That night Dracula stood on the ceiling above Tryphaena's bed and watched her sleep.
The dress from before was draped over the chair to her dresser and the necklace lay gleaming in the moonlight in front of it.
He crossed his arms as he stared at it.
The necklace, it all came back to the necklace.
He began to pace the supporting beam in an attempt to stop looking at it; he prided himself on knowing his own mind, but was it possible that there was something about himself that he did not know?
When had the girl in the bed become so important to him?
He glanced at her, girl no longer, a young woman now.
Or was that the point?
When had she stopped being Tryphaena and become his Tryphaena?
For she was his, he would not let her go, yet at the same time he did not wish to dominate her in the way he had his brides, she was too important to him for that.
She did not deserve to share his fate, she was pure, she was unique; she was…his angel.
He groaned a little at the thought that those words had slipped out when he was talking to her before.
He remembered what Verona had said earlier, that he could feel but that his care was limited. In a way she was right, he could care, he did care, but at the same time it was limited, but not in the way they supposed. It was limited to Tryphaena.
The irony was that his brides had discovered this before he had; perhaps being female they had the advantage. Or perhaps their jealous natures made them fancy attachments when there were none, only if that were true they had miscalculated.
In seeking to make Tryphaena believe that he did not care for her they had only succeeded in making him come to an understanding of how much he did care for her.
How much he loved her.
He closed his eyes at the impossible thought, "So I can feel after all," he murmured.
The passage of time had caused his feelings to become negligible, to the point where even he considered them nonexistent.
Tryphaena had changed all that, from that first night when he had first taken her in he had felt something; at first it was responsibility, even a type of doting that had eventually blossomed into love.
He looked back down at her, admiring her beauty as she lay bathed in the moonlight, how ironic that he had discovered he had a heart, only to have it broken.
Thanks to his brides she believed him devoid of feeling, though she may have thought that anyway as she was in love with someone else.
With that in mind and under the control of an emotion that even he could not explain he silently dropped down beside the dresser and scooped the necklace into his pocket.