Dahlia had never had a house filled with laughter. Her home had scarcely had words at all spoken within its walls. Family was a word that had always seemed foreign to her. She had family, once. But they had never been close. There was always distance between them. Always blame, fear, hate. Dahlia had always been on her own and yet never once alone. A family presence there that taunted her but could never be what others had.
Her gaze sought that phantom image.
Only to be disappointed.
Dahlia took unneeded breath; fighting her own thoughts and her own feelings. Lacking the understanding to know that all she felt, all she thought, wasn't strictly her own. Dahlia couldn't know Janos's thoughts but with her sire so near she felt hints of what he felt.
Emotions that in a way, matched her own.
Though her thoughts raced, and her gaze drifted throughout the room seeking something, someone, that wasn’t there, her fingers never ceased to keep contact with the painting. As though if they were to fall away she’d lose some small piece of whatever she’d had before this. That life, so long gone, was still one that she understood better than what she had before her now.
His question drew her eyes to him again. Focusing on the vampire before her rather than the dead. The family she could touch instead of that which she couldn’t.
“She is dead.” Dahlia spoke; her tone without sadness or even misery. It was as it had always been. She couldn’t mourn someone who died before Dahlia even drew breath. Her sister, her twin, had always been a ghost. An image seen that no one else could. A voice that spoke always in her ear but couldn’t utter a word to their mother or father.
A voice Dahlia had been told for so very long wasn’t real.