Chapter 4 #3
A network of underground passages, cross-hatched to mark elevation, annotated in the scribe’s hand.
He couldn’t read every note from where he sat, but he didn’t need to.
He’d walked one of those tunnels at twenty years old, in his father’s company, on a diplomatic visit to the Drakovich elder before his own emigration — the tunnel that connected the family seat to a private river landing two kilometers north.
There were others. The book showed them all.
A hunter who held this book could end the entire Drakovich line in a single night.
She finished the paragraph and looked up, her lips suddenly within five inches of his.
She hadn’t, until that second, realized how close she’d drifted.
He heard her gasp, watched the small startle of her shoulders, the widening of her pupils, her gloved hand freezing on the page.
She didn’t pull back. She didn’t lean in either.
She just held the space between them and looked at him, bright and unguarded, her own enthusiasm having pulled her closer than she’d ever have dared.
Five inches. He could count her eyelashes.
The dragon strained toward her mouth and Demetri fought the urge
“It’s a family chronicle,” she said, softer now, a little breathier, and the dragon nearly broke through his control to get to her.
“A real one — a fictional one, I mean — an entire invented noble family. The Drakovichs. They start with someone called Dmitri the Founder in the sixteenth century and run all the way to a woman named Anastasia in 1912. Generations of them. Hundreds of names. And the scribe didn’t just write a tree — they wrote the family’s spells.
Their protective magic over the estate. Charms. Wards for doors.
Words to seal a threshold.” She laughed, a small, delighted laugh, and he felt her breath against his chin.
“It’s as if they were wizards. And the maps, Mr. Vasiliev — look.
Tunnels. Underneath the family seat. Some scribe in the late eighteen-hundreds drew the entire underground architecture and labeled every passage.
One runs down to the river. Three more run out under the property line, into the forest. It’s the most committed piece of imaginative geography I have ever seen.
Whoever wrote this believed it. They weren’t playing.
They wrote it as if a member of the family might one day need to read it and use it.
” Her smile was blinding. “But I looked them up — ancestry sites, here, Russia, Europe. This family doesn’t exist. No historical records. None.”
She had no idea that the family she called fictional had buried its last keeper twenty years ago.
That the bloodline that remained — cousins, distant relatives — lived on that land even now, in that very house.
That hunters had killed to obtain the knowledge in her hands.
That he’d spent decades waiting for the book she held to surface.
She had no idea how much danger she was in.
And she was smiling at him about it, delighted, luminous, utterly unguarded, and the wrongness of that — her joy sitting on top of a horror she couldn’t see — made his chest ache in a way nothing in all his long centuries had prepared him for.
Take her. Protect her. Now. The dragon understood perfectly.
He asked his next question. “You posted the video?”
She blinked. “What?”
“On TikTok. Yesterday evening. You read a passage from this manuscript aloud.”
The color came up under her skin so fast he could watch it move — throat to cheekbones, a pulse in the carotid he’d been tracking.
“Oh god,” she said. “Did — did you see it? Margaret tell you about that? It wasn’t — I wasn’t trying to —”
“You are not in trouble, Nica.” He loved the way her name felt on his tongue.
“Are you sure? Because I wasn’t — I know the lot is technically still in active cataloging and I shouldn’t have —”
“I’m not asking about WMS policy. I’m asking about the post.”
She looked at her hands. “I do these little videos sometimes. Of things I love. Just — for me, mostly. For the people who follow my account, and there aren’t very many — fewer than a hundred, mostly history professors and students.
I read passages of old Russian things now and then, because hardly anyone teaches the pre-reform letters anymore and I — I just like keeping them in my mouth, I guess.
” She laughed, embarrassed. “It’s a very nerdy hobby.
I didn’t expect anyone to watch. That video had twenty-three thousand views by this morning, which is a lot, for me. I’m a little overwhelmed.”
He watched her face the whole time she spoke. Watched for the lie, for guilt or calculation. He didn’t see it. He didn’t see anything but a flushed, embarrassed, faintly proud woman who had posted a video of herself reading something she loved and had no idea what she’d set in motion.
She does not know, the dragon said. Demetri. She does not know what she has done.
He didn’t let himself answer. He asked one more question. “The collector. Mr. Crowe. Did you know him?”
“No. He died before WMS took the lot. Margaret says he was a recluse — a real one. Lived in Presidio Heights more than forty years, and his housekeeper never met another soul going in or out. Left everything to a relative who didn’t want to deal with it and hired us. ” She frowned. “Did you know him?”
“I knew of him.”
“Was he —” She hesitated. “Mr. Vasiliev, I have to ask. Was he a criminal? A mob boss, something like that? Because some of the things in his estate are very strange. Strange in a way that suggests he had access to networks ordinary collectors don’t.
I’ve catalogued estates for years. I’ve never seen a collection like this one. ”
The dragon went very still. Demetri let half a second pass. “He had access to networks,” he said quietly, “that ordinary collectors do not. Yes.” He did not add that Elias Crowe had been a cold-blooded killer.
She nodded. She didn’t press. She accepted the answer the way an intelligent person accepts a partial one when the whole truth might be dangerous.
“Then I’m glad you’re the one acquiring it.
I have to be honest — some of this material should not be sold at public auction.
I’ve been preparing the catalog notes assuming it would be, and I haven’t been comfortable.
About the book, especially. There are things in it that —” She trailed off. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”
“You’re trying to say,” he said gently, “that you believe the book is dangerous.”
She looked at him, her pale blue eyes — an unusual pale blue, rimmed in a darker shade — holding his until he felt as though he were drowning, and did not much mind the drowning.
“I think the book could be dangerous. Which is a strange thing to say about a manuscript. But I’ve been sitting with it for six weeks, and I’ve noticed— well, it’s silly, really—”
“Tell me.”
She cleared her throat. “Very well. Every time I read from it, my voice gets sort of.. well.. deeper? It’s a strange thing to say. It feels like—it’s as if the book is... warning me? I mean it’s a warning.” She gave a self-conscious laugh. “Somehow.”