Chapter 4 #2
He cut the dragon off, which made no difference at all, because the beast simply shoved the images into his mind anyway — vivid, erotic: Nica naked and reaching for him, her hair fanned across his pillow.
He set his jaw and let the images sear into memory, yet not once did he let one of them change his expression.
She would see only what he wanted her to see. The dragon was relentless.
No. He could not leap into this blind. Pretending was the most basic skill of any operative; he had pretended to be a dozen men, had wept on cue at funerals he’d ordered himself. He could not afford to assume anything about her.
She turned her head a little to look at him, and he stopped breathing.
Six inches. Her lips were six inches from his.
He could see the fine hairs near her temple, a single freckle on the slope of her cheekbone he hadn’t caught across the warehouse floor.
He could smell her — soap, something floral, the chemical hint of glove powder, and beneath all of it a warm skin-scent that was simply her, that had no name in any language he knew, that the dragon was already filing away in some deep place from which it would never be erased.
It would be very easy, he thought, to close those six inches.
To find out if her mouth was as soft as it looked.
The dragon leaned toward the thought like a hound to a scent, and Demetri held them both still by force of will.
“I don’t usually have an audience for this part,” she offered softly. “Tell me if I’m boring you.”
“You will never bore me.” He hadn’t meant to say anything so true; he’d meant it as a courtesy, and heard, with some detachment, his own voice drop half a register on the word never.
Her color came up another shade of pink, and she turned back to the book. “Okay,” she said, a little breathless. “Okay. So. This is — Mr. Vasiliev, I have to tell you —”
“Please. Call me Demetri.”
She swallowed hard, her gaze dropping to his mouth and climbing back to his eyes, and he catalogued every flicker of it as his cock hardened under the table. If she keeps looking at me that way she is going to end up naked and spread across her desk.
She licked her lips, shifted a fraction closer.
“Demetri.” His name on her lips set him alight.
She looked back to the page. “I was saying — I have to tell you up front, this is the single most extraordinary thing in the entire Crowe collection, and I am not going to be objective about it. I’ve tried. I failed. Miserably.”
“I would not want you to be objective.”
He saw the reaction because he was already obsessed with her: a small inhale, a softening at the corner of her mouth. She hadn’t expected him to answer like that.
“It’s a Russian manuscript. Hand-illuminated, vellum, pre-revolutionary script.
Most cataloguers in this country would read it as Old Church Slavonic, which is wrong; it’s secular Russian using pre-1918 orthography.
The letters they cut in the 1918 reform — the yat, the i-decimal, the fita — are all here.
Single scribe, probably late nineteenth century by the ink.
Though the imagery —” she paused “— the imagery is much older. I believe the scribe was copying an older source.”
She was a different woman when she talked about the work.
In the storage bay he’d noted she was beautiful; now, watching her describe the manuscript from six inches away, he understood she was more than that.
She was competent. Intelligent. He like her voice.
It wasn’t girlish. When she talked about the book, her voice lowered in register, like she was sharing a secret with a friend.
It was pure seduction; if she said his name in that voice he’d do anything she asked.
He wanted to hear it in the dark. He wanted to hear it break.
Mine, the dragon reminded him — she already owned them both. He shut the beast away and asked his first real question. “You read it fluently?”
“I do.”
“How?” He kept it light, the way a wealthy buyer might ask — not the way a Draquonir guardian investigating the former owner’s murder would.
She didn’t flinch. “My grandmother.”
“Your grandmother taught you?”
“I started when I was six. The power was out for three days one winter, so we had to read by candlelight. After that I was hooked.” She laughed, a small, surprised laugh, as if the memory had reached up and grabbed her.
“She said it was a sin to lose the old languages. So she taught me — the pre-reform letters too, because that was how she’d been taught.
I didn’t know they were obsolete until I was eleven and tried to use one in Russian-language school in Richmond. ”
“The Richmond District,” he said carefully. “Here in San Francisco.”
“Yes. We lived on Twenty-Fifth Avenue. Above a bakery.”
The dragon whispered. Hunters do not train their children this way. She is innocent. She is in danger. Take her.
He kept his face still. “And your grandmother. Is she —?”
“She passed years ago. When I was fourteen.” She said it flat and final, a script built over time and used without thinking, and something in that flatness — the practiced armor of it — reached into his chest and closed a fist. He knew that armor.
He’d worn his own version of it for too many centuries.
“My condolences.”
“Thank you.” She moved her gloved hand a fraction across the page, redirecting them both toward safer ground, and the motion brought her wrist into his peripheral vision — narrow, the bone delicate, a small blue thread of vein against pale skin where the glove ended — and the dragon made a sound inside him that was not a word at all.
He wanted to set his lips to that thin blue vein and feel her pulse against his mouth. He looked back at the book.
“Anyway. When I got put on the Crowe lot six weeks ago and saw there were Russian materials, I thought I could help. I didn’t expect to find treasure.
” She looked at the book the way she had before.
“I don’t think anyone at WMS knew what it was when they brought it in.
The catalog notes just say manuscript, Russian, illuminated, c. 1700. Which is wrong on three counts.”
“How so?”
“On its face.” She turned the page.
Her gloved hand passed within four inches of his bare wrist — close enough that the cool of the cotton against the warmth of his skin registered as a near-touch he didn’t get to have, and wanted — and there, on the new spread, in the lower margin of the right-hand page, was the image he’d been hoping not to see.
A family tree. Royal. Ancient. Drakovich.
The branching genealogy of the Russian dragon line that had been sealed behind silence since 1917, rendered in pre-reform Cyrillic by a scribe who’d understood exactly how important his task was.
He read the names down the central trunk without meaning to, unable to help it — Dmitri Drakovich, the Founder.
Pyotr the Long-Lived. Mikhail the Silent.
Dozens of names. Centuries of history, all the way down to the last name in the book, a name he knew. Anastasia the Radiant, b. 1912 —
He stopped reading. There was no death listed for her. But he knew.
He had buried Anastasia Drakovich himself, in absentia, twenty years ago.
The Draquonir families had held a closed rite for her in a cathedral in Italy, because there had been no body to send home and no immediate family left in Russia to receive it.
The hunters who’d murdered most of the Drakovich line had not left one.
And the book Anastasia had protected for nearly a hundred years had found its way here — to the estate sale of a human named Elias Crowe, who had taken it and hidden it for decades.
The ancient tome lay open now on a table on Brannan Street, four inches from his hand.
His mouth went dry.
Demetri. The dragon’s voice was lower than he’d ever heard it. This is the Drakovich book.. The one we’ve been hunting for thirty years. It has been here. In our city.
He held his face still through three slow breaths.
Nica was reading. Her finger moved along the genealogy and down to a paragraph beneath it, her lips moving slightly as she read aloud — softly, almost to herself.
He suspected she’d forgotten, in the absorption of the page, that he was sitting beside her at all.
Forgotten it was a meeting. Forgotten her hand lay four inches from his.
He heard the rhythm of the words, heard his own grandfather’s voice in their cadence, and beneath the table his hands clenched into fists against his thighs.
She read the mother tongue like she’d been born to it, and the dragon curled around the sound of her voice like a beast around a fire, and Demetri understood he was in far more danger tonight than the woman was.
She was reading dragon magic. Royal wards.
The spell-bindings the elves had given the Drakovich family — the words that protected their ancestral home outside St. Petersburg, that named the threshold and the hearth and the elder dead in the family crypt.
She did not know what she was reading. She thought it was poetry.
It was, in fact, the operating manual for breaching the most heavily warded magical structure in the Russian sphere.
And beneath the wards, sketched into the lower margin in fine brown ink, was a map.
Demetri saw it, and his whole body went still.