Ava felt her blood chill in her veins. “What does that mean?”
“It means that you must exert not a speck of effort to prove yourself useful, deshovka.”
Cheap whore, Dima translated in Ava’s head. I think she might be having some problems with what the psychologists call “projection.”
“Oh, and what do I have to do, Yelizaveta?”
“Nothing.” Another giggle. “That’s what makes the plan so beautiful. You simply have to be.”
“Be what?”
The vampire smiled like a shark, all teeth, and performed a few dancing steps of delight. She spun to a stop and pinned Ava with her blank, doll’s eyes.
“Be bait!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dima wondered if they could expect reinforcements later in the week, because he was certain his allies had heard his shout of denial in Moscow.
“That bitch!” he roared, slamming his fist down on the dashboard of the van with enough force to dent the thick layers of metal and vinyl. “She got us to do exactly what she wanted and she never even had to lift a fucking finger. I’m going to pluck out her eyeballs and feed them to the crows, I swear to God.”
Misha reached forward from his position just behind the front passenger seat and squeezed his brother’s shoulder. “Hush,” he urged. “You might still be able to hear what is going on inside, but while you shout, none of the rest of us can.”
Dima hardly cared how well the bug was transmitting to Graham’s high-tech monitor system, which allowed the other members of what he now feared would be a rescue team to hear the events unfold inside the mansion. He had never felt entirely comfortable with this plan of Ava’s, and now he knew why. Only what he really wanted to do was be able to grab her and shake her and say, I told you so, but he couldn’t. He had let her walk into a spider’s web, and now he had to find a way to get her out again.
“Ssshhh!” Graham hissed, gesturing for quiet. He pressed a pair of earphones against his head, listening for tiny details that could prove significant while the sophisticated surveillance equipment broadcast the voices to the rest of the audience gathered in the van.
“You’re telling me you invited me here just to try and lure Dmitri Vidâme and Vladimir Rurikovich to come with me?” Ava’s voice sounded loud and clear inside the steel box, and slightly nervous.
Only Dima could sense the fear that flashed inside her at the thought of being the cause of his or his brother’s death. Dima’s jaw clenched helplessly.
“That seems like a risky card to play,” she continued. “I mean, sure I know both of them, but I don’t know why you would think they’d come here after me. I mean, it’s no secret that Dmitri and I have never gotten along, and I’ve known Vladimir for all of a week. Don’t they have a sister you could take prisoner? I doubt they’ll go through all that much trouble to come after me.”
He knew she was bluffing, but Dima found himself disturbed by how convincing she sounded.
“Oh, they’ll do almost anything to stop me.” Yelizaveta’s voice wasn’t as loud as Ava’s, but thanks to the expensive spy equipment, it came through just as clearly. “There’s a rumor going around that I mean to raise an army and kill what remains of the European Council of Vampires and rule over Russia and the rest of the territories in Europe myself. Sillies! As if I’d want to go back to cold, ugly Moscow when I can live in New York forever!” She giggled insanely, and Dima swore.
“Stay in New York?” Misha asked, frowning.
An instant later, Ava echoed the question.
“Of course. It’s ever so much more exciting here. There’s so much more to do! And the shops are wonderful. I’ve never seen so much luxury in one place in all my life! There’s no way I’m going back to dismal old Moscow, let alone that hideous little prison in Kolomenskoye. I’d rather be dead.” She paused to laugh. “No, actually, I’d rather kill Misha and Dima, and I will! They’d try to stop me. They’d try to send me back; therefore, the only way I can have what I want is to kill them both.”
Dima felt Ava’s heart skip a beat and then race forward for a second; then a wall suddenly slammed down between them. He wanted to comfort her, but he couldn’t seem to reach her internal thoughts. He could monitor the scene through her perspective, but it was as if she had instantly cut off all emotional connection between them. Frankly, she shouldn’t have had the ability to do that so early, but maybe the shock had allowed her to tap into it. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that while he could keep track of her words and Yelizaveta’s responses, he couldn’t tell how Ava felt about them.
He couldn’t tell what she planned to do next, and frankly, that scared him more than anything else.
“I’m telling you that I’m a lousy lure,” Ava informed the other woman calmly. “If you wanted to force Dmitri to come here, you should have used his wife. Even his best friend would be a better piece of bait. The warmest feelings he had for me can best be described as irritation and impatience. And as for Rurikovich …” She paused, and Dima could feel her shrug, rather convincingly. “Who knows what he might feel? The man’s as easy to read as Egyptian hieroglyphics during a sandstorm. But after a week’s acquaintance, I doubt he feels anything approaching an emotion strong enough to make him come after me. I’m afraid you’ve dealt yourself a very bad hand, Yelizaveta. Next time, you might want to know your targets a little better.”
That mad giggle sounded again over the wire. “Oh, I know them as well as you can possibly know a man,” the vampire taunted. “Both of them.”
Inside the van, the brothers exchanged shocked looks, followed by identical sheepish shrugs.
“I was still human. And I was drunk,” Misha muttered. “So drunk I’m surprised I was still capable. And I may have been thirty to her fifteen, but I swear to Christ, the little slut had more experience than I did.”
Dima nodded. “Then it’s no wonder I was so easy for her. I was only sixteen myself, and she was only the second woman I ever had. The first had known almost as little about the matter as I had.”
“Both of them?” Ava demanded in their ears, and in Dima’s head he felt a flash of her very real irritation. “I’m sorry, but that’s just kinky.”
Dima knew her irritation was more with him than with Yelizaveta, and he couldn’t blame her. He wished he’d never slept with the little psychopath himself, but boys did many stupid things when they were only sixteen and their hormones were raging. Not to mention what happened when they got bored six hundred and some odd years before the invention of television.
“Admittedly, it was several centuries ago,” Yelizaveta continued, “but I’ve found over the years that men very seldom change in any fundamental sort of way. You see, the biggest weakness that each of those fools have is their ridiculous sense of honor. They’ve always been too noble for their own good. So you see, once they learn that I have an acquaintance of theirs—a female acquaintance, no less—in my power, they’ll be tripping over themselves trying to be the first one to save you.”
“I’m telling you, you’re wrong. They don’t care enough about me to try to save me.”
“They don’t have to care about you at all.”
The vampire’s tone was growing bored, and Dima was growing impatient with the delay. He gestured to Misha that they should prepare to move, but his brother shook his head.
“Not yet,” Misha murmured. “We don’t know enough about the situation inside. Unless Ava can tell you how many men she can see with Yelizaveta.”
Dima cursed himself for not asking as soon as she entered the room. He’d caught her impression of people sitting in chairs near the throne, but she hadn’t counted them, and he hadn’t insisted she do so immediately. He had thought they would have a little more time. And now, since she had cut him off, he no longer had the option of getting the information from her.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, “but it can’t be that many. She didn’t have much of a reaction when she walked in there. If Y
elizaveta had an army on hand, Ava would have noticed.”
“That’s not a good enough answer.” Misha met his brother’s gaze evenly, which drove Dima crazy, because he knew the other man was right. “Not too many could mean no more than fifty, and those aren’t odds I want to take on, not even with the Silverbacks to guard my back.”
“Or it could mean less than a dozen. We could take those easily.”
“But we don’t know for sure, do we?”
Reluctantly, Dima jerked his head no.
Misha raised a brow. “And I’m assuming that for whatever reason, Ava is not providing you with that information?” He barely waited for the acknowledgment. “What did you do to piss her off?”
“I have no idea,” he answered honestly. “From what I can recall, I did nothing.”
“Well, take my advice and apologize anyway when you see her again. It makes everything involved in this mating business go much more smoothly.”
Dima shot his brother a sideways glance. “Mating? Who said anything about mating? I certainly never said I had taken a mate.”
Misha patted him on the shoulder. “It’s all right, bratok. It comes to us all eventually. Trust me when I tell you that it’s just less painful when you give in.”
Not, Dima reflected grimly, if the woman you had chosen for your mate was being held prisoner by a violent, sociopathic vampire with delusions of grandeur and a dislike of ever being told no.
“They don’t have to care about you at all,” Yelizaveta repeated. “They just have to care. Misha cares about his wife, that is obvious to the whole world, and his wife, the sniveling little thing, cares about you. He might damn you to hell, but if losing you would cause his wife a moment’s pain, he would save your life at the expense of his own.”
Dima could read the truth of that in his brother’s expression. It didn’t matter what the cost was; he would always do what he could to keep his wife from pain or grief.
“And if Misha comes for you, it is inevitable that Dima will come for him,” Yelizaveta chortled. “Poor little Dima was ever following after his older brother, wanting to grow up just like Misha. Well, I will make them happy. I will kill them in one blow, so they might spend all the rest of eternity being dead together. Aren’t I thoughtful?”
“As a concrete floor,” Ava replied. “Even if Misha were insane enough to try to rescue me for Regina’s sake, why would you think that Dima would come chasing after him? They haven’t seen each other in hundreds of years. That seems to indicate to me that they might not be all that fond of each other.”
“Oh, that’s just them being stubborn, and it’s already forgotten. I knew that once I threw them together they would let the past slip away. They were too close when they were young not to build on that bond again as soon as they were forced to actually see each other.”
“What do you mean, ‘forced to see each other’?”
“Once I threw them together again. You were the perfect tool for that, shalava [slut]. Your connection to Misha brought you to my attention, and once I saw you, I knew Dima would slobber all over you like a dog. He always fancied a dark girl so he could press all that pale muscle of his against her. And, of course, once you were in danger, that nobility of his would do the rest. He would never leave you to suffer if he could prevent it so easily.”
Dima’s mind reeled. Yelizaveta was implying that the attack on Ava hadn’t been an accident. But how could that be true? How could Yelizaveta have planned something so seemingly random?
“I should thank you for making it so easy. You really should try not to walk the same route between your home and Misha’s every time you go there, suka. Why, if someone wanted, they could just lay in wait for you and grab you as soon as you walked by. It would be so entirely easy.”
The vampiress giggled again.
The occupants of the van heard a moment of silence.
“Then I wasn’t changed accidentally,” Ava finally said, her voice curiously flat and disinterested.
Dima frowned. It wasn’t like her not to show any emotion at learning such a significant detail. Something was wrong. He could feel it.
“Oh, stars no, suka! I planned that, just like I planned everything else. If you hadn’t bitten Jimmie, he’d been instructed to feed you a few drops of blood, just to get things going. While I knew Dima couldn’t resist saving you, I couldn’t resist the idea that you’d suffer while he did it.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dima was out the door of the van and halfway across the street when something large and pissed tackled him from behind and wrestled him to the pavement. He cursed mightily and drove an elbow backward, getting a grunt and a muffled oath for his trouble. When he drew back his arm for a proper punch, someone caught it in mid-air and held tight.
Looking up, he saw Misha holding his clenched fist between his two hands; turning his head, he found Graham’s Lupine eyes staring down at him. Neither looked very happy, and neither appeared to have any intention of letting go.
“You can’t do this, Dima,” Misha snapped. “You know you can’t, and I know how much you want to. Believe me, I do. But if you charge in there now with no strategy and no idea of what you’ll be getting into, you’ll only make things worse.”
“That is where you’re wrong.” He spat the words out through clenched teeth, barely able to speak through his anger. “Right now, there is no worse. She has Ava. She has my woman inside that house. I’m going to get her out if I have to raze the entire building to rubble.”
“Which would only make things worse,” Graham grunted. “You heard just as well as I did that your Russian bitch-friend set this all up as a trap for the two of you. If you were planning to let her catch you, you could have at least given us enough warning so we could go home and catch a little couch time with our wives.”
Dima bared his teeth at the werewolf. “You want me to just leave her there?”
“Of course not. But we have to use our brains on this one. The only way to get Ava back safely is to have a strategy.” He watched Dima’s face as he spoke, and gradually he began to let go of the hand he had caught in mid-punch. “One of us needs to keep a cool head and start with a plan.”
Graham snorted and levered himself off of Dima’s legs where he’d had him pinned. He was rubbing a hand over his rib cage and wincing. “Yeah, well, you first, sucker. For some reason, I’m in more of a beat-it-till-it-squeals mood.” He shot a glance in Dima’s direction.
The vampire looked at them consideringly. He appeared lost in thought for a few moments; then the contemplative expression was edged away by one of devious pleasure.
“I think,” he said, his mouth curving into a smile, “that we should give Ms. Chernigov what she wants.”
Graham stared. “You want to let that psycho-tramp stay in the city and continue to make our lives miserable until we die of old age and she goes on to make our children’s lives miserable?”
“Of course not, but what if the council were to make the offer? What if they came here in person and offered her asylum?”
“I think she’d jump at the chance. But I also think she’d be bored in six months and looking to start another war.”
Misha nodded. “Exactly.”
Dima scowled. “So we let her start her war?”
“No, we let her fight it. And once she’s exhausted, we swoop in and carry her back to prison.”
“Forgive me if I say that sounds a little simplistic, but, well, it does.”
“Only because you are not considering the possibilities.” Misha shook his head, still smiling. “The first step to making such an offer would be to get the head of the council here to negotiate, wouldn’t it?”
Graham rolled his eyes. “Oh, sure. Let’s just add another target for her to take aim at. While we’re at it, we’ll just invite the mayor of New York City along for the ride, shall we? Then she can wipe out everyone who matters around here in one fell swoop.”
“Now you’re thinking like Ye
lizaveta,” Misha scolded.
“I’m what?”
“You’re thinking about the benefits you get by arranging things a certain way, but you’re neglecting to consider the other possibilities in such a scenario.”
Dima levered himself into a sitting position. He had finally begun to see the strategy his brother was suggesting. “Possibilities such as the targets that she gathers into one convenient place might not oblige her by dying so easily.”
The Silverback Alpha looked from one brother to the other and shook his head. “The two of you are out of your minds. That’s your plan? Get Rafe here and let her think she can kill all of you in one glorious shot, and then surprise her by fighting back?”
“You make it sound so … primitive.”
“Because it is!”
Misha leveled him a glance. “You have a better idea? One that can be arranged and executed within the hour? Because I don’t like the chances of us having much more time than that to work with.”
Graham opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, then frowned. A minute later, his expression cleared and began to curve into a smile, one a lot like the one Misha had recently worn.
“Well, first,” Graham said, reaching out a hand and helping to swing Dima back to his feet, “I suggest we give my assistant a call and see if her husband has any plans for this evening.”
There were moments in a person’s life that they remembered forever—a first kiss, the passing of a loved one, the birth of a child. Ava didn’t even remember what happened next ten minutes later. All she knew was that the rage at Yelizaveta Chernigov that had been building since the moment she announced her intention to harm Dima exploded when the bitch revealed that she had intentionally robbed Ava of her life by ordering a henchman to convert her into a vampire. And that Yelizaveta had known it would cause Dima pain to watch Ava suffer, yet had done it anyway, pushed her over the edge.
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