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“Astonishing.” Keeping his hand in hers, she stood and pushed her chair away from the table, turning in as much of a circle as she could without releasing him. “And now?”

“Still nothing,” he said grimly. “If you wouldn’t mind removing it, my love? Rather quickly, if you please, for the sake of my nerves.”

“If you insist.” Regretfully, Margaret pulled the laces free from around her throat. Silver folds slipped loose around her, and she gathered the supple material safely under her free arm as she squeezed her husband’s hand. “You see? I’m completely safe.”

He let out a shuddering breath, his shoulders slumping. “And did you know you would be safe when you fastened that thing around your shoulders?”

“Don’t be foolish. How could I possibly have known? I’ve never even heard of this artifact before.” A giddy smile pulled at her lips; she nearly bounced as she continued, “Do you have any idea how extraordinary that is? For an artifact with such powerful illusory properties to be entirely forgotten—or never written about in the first place?”

“It sounds,” said Lord Riven tightly, “like a perilous secret. And speaking of perilous...!” As a fair-haired vampire, her husband’s face tended towards pallor even at the best of times. Now, his cheeks were chalk white as he battled some strong emotion.

Margaret gave his chest a sympathetic pat as he dealt with whatever masculine nerves were fretting at him. Her own mind was already racing down a number of different intriguing paths. Forcing herself to be practical, she focused on ranking them by priority. “First, I’ll need to find out whether I can access the Imperial court library’s supernatural archives tomorrow morning or whether they’re as tightly guarded as the Parisian catacombs were. If they are, I’ll have to request King Thomas’s assistance, and then⁠—”

“Margaret.” Her husband’s free hand closed around her shoulder, his other hand holding hers tight. “Has it even occurred to you that, for all you knew five minutes ago, that cloak could have been a magical attack upon your person?”

She blinked up at him, startled out of her chain of thought. “What in the world are you talking about? It was harmless.”

“We know that now,” he said through his teeth, “but we didn’t then. We still don’t know who left it for you, or why. Remember, someone is going to a great deal of trouble, threatening every crowned head of Europe in an attempt to disrupt the private peace talks behind the balls. As soon as they realize why King Thomas summoned you, they may well see you as a threat to be eliminated by any means necessary.”

“Oh, pfft!” Margaret was a scholar, not a political figure. No one could possibly see her as a threat except her academic rivals...who should.

Still, her husband looked genuinely concerned, so she said soothingly, “I’m sure whoever is behind this is far too busy with world affairs to bother speculating about one more pair of British aristocrats who’ve come to visit the Grand Exposition.”

“Really? Even when one of them is a famous scholar of the supernatural whose notoriety has spread across the continent?” Shaking his head, Lord Riven drew her even closer, until her face was lightly pressed against his chest and his arms were clamped around her. His breath ruffled her hair as he murmured, “I know there’s no point in asking you not to follow every enticing new trail of information laid before you. But, my love, please remember that you shine far brighter than you realize...and for all your strength of mind, your body is still mortal, so I would very much appreciate you holding out some care for your own safety. For my sake, if not yours?”

Oh, dear. Margaret had become so accustomed to a solitary life of the mind that even now, over a year after they’d met, she sometimes forgot that he could be hurt through her own risks. With a deep pang of tenderness, she nudged aside his evening jacket, grateful once again for the velvet curtains’ privacy, and kissed the thin white linen of his shirt, just above the V of his waistcoat and below his cravat. “I promise I will take care,” she murmured, “but remember: this cloak was not an attack. It seems to have been a gift from a well-wisher—and it may prove to be extremely useful at tomorrow night’s ball.”

“Mmm.” He sounded deeply dissatisfied, even as one big hand shifted to caress her upswept hair. “But which well-wisher sent it in the first place? If it were our king, he would have given it directly to us or sent a royal messenger. There would be no need for any ruse to bring it here.”

“True.” Margaret frowned. “It must have come from someone else who knew we were coming—and who waited, tonight, to see where we would go after we met the king. But who else could have known? Our summons was meant to be perfectly discreet.”

“Which means, knowing our particular king and his tendencies...” As Lord Riven finally let her go, he released a weary sigh. “It could be almost anyone in Vienna, if His Majesty’s tongue was sufficiently loosened in his cups.”

“Indeed.” Margaret’s eyes narrowed as she stepped back and folded the cloak into a surprisingly small, neat pile—so small, in fact, that it could easily fit into a lady’s elegant reticule for safekeeping in the midst of even the most dazzling royal gathering. “In other words, there is no way of surmising yet who sent this...but tomorrow night’s ball promises to be far more interesting than any others we’ve attended.”

Unfortunately, the doors of the Imperial court library remained firmly closed and locked for hours after Margaret’s arrival the next morning.

It was always a challenge to align her waking schedule with that of her nocturnal husband without losing all opportunities for daytime research. After so many days of joint travel, though, it took even more effort than usual to remain awake as she waited, pacing impatiently outside the broad, curving wing of the Hofburg Palace where the library was located.

If only she had more tea to carry her through!

Still, the promise of those vast and impressive archives was enough to keep her enthusiasm high. When she stepped into the first room and spotted the famously giant, gleaming bank of card indexes that catalogued the library’s unique inventory, she had to bite back a moan of pure delight.

A librarian’s voice stopped her before she could take more than a single step towards those fascinating card indexes full of information.

“No foreign visitors allowed, Madam, without written permission from the emperor.”

Augh! Margaret could imagine no crueler form of torture than to view such an immense treasure hoard of knowledge...and be restrained from accessing any of it.

Needless to say, she did not surrender without a fight. Under the wearily disdainful eye of that first librarian, she immediately sent a message to her own king, who was housed in another wing of the sprawling palace, requesting a royal referral.

It took over two hours of fruitless pacing under the high, arched ceiling of the library—under the increasingly suspicious gazes of a whole group of librarians who had gathered in the interim to glare at her en masse—before she finally surrendered to the fact that King Thomas was clearly sleeping off his own late night and wouldn’t be of any assistance.

By the time she finally gave up and returned to her apartment in the eighth district, there were distressingly few hours left before she had to wake again for an overwhelmingly social evening. So, she was still yawning painfully that evening as she stepped before her husband into the small black fiacre that would convey them from their tucked-away side street to the broad Ringstrasse that led back to the first district and the Hofburg Palace, the site of all her earlier frustration.

Every one of Vienna’s numbered districts spiraled out from the elite first district like the curling of a snail’s shell. The Hofburg stretched its own sprawling stone body across that first district’s center with numerous spreading wings, archways and statue-flanked entrances seeded through the cobblestoned streets like an inescapable reminder of which family held all the power in this city. As all that Margaret had been allowed to examine in the Habsburgs’ famous library that morning had been the grandiloquent paintings created in that family’s honor, she was in no mood to appreciate the splendor of their vast imperial home nor the elegantly fashioned tall buildings along the way.

“Ugh.” She let out a groan as the fiacre turned off the broad ring road and was immediately caught up in an unmoving clog of other conveyances in the narrow, enclosed streets of the first district. “It would be so much simpler to walk to the palace from here!”