost reinforced his grip on the ivory-handled cane.

Exhaling, as much as in annoyance as anything, he began to follow her up the stairs and through those massive double doors.

* * *

They gave him a room.

It did not look like one they only recently aired out and readied.

The massive, four-poster bed was carved from the same black stone as the castle walls and much of its interior furnishings. The carpets and drapes were all blood red, giving it that same dungeon look as the outside of the castle, and much of the rest of Count Aslanov’s interior stylings. Yet the bedding was fresh and appeared almost new. Someone had lit a fire and opened the heavy drapes to the winter view, making the room warm, light-filled, almost cheerful.

That same someone, or perhaps someone else, left a large bowl of fruit on one table.

They left an even larger bouquet of hothouse flowers on another.

Books filled a number of built-in oak shelves near the tall windows, and someone had thoughtfully left a dressing robe and slippers on a couch near the fire. Bearskins covered the floor. Blankets and pillows covered each of the long couches and the enormous bed.

In the standing oak wardrobe, Ghost found formal attire in exactly his size, almost as if it had been tailored to fit his tall frame and long legs.

He even found polished shoes that looked like handmade Italian.

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