“You care too much about what other people think.”
“I have to care about what other people think!” Tatyana leaned forward. “Some nights every eye in every room is on me?—”
“They’re not.” Anna waved a careless hand.
“They often are,” Tatyana countered. “Unfortunately they are. I am a terrin of the Poshani people, and now I’m going to be some kind of Russian vampire empress. Every eye is often on me, Mama.”
Anna shook her head and rolled her eyes to the sky. “Your grandmother will be rolling in her grave.”
“I know,” Tatyana said. “Trust me, I know.”
Never mind. Why had she come to her mother’s house? What was this maternal comfort she’d been idealizing? Maybe she needed a Poshani mother.
No, she had Poshani sisters, and they were just as brutal as her mother.
“I love him.” Tatyana closed her eyes. “But sometimes I hate him too. Why does he have to be so…”
“So?”
“So…” Overbearing. Proud. Stubborn. Egotistical. Domineering.
Exactly who he needed to be.
Tatyana put a hand over her eyes and took a deep breath. What had she taken on? She felt like an idiot.
It was already too much to be the leader of a large group of people who trusted her to make their lives bearable, and then she went and attached herself to a vampire king because she foolishly fell in love.
That was her, wasn’t it? Making promises she was completely incapable of fulfilling.
Find millions of dollars your daughter stole from you?No problem.
Become the leader of a huge, roaming vampire clan?Of course.
Form an eternal blood bond with the leader of the Kievan Rus?How hard could that be?
Her mother was right. Becoming a vampire had made her more stupid.
“At some point I am going to make a mistake so big,” she whispered, “that I won’t be able to fix it. And then what do I do?”
“You’ll ask for help,” Anna said. “Which you hate to do, but you’ll ask him for help. And he will move heaven and earth for you. And you will accept it.”
Tatyana lifted her chin. “Then I will become just another vampire who wants something from him.”
“No, then you will be his wife—a woman who trusts him,” Anna said. “You will be the woman who chooses to be vulnerable. And there is nothing weak about that.”
“When did my mother get a donkey?”Tatyana was bundled up, feeding carrots to a tousle-headed animal in the barn who had woken up the moment she sensed an easy mark.
“Oh, just a while back.” Marko was one half of the couple that helped Anna run the house and the property. “You’re lucky she doesn’t mind vampires. Some of them do.”
He and his wife Marie had been connected to immortals back in Kyiv before they had to move, so happily Tatyana didn’t have to hide her true nature around him.
“She never had any big animals on the farm except for Dymka.”
Her mother’s massive farm dog had taken to Marko and Marie immediately, moving into their house. Probably as a protest to the diet that Anna had started Dymka on.
Marko reached over and patted the donkey’s back. “Betty’s a sweet little thing, and she loves it when I take her in the forest.”
“The forest?” She looked at him. “Why?” Weren’t there even larger animals in the forest?
