Dima didn’t actually enjoy his own company at the moment any more than anyone else did, but he was the only one without a choice. He had to stick around regardless.
Last night he’d had panic, anger, and more panic to occupy his evening, and during most of the day he’d taken advantage of the blessed oblivion of sleep, but at the moment it was 11:00
P.M. and he was about as sleepy as a camp sentry surrounded by a forest full of Turks preparing an ambush. He felt even jumpier than one.
Part of that could come from the way he’d spent the first half of his evening. Just after dusk, once everyone was awake, he had sat down with Misha, Graham, and Rafe, their wives—who refused to be excluded for some reason—and Ava to review the plan for her trip to Yelizaveta’s hideout. Ava had wanted to keep things simple. Go in, see what the bitch wanted, poke around, and leave, and she hadn’t taken well to his suggestions that things just might not go that smoothly. She wasn’t used to people who didn’t automatically agree with her assessment of herself as undisputed queen of the universe, and the idea that Yelizaveta might be part of that small group seemed hard for her to grasp. It was almost as though, while she understood the words when he said them, somewhere between her eardrum and her frontal lobe, the message got lost or garbled. In her mind, everything would go smoothly because for her, everything usually did.
When he’d reminded her of Friday night, she’d actually gotten a bit offended. He still hadn’t decided if it was because she was embarrassed that she hadn’t looked at things that way, or because she honestly took offense to the idea of not always having things her own way. With Ava, he had quickly discovered, either was a possibility.
It was also a possibility that she had gotten offended when he had tried to forbid her from taking part in the entire operation.
Dima sighed and flipped idly through the television channels from his spot propped up against the arm of a sofa that was comfortable, but too small for his frame. It needed at least another foot added to the end to accommodate someone his size. Even half-sitting, he had to prop his feet up on the opposite arm to keep from having to bend his knees. He could think of a million other ways he would rather be spending the night, but then again, he’d already thought of at least half of them while he’d been sitting with the others and reluctantly agreeing that Ava’s invitation gave them the best opportunity they were likely to get to do a thorough casing of Yelizaveta’s building.
Samantha had traced the address on the note Ava had received and provided Graham with an interesting leg up on their inquiries. It turned out that, as befitted her taste, Yelizaveta had not been content to rent an apartment or a building in Manhattan or wait for a place she wanted to come onto the market for sale. Instead, she had decided where she wanted to set up her base—Fifth Avenue—and picked out the building she wanted. Since it wasn’t on the market—as few classical town-house mansions in the heart of Museum Mile were—she had simply sent her people to kill their people and moved right in.
A remnant of old Knickerbocker New York, Wadsworth House had been the home of a wealthy early-nineteenth-century industrialist by the name of Russell Morgan Wadsworth II, who had built it for his wife, who had promptly snubbed his gift by dying. It had remained a private home for many years, stayed miraculously in the hands of the family, and wound up, situated as it was between the Cooper-Hewitt and The Jewish Museum, just blocks from the Met and across the street from Central Park, something of a museum in its own right, a privately owned house occupied by a wealthy, aging eccentric with a passion for lending his home for charity functions and then criticizing their catering. Jonathan Russell Wadsworth-Chatham enjoyed equal fame with this magnificent house, and reveled in their notoriety.
Or at least he had. Since about sixteen weeks ago, no one had seen or heard from him at all. Not even when the Avery Foundation for African Refugees had hired Passionate Affair—the company owned by his former lover Geoffrey Orchand—to cater the event and then hosted it just down the street in the “drab, intimacy-crushing echo chambers” of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That was what Jonathan had called it last time, according to the article in The New Yorker that Samantha had cited. His disappearance was the hip new Manhattan murder mystery, and everyone in the city was wondering who’d done it.
Everyone, of course, except for Dima.
He knew perfectly well what had happened to the unfortunate man whose only sin had been to own a piece of property that Yelizaveta had wanted for herself. Dima knew that the man either was now a corpse, drained of blood and disposed of in some anonymous dump site, or had been kept as a mindless servant for the vampire’s ease and amusement. Neither fate was one the man had deserved, no matter how sharp his tongue had been.
Now Dima was supposed to let his woman walk into that spider’s web with nothing more concrete than her promise to him that she “would be fine.” He would rather have faced Yelizaveta himself, naked, weaponless, with his hands tied behind his back.
Dima had to admit it: he’d fallen for the prickly woman with the fierce temper. He had no idea how, and very little idea why, given how badly they’d gotten along for most of the time that they’d known each other, but it didn’t seem to matter. Every time he was in the same room with her, his heart and mind went soft, even while his body hardened. Every time he thought she might be in danger, his breathing froze, his blood pressure skyrocketed, and he could think of nothing else until he had found her and reassured himself of her safety.
That was how it had been last night when he had returned to the loft and discovered her missing. He had been convinced that she had wandered outside and been seized and attacked on the street, by either a vampire protecting his territory or a fundamentalist activist who wanted to see all bloodsuckers destroyed. Then Dima had only imagined her to be in danger. How the hell was he going to cope when he knew she was in danger?
“You’ll practically be right there,” she had said, dismissing his worries with a wave of her elegant hand. “I’ve agreed—very reluctantly—to let you into my head while I’m in the mansion. If anything goes wrong, you’ll know right away and you can send in the cavalry with my blessing. Believe me, I would find myself very unhappy to almost die again, so if the time comes when you need to rush to the rescue, please feel free.”
He hoped she had really meant those words, because if he sensed that she would be in danger from Yelizaveta or any of her flunkies, he wouldn’t hesitate to tear bodies apart in order to get to her.
This wasn’t something he’d ever expected to happen. When a man went through the equivalent of more than a hundred lifetimes without ever finding a woman he could imagine spending eternity with, it tended to make him rethink the idea of a committed relationship. Was something like true love even possible? And if it was, could there really be someone out there for everyone? It had been a very long time since Dima had drawn the conclusion that the fairy tales were, quite simply, bullshit. Love as they portrayed it did not exist.
Actually, now that he thought about it, he supposed what he felt for Ava really did nothing to disprove that. After all, the love in those stories was always pure and shining and self-sacrificial. It made couples content to gaze into each other’s eyes and to view their partners as nothing short of perfect. If Dima had been in the throes of a fairy-tale love, shouldn’t he have viewed the object of his affections as perfect and sweet and all that was good and loving? A woman like that would bear absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to Ava Markham.
The Ava he loved was prickly, arrogant, rude, stubborn, ungracious, mostly tactless, haughty, and occasionally cruel. And when he listed it all out like that, he decided he had to be completely off his rocker to consider wanting to remain with her for long after he had completed his mission. But then he would remember that she was strong, intelligent, perceptive, decisive, fiercely loyal, and utterly fearless, and he would feel his heart clench in his chest, sending him over the edge once more.
Acknowledging his love for her m
ight have made him happier, he reflected, if he had the faintest inkling of her feelings for him. Unfortunately, in addition to her other faults, Ava kept her thoughts and emotions stubbornly under her own control, and he had kept his word that he wouldn’t invade them without an invitation. It felt a lot like having hobbled himself of his own free will. His brain fairly itched with the desire to poke inside her mind, just a little, just for a minute or two, just until he could get a sense of whether she felt anything for him other than the resentment and irritation she generally showed when he was around.
He had thought he saw a hint of something more the night before, in the sitting room next door when he and Misha had been caught up in their emotional reunion. She had moved near him after all, lending him the support of her presence, if nothing else, but from what he could tell, she would have done the same for any of her friends. How could he tell if what she felt for him was any different from what she felt for Missy or Regina?
Well, for starters, I doubt she’s ever ridden either of them like a championship barrel racer, his subconscious taunted.
Dima dismissed it. Sex, he knew, was not something by which you could judge the quality of a relationship. The night they had spent together in his loft might have been the most amazing sex either of them had ever had—which was slightly more impressive when Dima said it—but it was still sex. The relationship Dima had decided he wanted needed something a bit more substantial as a foundation if he was to build something lasting upon it.
The problem, he acknowledged, was getting Ava to open up about her feelings—the deep ones that she always kept to herself. He had noticed that she would share the easy ones, the ones on the surface, without the slightest hesitation. She had no trouble expressing anger or impatience or frustration or sympathy, but they were like barriers she held in front of her to keep from exposing the softer, more vulnerable parts underneath. She didn’t show him love or need or fear, and he doubted she showed them to anyone else, either. He knew that her friends had no doubts about her love for them, but he thought that was because she had demonstrated it, quietly, in so many ways for so many years that they accepted it the way they accepted that it would rain in April or snow in February. It was just the way their world worked.
He thought Ava’s world was more complicated than that. In her world, trust seemed to be a commodity that was not easily come by, though once given, it appeared to be unshakable. Otherwise she would not have gone to Missy and Graham when she ran from Dima. He actually found it astounding that she trusted the Alpha Lupine at all. Neither of them made a secret of their animosity for the other, yet each seemed completely comfortable—in their own strange way—turning to the other for help when it made sense to do so. Graham had made no fuss about trusting Ava to survey Yelizaveta’s headquarters, even though he had volunteered to enter the building with Dima when they were ready to take the vampire back into custody; if he did so, he would be putting his life into Ava’s hands, trusting that she would not have provided false or inaccurate information.
Likewise, Ava had complete confidence in the fact that Graham, though quite strong enough to rip her limb from limb should he choose, would not harm her. The solidity and unthinking reflex of that belief proved it to be one of long standing, which meant that even as a defenseless human, she had felt the same way, because she trusted that Graham’s love for Missy would prevent him from harming one of his wife’s closest friends. More than that, she trusted that at his core, Graham was not a wanton killer, not the type of Other who would slaughter the innocent simply because he possessed the ability to do so.
Dima wanted to earn that kind of trust from her. Whether or not it was possible was another question entirely.
She had walls, his Ava, thick, high ones, some of which had been planted with briar roses to keep out anyone adventurous enough to try to scale them. He thought he knew where a few of them were and had made note of the gaps that could allow him to worm his way inside; but just when he thought he had the landscape down, he would turn a corner and find a new maze of moats and fences, and have to start all over again.
Was anyone, he asked himself, really worth all this work?
As he pondered that question, the door to the suite opened and a figure stepped inside. He could have been blind and he would have known who it was. All she had to do was breathe in his direction and his entire body went on high alert, tense and ready for action—of one kind or another.
She said nothing for several minutes, just stood with her back to the door and her dark eyes on him. He wanted badly to know what she was thinking, considered taking just a peek, but resisted. He couldn’t seem to bring himself to do anything that would truly upset her or cross the boundaries she’d so clearly laid out. Seven hundred ninety-three years old, and he’d been brought to heel by a woman barely in her thirties. There were moments when he didn’t think he could bear the shame of it.
He also couldn’t bear to have her watching him and not know what she was thinking. He lifted the remote control, lowered the television volume to a quiet murmur.
“I thought you were going to spend the rest of the night with your friends.”
She shrugged and pushed away from the door to take a seat in an armchair that angled near the end of the sofa on which he lay. “I thought about it, but they were starting to get a little Ward and June on me. I can’t handle that kind of thing.”
“Ward and June?”
“Pictures of domestic bliss. When Missy started talking about new ways she’d found to let Graham know she still needed a little romance now and then, even after all their years together, I panicked and ran.” Her mouth curved in a wry smile. “I thought you’d be spending your time talking to your brother. After all, you certainly have a lot of catching up to do.”
Dima shook his head. “We do, but I think both of us are feeling a bit overwhelmed by it. We each have a lot of old ways of thinking to adjust, and that’s going to take time. Now that we’ve seen each other and broken through that barrier, we know we have all the time in the world to get reacquainted.”
“Very true.”
There was a moment of silence. Each watched the other and waited.
“I thought you might want to go over a few things about tomorrow night.”
Ava finally broke the silence, shifting as she spoke to smoothly cross her legs at the knees. Even wearing a pair of old sweatpants and a baggy Columbia University T-shirt from the collection Missy apparently kept on hand for emergencies, Ava looked like a queen, elegant and calm and regal. Only the way that one manicured fingernail beat a quick, uneven rhythm on the arm of her chair betrayed the restlessness of her mind.
When Dima didn’t respond, she arched a brow and pursed her lips. “You seemed … uncomfortable when we laid out the strategy earlier.”
That was one word for it, he supposed. “I am. I think you are taking a large risk for something we could achieve in other ways.”
“But not as quickly or as easily.”
“Perhaps.” He shrugged. “But as you have pointed out before, I am your mentor and not your keeper. If this is what you truly wish to do, I cannot stop you.”
“Sure you could.”
He inclined his head but kept his gaze on hers. He wasn’t quite sure what she was getting at, but he knew it wouldn’t pay to be caught completely unwary. “Did you want me to? I am certain that you only need to say you have changed your mind and no one would expect you to put yourself in danger, nor would they hold your change of heart against you.”
She snorted. “I would.”
He sent her a questioning look. More than that, he thought, might spook her.
Her mouth tightened. “I don’t go back on my word. Not when there are already so many people who have a corner on that market. I said that I would go, and I will.”
“It’s not your responsibility.”
“It might not have started out that way, but I made it mine when I volunteered. I won’t abandon it now.”
&n
bsp; His mouth slowly curved into a smile. “I could have used more men like you, back when wars were fought by individuals instead of by machines and puppet masters.”
She gave him a look of almost pitying disappointment. “Those wars are still fought every day, Dima. In fact, they’re the only ones that matter.”
Dima looked at her, really looked at her, and saw the shadows again, the ones that lurked behind her eyes when she thought no one could see. But he could. He always knew when they were there. Maybe he was the only one who had ever looked.
“Yes, they are,” he said, his voice low and quiet and intimate in the dimly lit room. “What is your war over, lyubushka?”
“What does that mean?” she asked him, broadly sidestepping the question. “You’re always calling me things in Russian, which as far as I’m concerned is a cheap trick. If you’re insulting me, I want to be able to defend myself, and if you’re not, then I want to at least get a charge out of a compliment now and then.”
“Lyubushka means ‘sweetie,’ ” he translated easily.
“What about kukla?”
“ ‘Pretty little girl,’ like a doll.”
Her brows rose. “What about nen- … nenag- … Damn, you use a lot of consonants.” She tried again. “Nenaglyadnaya?”
“What are you fighting, sweetheart?” He turned her avoidance technique around to her. “What is your war over?”
“My war is never over.”
“And you will not tell me what it concerns?”
Ava pursed her lips. “It doesn’t concern you.”
He corrected her softly. “I believe that it does.”
“Why?” she shot back.
“Because everything about you concerns me. That is what happens when a man falls in love.”
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