Even though I pen these words years after the last episode, in Bitsy and Stuart time, only moments have passed.
Michael. Bitsy's inner voice and thoughts clung to those two syllables like a talisman. How did things go so wrong? So fast? For the first time since his disappearance twelve years earlier when they were both nineteen, she felt a spark of anger ignite within her soul. Anger at him. For leaving.
Michael, the new Earl of Carpathia since his parents' deaths when Bitsy was just shy of her nineteenth birthday—murders—at the hands of the Bathorys, the same night they dispatched Bitsy's parents and aunt, was her center, her rock.
And, then? He was ripped away from her. Oh, nothing as catastrophic as his death, and nothing as shattering as her infidelity to him. One day he was there, and the next he was gone, ostensibly to broker a treaty with a band of Wiccans, who seemed to be less loyal to the Bathorys than other witches and warlocks.
Weeks passed, and nothing was heard from him. The Wiccans knuckled under—again—to Tracy Bathory's cruel nature. Word came to Bitsy that Michael never made it to that corner of Siberia that housed the Wiccans.
Bitsy realized, as did Chris, Michael's best friend, that if the Bathorys had killed Michael, that if he were dead, the mother-daughter duo of evil would have spared no expense to have the pleasure of parading his broken body before Bitsy.
As time passed, Bitsy, the war strategist and the Vampirans' best hope for victory in a stalemate two-front war, gave up on life. The change was gradual. But, as it became apparent that Michael was not returning, she began to refuse to eat and started singing to herself and wringing her hands at times, often in meetings with her advisors.
It was a last resort that Katya, her baby sister, had her committed to the asylum. By that time, Bitsy was catatonic and unresponsive. Only after signing the paperwork did Katya realize—too late—that the asylum was owned by the Bathorys, that she had actually placed her beloved older sister in a trap expertly crafted by the Bathorys.
For the next year, as the Vampiran defense steadily crumbled without Bitsy's masterful handling, she was offered up to Tracy Bathory's steadily more creative forms of mental torture. At the end of the year, she was pushed out of her tiny cell, scrawled with her incoherent ramblings, into the bright sunlight of a war-torn street in Jasper.
And realized that there was still no Michael.
Now, twelve years later, as she reached for his ever-present 8x10 image, a duplicate of the photograph of the innocently smiling nineteen-year-old who had stolen her teenage heart that graced her desk at her office in Transylvania, that rested on the right side of her desk in Paris, her vision blurred to the point that she could no longer make out her trembling, scarlet-tipped fingers.
She clutched him briefly to her chest, now heaving with silent sobs, before deliberately placing the photograph of her first love face-down in the lower right-hand drawer of her desk.
In doing so, she said goodbye to many things. Her innocence. Her love of Michael. The girl she used to be and was no longer. And Michael himself.
A knock interrupted her nearly melodramatic reverie. Briskly shaking her head, she pulled herself together mentally before barking a "Come in" to Marcos's hesitant knock.
There was a hardness to the steely grayish-green dry-eyed gaze that met Marcos's baby blues. Dispassionately, she catalogued the differences between the two brothers.
They were of the same height and facial features, but that is where the similarities ended. The man who would-have-been king but abdicated in favor of joining the priesthood in the hope of not descending into the same path of lechery and debauchery that had plagued his father's side of the family for centuries and had already, at the ripe old age of eighteen, skewed his brother into being a new convert to the cult of Dionysus, had a...kinder...look to his eyes that Stuart simply didn't have.
A few months earlier, Marcos had returned home defrocked, by his own choosing rather than the Church's. Whispers abounded that maybe he had succumbed to his family's base tendencies, but, from what Bitsy could see, that concept was laughable.
Marcos was an innocent...a babe in the words in terms of the sensuality his two-years-younger brother wallowed in. And that she now wallowed in.
Bitsy, in front of the ten years older Marcos, suddenly felt ancient.
"Erm. Is everything okay, Miss Mason?" A hesitant query to match his knock moments before.
Bitsy glanced around before responding. All evidence of her early cam-play with Stuart had been safely put away. "Of course, Marcos. But, please, as I've said several times, call me Alyssa."
Marcos's kind smile was blinding. Just once, she wished she could inspire that open affection in Stuart. To bask in that much warmth from her Master would surely be her undoing, however.
"Alyssa. I'm sorry."
"Is there something wrong, Marcos?" Even though he towered over her, his bulk did not intimidate her, unlike her Master's. It was obvious that something was wrong with the Duke.
"Yes. No. I don't know." Clearly indecisive, Marcos began pacing before her desk. Then, with a heavy sigh, he collapsed in one of the chairs in front of her desk. "It's my brother," he let out with a groan of impatience.
Bitsy gulped. "Your brother?"
Marcos nodded. "You're the only person that I've said this to, but I came home because of him." Marcos barked a short laugh. "I could choose to save a million souls. Or I could choose to save my brother's soul."
"And you chose his." A statement. Not a question.
Another nod. "Yes. His behavior in the last couple of years has become more erratic. More women. More debauchery. More dealings with the Bathorys. He's spiraling out of control."
Bitsy cleared her throat before responding with a lie. "I don't know your brother that well," she paused thinking sardonically to herself, only intimately. "But, from what I've seen in the news and in the gossip rags, he seems as if he knows what he's doing." Playing the devil's advocate, she continued, "Are you sure it's not just you being big brother and worrying for no reason about little brother?"
Marcos appeared to deliberate on that for a few moments before steepling his fingers together and tapping his nose. Now, he appeared every second of his age instead of his almost youthful hesitancy and eagerness that usually enrobed him. "I had almost convinced myself of that. But then," he broke off.
"But then," Bitsy prompted when it appeared he wasn't going to finish his tantalizing teaser statement.
"But then, he made a deal with Tracy Bathory concerning Lady Bitsy." He appeared to want to explain.
Bitsy, as Alyssa, held up her hand to stall him. "You mean that...incarceration...that recently made the news?"
Marcos met her gaze, his normally warm gaze resembling blue ice chips. "Yes. I'm caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, Tristan is my brother. On the other, Lady Bitsy's fiancé is my best friend and cousin."
In attempting to maintain a neutral appearance, Bitsy glossed over his use of the present tense regarding Michael. She tried to appear understanding. "Of course," she responded, "you are trying to be a help to all involved."
Now, Marcos shook his head in a definite no. "It's not that simple. I know Tristan better than anyone on this planet. I knew, or rather I hoped, that since Lady Bitsy was Michael's fiancé that my brother would consider her off limits. You see," he intimated, his voice dropping to a whisper, "he's been obsessed with her for years. Almost stalker obsessed."
A maelstrom of emotions slammed into Bitsy instantly. "How? What? I'm sorry, but what?"
"I knew you would understand right away," Marcos beamed again while nodding appreciatively. "My brother, called by many the most infamous lecher of his generation, is absolutely infatuated with Lady Bitsy, Ice Queen. Fiancee of our cousin. And, up until Tristan got his claws in her, the ideal image of chastity. But all of that is irrelevant."
"Irrelevant?" Bitsy parroted while her mind reeled. Too much. Too much. Too many thoughts plagued her mind in those moments.
"Well, not irrelevant, but made so by the truly horrific thing he has done." Marcos appeared lost in his own dour musings.
"Which is?"
Marcos buried his face in his hands, then rubbed his fingers over his cheeks and eyes as if to clean his thoughts from his mind. "Even though he has taken her, raped her, enslaved her, been obsessed with her for years, that is not the truly terrifying fact. He doesn't appear to be able to stop."
"Stop?" I've really got to stop this, Bitsy thought. I'm only able to parrot back the last word of his statements. I must focus.
A harsh, bitter laugh ripped from Marcos's mouth. "My brother's attention span concerning women, especially once he gets what he wants, is miniscule. But, in Lady Bitsy's case, after all he has done to corrupt her, he doesn't appear to be ready to move on."
Bitsy decided a slanting glance might be an appropriate reaction. "And that's a bad thing?"
"It is when it involves an interaction that is related in any manner with Tracy Bathory. The sentence is to last a year. I guarantee that if she realizes that her malice has backfired and resulted in happiness for either Tristan or Lady Bitsy that she will do something to destroy them." After a deep, shuddering breath, he addressed the person he knew to be Alyssa Mason. "That's why I don't think you should let her have any involvement in the IPD. She's poison. She's worse than the evil you are trying to fight."
Inwardly, Bitsy couldn't help but agree. After all, she was living the fate worse than death that the Duchess had commanded. And she knew better than most of the festering malevolence that Tracy Bathory was capable of. Outwardly, she snapped, "Well, I haven't contacted her back yet, have I?"
Her tone seemed to snap him out of his rueful funk. "No. You haven't." His boyish eagerness was back. "But enough about her and Tristan and Lady Bitsy. I really came to ask you something."
"Hmm," she voiced, lost in her own turbulent imaginings.
Marcos took that for acquiescence. "Would you consider having dinner with me tonight?"
Bitsy snapped to attention again. "Are you asking me out?" The concept was almost laughable, but not for the reasons that his ego would be hurt by.
"Um, yeah."
Hoping to let him down gently, she demurred. "It really isn't a great idea. I mean, we work together. I'm technically your boss."
For the first time, in either guise—Bitsy or Alyssa, she recognized his family's rakishness in Marcos. If there had been no Stuart, and no Michael, she could easily have felt herself giving in. The heated glances from someone as gentle as Marcos would someday be a woman's undoing.
He walked over to her, knelt until his eyes were level with his. Even though her mind was occupied with thoughts of her Master, she could feel herself responding to his brother's own hypnotic gaze. Drawn in, compelled, she almost missed his reply. "I will quit my position, then. You are worth it." He was so close that his breath beat a caressing tattoo on her lips. Her tongue darted out, and his lips swooped the final millimeters to claim hers.
