His son clung to him as he hadn't since childhood, and he could feel the shudders running through him. Graf von Krolock caught the unfamiliar whiff of ugly, cheap scent on him, and wet iron. A rusty stain had bloomed around his shirt collar, damp with blood-tinged sweat. He steadied Herbert as best he could, who was quaking with hysterical little gasps as speech failed him.

"I told you to stay home. You ran all the way here?"

To be seen in the street in such distress, the son and heir of a respected elder, might have disastrous repercussions. Even as a child, a warm child, his son wouldn't have shown this much unbridled weakness; steady feeding on English soil had made him free with his tears and his emotional displays.

"Yes," he whimpered, raising his head. "They were out in the street. They set up stakes-- von Klatka--"

Johannes von Krolock felt as if his core had gone to ice.

"Where were you? Surely you weren't detained." The fact that his son was standing before him, not writhing with his guts hanging impaled on the public thoroughfare, confirmed this without answer. Discretion was not Herbert's strong suit, and previous interactions with the Carpathian Guard had not been friendly.

Some of Herbert's composure had returned; the disarray of his hair was finally remedied, and he caught sight of those grey eyes tightly shut, as if fending off a headache. "I wouldn't g--" He swallowed. "Go to places like that, daddy. But they were impaling people just for being there. Not just the patrons, the b-boys--" He pushed away, nauseous.

Of course the boy would be disturbed. But as an elder in his own right, child of a trusted lieutenant, and discreet enough not to be visiting infamous mollyhouses about town-- and compared to flamboyant degenerates like Vardalek, he was the model of sober restraint. It was the violence that troubled him then, surely. The two had done their fair share of father-and-son dispensation of justice in their time, been unholy terrors, but the Regent's favorite execution methods reduced him to a quaking newborn. Dracula's righteous anger hadn't been directed at pretty sodomites like his son; mostly harmless, or at least, no more destructive than their conventional counterparts. Johannes had willingly facilitated it, both to keep his favor and to be rid of the the brutes who'd warranted such action in the first place. Thugs and animals. Herbert at least made a show of wooing his meals.

Graf von Krolock sunk back into his chair, feeling his own head begin to ache.
"Contain yourself; it's only politics. Ţepeş means to take care of dissenters.. Falling back on the old ways--"

"Old ways?" Herbert was evidently himself again, judging by the shriek of outrage this elicited. "He's turning into a damned Turk himself! You've been to his little shows at court, you've been offered some pretty Vienna choirboy of his for your lap, it's all right if it's one of his-"

"And if I'd taken what I'd been offered, he would have kept note of it for whenever he begun to tire of me. Taking advantage of his subject's moral outrage is easier than an overt play for power, and what goes on in those houses is hardly as innocent as the sharing of blood."

"I've been to brothels." The set of his jaw showed his defiance. " You're the one who sent me to them."

"And if you'dve gone there to bugger children, I'd have strangled you while you were still breathing. You can't possibly have sympathy for the patrons of these places."

"To hell with their patrons. One of their newborns was my get!" Lashing out with one of his fists, splintering the wood of the mantel. His muscles were steely-tight; the transformation from sobbing wreck to little hellion reading through loud and clear. There was a looking-glass on the mantelpiece, which only set him off further on a streak of highly creative curses and more destruction. "What's the use of a title if the Guard can still ruin my things?"

That explained some of it.

"Such are the hazards of sowing wild oats," Graf von Krolock said, reproachfully. "I didn't know you had a new favorite. I'd have warned them off the poor boy."

His tirade stopped, in its place an uncomfortable silence.

"He wasn't a favorite," Herbert proceeded with a little more caution. "He was just mine.

"And I told you not to make toys of people like that. A prostitute, honestly. He would hardly have been suitable for you. You know that."

"Oh, I told him to wear my mark..." All the storm gone out of him, he crumpled. The silence after bore out painfully long.

There was to be no grand show of grief.