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approbation of anyone amongst the patriarchs, had been the law of consent.
    It was pretty simple: no one, human or vampire, lord, servant, or slave, could be sexually touched without granting their partner a clear, enunciated expression of consent. Blood slaves were a grey area that wasn’t actually outlawed, but even the human who legally belonged to their masters couldn’t be forced into sex.
    It was clear that Vincent had completely ignored that law. Fay didn’t even seem to know what consent meant.
    “Anything on Adrian?”
    “Don’t pretend to care, brother. I know your opinion.”
    Mike was probably shrugging on the other end.
    “When you find him, you’ll tell him off, then you’ll get drunk together, kiss and make up. That’s a fact, not an opinion.”
    William sighed. He’d forgiven Adrian on too many occasions for his brother to believe anything he might say.
    But this time, it wasn’t only hearsay Adrian could brush off as exaggerated tales sprinkled with little fact, and the victim hadn’t been a stranger William could consider as an unfortunate but inconsequential bystander.
    It was a child he knew. He’d been there when he’d taken his first step, learnt to read. When he’d been accepted to the Academy, William had proudly paid for his tuition, refusing to acknowledge any protest from his employee. He’d been family – or something close to it. There was no doubt that William would have been considerably more enraged if something had happened to his siblings, but that was because Michael and Charlotte were supposed to live forever, while he’d accepted long ago that his employees had an expiry date. He had them for nine decades, at most.
    Not nineteen years.
    There would be no excuse, no forgiveness. There was only one thing awaiting Adrian now: eternal death. It had taken a while but his eyes were open and he saw that Adrian was a menace to their way of life.
     
    The phone call had put him in a bad mood, and William needed coffee like a starving sucker needed blood.
    His penthouse, at the top of the newest and highest skyscraper in Manhattan, had two floors; upstairs, above a modern curved staircase without banister, was his space – Charlotte might have intruded a few times, but no one else ever dared, not even the cleaners, which explained why it was so dusty up here.
    He needed to tidy up, or give in and let his staff take care of his room. The bathroom – it might be more accurate to call it a sauna – definitely needed some attention. He was pretty sure some new kind of bacteria might be growing in the tub he hadn’t used since the previous year.
    William sighed, stretching before heading into his seven-meter square shower – the dozen powerful jets fitted in his ceiling managed to wake him up eventually, so he got out, throwing a pair of slacks and a shirt on.
    Zeva always left his laundry on hangers, in front of his door, and it was exactly where the latest lot of clothing still hung.
    By now his brain was focused on one vital point.
    Coffee. Coffee, now.
    He was heading towards the kitchen when his sense of smell called him to the dining room instead; there, he made a bee-line for the pot of freshly brewed nectar of the gods – if there really was an Ambrosia, he was pretty sure it tasted exactly like the first espresso of the day.
    After downing it in one go, his eyes finally cleared up, and he noticed he wasn’t alone in the room.
    “Good evening,” he said, dropping a kiss on each of Zeva’s cheeks; a habit he’d picked up in France, somewhere in the eighteenth century.
    The housekeeper had blushed when she’d been a schoolgirl, and four decades later, she still turned bright red every time. 
    “What’s the occasion?”
    As the head of the dozen servants who catered to Charlotte and William – as well as Fay, now – Zeva had plenty to do, so she was only too happy to leave the cooking to the chef he’d hired, but from time to time, she got her hands dirty. He