She saw him thinking, literally almost watched the gears turning for a few beats, then heard him sigh.
“Compromise,” he offered. “I’ll take you upstairs—I won’t make you leave with Marc and Geo if you agree to follow my orders the same as the rest of the men on my team. Do we have a deal?”
Ava didn’t hesitate. “Deal.”
She made a mental note to buy Samantha a thank-you gift when all this was over. She knew very well to whom she owed this man’s reasonableness.
Noah sighed and traded her the candle for the flashlight he removed from the barrel of his rifle. He looked as if he already knew he was going to regret this.
“Here. Stay close and cover the beam when I tell you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now, a few quick things.” He took a minute to show her some basic hand signals for directions, slow, stop, halt, and hide. She committed them to memory and tried to hide her impatience. Finally, he reached around her to open the door and eased outside.
“Remember,” he murmured, “stay close.” Then he led the way back into the darkness.
Yelizaveta had listened when Rafe promised her asylum from extradition back to Russia and when he offered her the unconditional support of the Feline breeds in the city, but her eyes lit up when he began talking about giving her the council.
“You understand that elections are not held until next year,” he said, his voice full of promise, “But I have begun to think about retiring from my position, and I don’t believe I am being presumptuous when I say that my choice for my successor will hold a great deal of weight with the voters. Especially with the Inner Council.”
Dima could practically see the vampire drooling. She didn’t just want revenge, he realized, or to build herself an army to conquer her old homeland. She wanted everything. She wanted to rule the world, and like her father before her, she believed she would manage the task. In that moment, Dima finally grasped the extent of Yelizaveta’s insanity—of the insanity that had tainted her entire family like a blood-borne infection—and he knew that she could never be returned to prison, because she would always be planning her next escape. No prison could ever be made escape-proof; so as long as a woman like Yelizaveta lived, there would always be a risk of her escape, and while there was a risk of her escape, there would always be a risk to him and to his family. Somehow that mattered more to him now that he intended to claim Ava as part of that family.
He would not allow her to be hurt.
He slid one hand inside the pocket of his trousers, the pocket that held the small communicator he’d slipped in there earlier. While Rafe tried to convince the madwoman that he could be bought for the right price, Dima pressed the button on the device three times in rapid succession. A few seconds later he felt three rapid twitches against his palm and he felt a grim sense of satisfaction. The cavalry was on its way.
Casually, he shifted his weight, as if growing impatient, catching Graham’s eye with the movement. Frankly, it wasn’t difficult to feign the boredom. What was tough was believing that Yelizaveta was stupid enough to believe that they would stand by and let Rafe strike a bargain that involved their deaths without protesting. But now it was finally time to act offended.
The plan had been that Graham would make the first move. He would confront Rafe, argue that he wanted no part of this betrayal and start a fight. The brawl would stir up some chaos and distract the guards from the stealthy arrival of Noah and his backup forces. They would surround the guards, Rafe and Graham would join in the fun, and they would all live happily ever after.
That had been the plan. But then, no one had bothered to describe the plan to Ava.
Ava had obeyed every single order, request, and signal from Noah Baker for the last fifteen minutes. As far as she was concerned, she’d built up enough good-deed karma to last her until next Christmas. At least.
She had stayed as quiet as a mouse all the way through the basement and up the back stairs into the kitchen. She’d taken off her boots and carried them so that her heels wouldn’t make noise on the bare floors. She had even hidden in three different corners and alcoves so that she would be safely out of the way while Noah’s men disposed of some of Yelizaveta’s patrolling guards.
So Ava figured that by the time they reached the doors from the narrow back hall to the ballroom, the men she was with should have realized that all bets were now off. Was it really that big a surprise when, as soon as Noah eased the first door open, she slipped past him and hurried into the room?
Ava felt Noah reach for her arm and miss, and even though he didn’t breathe a whisper, she could feel his curses bouncing off her back as she edged toward the back of the dais. Back here, she realized, was where Yelizaveta’s minions had stored all she other bits of furniture and decoration Ava had been used to seeing in the ballroom. They had actually hung the heavy black drapes about eight feet in front of the windows on this side of the room and taped heavy black plastic, the kind used to line ponds and water gardens, over the glass.
Using the clutter as cover, Ava moved silently toward the center of the room and the space where she knew the dais to be. When she reached the barrier of the curtains, she raised her gaze to the fabric and searched out the nearest seam between panels. Finding one, she twitched the cloth aside just a hair’s breadth and peered through.
She didn’t quite have a clear view of anything. What she could see was the back of Yelizaveta’s throne, a small crowd of bodyguards armed with medieval weaponry, and glimpses of several male faces, one lethally charming, the others just lethal. Somewhere in the mix, she knew, was the madwoman, but it took a moment to find her red-gold head. She appeared to be standing somewhere in front of Rafe instead of sitting on her throne. Ava could see that Yelizaveta had stepped a couple of feet away from her guards, but not far enough for anyone to get a clear line of attack, she imagined.
The one thing Ava didn’t see was the lemon-sucking flunkey who had spoken for Yelizaveta earlier that evening.
God, had it really been just this evening? she wondered, shaking her head. It felt like lifetimes ago.
Letting the curtain reclose completely, Ava turned to warn Noah that a significant member of Yelizaveta’s cheerleading squad seemed to be missing, only to discover that Noah was missing, too. In fact, all of the men were, except for the one who stood right behind her, with his eyes glued to her head and his hands on his rifle. She didn’t have any trouble realizing what had happened—Noah had taken advantage of her distraction to set his troops into motion, leaving one man behind to ensure that she didn’t throw herself into the breach and get herself into trouble. Noah had counted on her knowing that the key element of a surprise attack—that being surprise—would be negated if she kicked up a loud fuss about his heavy-handed tactics before the first shot was fired.
Damn his manipulative little hide.
Sparing her watchdog a withering glare, Ava took a very deep breath—then another—in an attempt to regain control of her temper. When she thought she could relax her lips without giving in to the urge to scream, she turned back to the curtains and peered out again. It didn’t really look like anything had happened. No one had moved so much as a hair on their heads, but she could feel the tension in the room ratcheting up several notches and she knew it had to be more than just her. She felt as if she could write her name with her finger in the air and still be able to read it after enjoying a nice cup of tea.
Straining to hear what they were saying, she could make out the words if she listened hard enough. Her hearing had improved since her turning, but the speakers were Other as well and kept their voices low to avoid sharing the details of the discussion with everyone present, and the drapes absorbed and muffled much of the sound.
“—do you think?” she heard Rafe ask, presumably of Yelizaveta.
“I don’t really think that matters,” she heard Graham snarl, and realized, to her surprise that he was talking to Rafe, arguing with Rafe. “I think that bef
ore you go trading away promises of loyalty, you ought to consult with the parties involved, old friend.”
Rafe turned to face the Lupine, which put his back to her, so she couldn’t hear his reply. What she could hear, though, was Graham’s vicious snarl and the insult he threw at the Felix’s head. Rafe responded by throwing a punch, and the two of them turned on each other like rabid animals.
Ava couldn’t believe her eyes, not that Rafe and Graham—who had been friends for years numbering into the decades—would have such a vicious argument, and not that they would indulge in such risky, stupid behavior in front of an enemy. Something was not right about this.
Then Ava saw a blur of movement along the other curtained wall and she realized what part of the picture had been missing. Graham and Rafe had been serving as the decoy while Noah’s men put themselves into strategic positions around the room to prepare for the coming confrontation.
They were lucky, she thought, that she had realized the truth so quickly, or they might have had a very different situation on their hands. She would make very sure to point that out to them just as soon as she got the chance, too.
She held her breath and watched as nine large shapes distributed themselves around the perimeter of the room. She had to marvel at their abilities, because even though she knew they were there, she had to really look to pick out where each one was hiding.
Then Noah gave a signal and the first shot rang out, echoing through the massive space. Near the front of the dais, a tall, fair-haired vampire blinked, then collapsed to the floor, a blooming patch of red now decorating the outside of his chest above where his heart had recently been.
The game was on.
Yelizaveta gave a furious scream and ordered her guards to kill everyone. She sprang at the man closest to her, who happened to be Rafe, and managed to get a claw or two into him before he twisted and shivered and landed in front of her on four compact and furry feet. At least, compact for a jaguar the size of a small pony. Clearly furious, she tried to slice at him again, but he was too fast and much too agile for her to lay a hand on.
Around them, the rest of the room had erupted into chaos, Yelizaveta’s guards leaping at the enemy. The Silverbacks had to drop their guns after the first shot, since in the melee they couldn’t be sure who they might hit. Several of them shifted, taking on the forms of extremely well-made timber wolves in varying shades of gold, red, brown, and black. In the mix of fur, Ava also noticed a tawny wolf whose fur was colored silvery white like a mantle across his back and shoulders.
The others had joined the fighting, and Ava could see vampires beginning to fall all around them, most of them turning to dust, but one or two just falling to the floor and beginning a rapid version of natural human decay. What she did not see was Dima. Looking around, she found him and his brother consulting briefly with Noah, and then saw them move with pride of purpose toward Yelizaveta. In his hands, Misha carried a set of handcuffs and a long length of silver rope, while Dima bore a new-looking roll of gray duct tape.
Ava winced, then thought about it and shrugged. The bitch had it coming to her.
Ava was paying so much attention to Dima, trying to keep watch over him, as if something terrible would happen the moment she took her eyes away, that she almost didn’t notice the something terrible approaching.
Then another sliver of movement caught her eye, and she turned her head again. Charles, the lemon-sucking, manicure-needing, hideous skin tone-sporting vampire flunkey of this evening, slipped out from behind the drapes at the other wall with a small, sharp, obviously well-balanced dagger in his hand. She saw him raise the arm that held it over his head, saw the glint of hate and madness in his eyes, then saw him focus all that malevolent force on Dima. She screamed and let her instincts rule her. Raising her own hand, she let fly one of her poor, battered, beautiful boots, straight at the vampire’s head.
Ava had been aiming for his throwing arm and had hit his head, but since he took the three-inch heel right between his eyes, she wasn’t about to quibble. Either way, he screamed, the knife flew harmlessly off course, and she got to see Dima spin safely around, lock eyes on Charles, and fly at him with a muffled roar. The ends justifying the means right there, even while she watched.
The soldier behind her, however, was less of a go-with-the-flow sort. When she moved, he panicked, probably thinking she meant to run into the middle of the room and join the fighting, and he shoved her to the floor and covered her with his body.
She screamed and tried to buck him off, but he simply dug in his heels and hung on.
For God’s sake, what had they told these guys about her? she wondered, realizing for the first time how closely a vampire and a werewolf could be matched in strength. They were treating her as a sort of combination between Mata Hari, Harry Houdini, and the Incredible Hulk. Flattering, certainly, but hardly accurate.
When she failed to throw off her human—or maybe make that Lupine—shield, she settled on a particularly foul curse and lifted her head.
“At least let me move the curtain,” she snapped when he would have stopped her from reaching out and twitching the fabric aside. “I need to see what’s happening out there!”
The soldier grunted and shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I have orders.”
Ava told him exactly where she planned to shove his orders and reached out again. She was just barely able to touch the fabric with the tips of her fingers, but when she thought she had it, it was whisked out of her hand and brushed aside, leaving a wide gap through which she could clearly see the rest of the ballroom. Or she would have been able to see it if her field of vision hadn’t been completely obscured by a pair of long legs and big feet clad in unrelieved black.
Despite the Lupine still physically pinning her to the floor, Ava smiled up at the vampire and smiled. “Did you get her?”
Dima half-turned, allowing Ava to see the room beginning to quiet down behind him. Misha had bound an irate Yelizaveta to a chair with rope and was now taking great delight in sealing her lips with a strip of the duct tape. Charles lay, also bound but blessedly unconscious, on the floor where Dima had tackled him.
Ava breathed a long sigh of relief and let herself relax. “Cool. It looks like we won.”
Dima shook his head. “Not quite yet. There’s still one last piece of winning I need to do.”
She looked up at him and frowned. “What do you mean? Did I miss something? What else could you possibly need to win? The Nobel Prize?”
“Your heart.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was never fun getting the police involved in this kind of thing, Dima reflected grimly, but times had changed and he and people like him had to learn to change along with them. So Rafe summoned the police, who made everyone wait around to give a statement before they were allowed to leave. Since Dima had been involved in the capture of a known fugitive and had been the victim of an attempted murder, while Ava had been kidnapped and held against her will for several hours, they were among the last of the crowd to be allowed to leave the mansion.
Adrenaline still pumped through Dima’s body, partially from the fight and partially from the discussion he knew he was about to have with Ava. Frankly, he couldn’t decide which one was likely to be more challenging. If he had been alone, he would have walked back to the Vircolac club, but he could see Ava fading and could feel the first stirrings of dawn beginning below the horizon. He needed to get her tucked into a bed where the sun couldn’t touch her as soon as possible. There would be time enough for their discussion tomorrow.
He had to remind himself of that several times over the next hour, during the time it took to pour her into a cab—where she proceeded to crawl into his lap and snuggle during the trip to the club—and then into bed, where she pressed her naked form against his as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and drifted immediately into sleep.
Dima lay beside her, exhausted but far from sleepy, and stared up at the ceiling. Hi
s rational mind had a hard time accepting that he’d known this woman for only as many days as he could count on one hand, but then again, his rational mind had very little to do with his feelings for her. It wasn’t rational to fall in love so quickly, even if Misha said it had happened to him the first time he laid eyes on Regina. It wasn’t rational to love a woman who could drive him completely out of his mind with rage or lust with equal ease. It certainly wasn’t rational to feel as if the presence of one particular woman dictated whether or not any day or night before him was likely to be a good one.
None of it was rational, and Dima couldn’t have cared less. How could he, when he fell asleep with his woman in his arms and a smile on his face?
He woke with the niggling feeling that he had overslept and that this fact was significant for some specific reason. When he finally lifted his eyelids and saw Ava’s dark brown eyes looking down at him, he remembered exactly why.
“Good evening,” she greeted him, the corner of her mouth twitching into a smile. “I thought you were going to sleep forever, and I was just working myself up to be mad at you for it, because I’m really starving.”
He stared up at her and lifted a hand to brush several stray strands of dark silk from her face. “Marry me.”
She blinked; her smile disappeared. “What?”
Somehow, the confusion on her face made him feel all the more certain. He felt himself smile.
“Marry me,” he repeated, and tugged at a lock of her hair. “You really don’t have any choice. I’m the only man in the world, or any of the more populated dimensions I can think of, who would ever be willing to take you on. So make it official and marry me.”
Her eyes narrowed as she stared down at him. “I can’t say that’s the most romantic proposal I’ve ever heard,” she commented sourly. “The only man willing to take me on, my ass.”
He grinned and rubbed his hand over that portion of her anatomy. “Oh, I’m sure there are thousands, tens of thousands, who would be willing to take on your ass. It’s your mouth I think they’d have trouble with.”
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