Victoria gaped at her. “Why on earth haven’t you accepted? We could be planning your wedding.”

Melly tapped Victoria lightly with her folded fan. “But it’s so much more fun to plan yours, my dear. What about Mr. Killington? You already have a title, and he-”

“Has no hair, and breath so bad I’d swear it’s rotting his teeth. No, thank you, Mother,” Victoria replied, back to the formality.

“You aren’t serious about that Monsieur Vioget, are you? He hasn’t asked you to marry him, has he?” Melly’s horror had gone from dying her hair green to shaving it all off and dashing through Almack’s naked.

“As a matter of fact, he has,” Victoria said breezily. “Excuse me, Mother. I think I see…” And she let her voice trail off as she hurried away, grinning at her mother’s dismay.

To be fair, Sebastian hadn’t actually asked her to marry him. But that didn’t bother Victoria one whit. After what had happened with Phillip, who, like most of London, had been unaware that vampires existed-let alone of his wife’s calling as a Venator-Victoria had realized that she would never marry again. She couldn’t put someone she loved in danger as she had done to Phillip-although men like Sebastian and Max were already in danger by virtue of who they were.

Just as she was.

But she’d also recently realized that, as Illa Gardella, and the last of the direct line from Gardeleus, the first Venator, it was incumbent upon her to continue that direct lineage. Certainly, there were far-flung branches of the Gardella family throughout the world, where Venators born to the family legacy were called… but the most powerful of them, and the leader of the vampire hunters, descended only from the direct line. Aunt Eustacia and her brother, Victoria’s grandfather, had been the last two directly descended Venators. But he had declined the legacy, passing his powers on to Lady Melly, who had also chosen not to be a Venator, and who now lived in blissful ignorance of the undead.