Chapter 6 #4
“I asked Margaret.”
“Of course you did.” She drew a breath. “I’m keeping my phone. And my laptop. I call Margaret when I want. I work on the manuscript, but I decide what goes in the catalog.”
A pause. “Within reason.”
“That sounded like a but.”
“It was.”
She almost smiled. Almost. “And you don’t come into these rooms without permission.”
His gaze held hers. “Never.” The answer settled something inside her she hadn’t realized was braced.
“Wait,” she said, as he turned for the door. He stopped. She hated the next question before she asked it. “Why me?”
His back stayed to her, and for a moment she thought he’d give her another elegant evasion.
Then he turned. The control was still there — the polished billionaire, the cold disciplined man who could order strangers to find the people who’d entered her home and know they’d obey — but something burned beneath it now.
Something old. Something hungry. Something so focused on her that every instinct she had screamed predator, and her body answered the scream with a flood of heat that shamed her, because the sensible half of her was still afraid and the rest of her did not care.
“Because there is no one else,” he said.
The words struck low and deep. She forced a laugh, but it came out thin. “That’s a lot for a second day.”
“It is.”
“You always move this fast?”
“No,” he said. “I do not.” And he gave her nothing else.
Nica looked down at the manuscript, at Anastasia Drakovich’s name written in faded ink centuries ago — a dead woman, a stolen book, a language Baba Yelena had placed inside her before leaving her alone in the world.
Everything I touch eventually becomes a ghost. Demetri was watching her again, seeing too much. She lifted her chin. “Good night.”
Something in his expression closed. “Good night, Nica.”
He left, and the door remained open behind him.
She stood in the office until his footsteps faded down the gallery, then crossed the bedroom and locked the suite.
The mechanism engaged with a soft click — no alarm, no protest, no Demetri returning to demand an explanation.
Nothing. And she stood with her palm flat against the locked door and was appalled to find that part of what she felt, under the relief, was the small cold drop of disappointment.
Nica ate the soup because her hands were shaking and she refused to examine why.
She called Margaret, who was bruised and furious and temporarily installed in a Pacific Meridian apartment with private security, and who assured her three times she was fine and demanded twice that Nica photograph the manuscript’s binding before doing anything else. Normal. Almost.
She showered, changed into an old T-shirt, and climbed into the enormous bed.
She did not sleep. At midnight the foghorn sounded beyond the headlands, low and mournful and swallowed almost at once by the fog; at one, rain began ticking against the glass; at two, Nica gave up.
She crossed the sitting room barefoot and opened the balcony doors, and cold air swept over her skin, wet and salt-heavy and alive.
The balcony extended out over the cliff behind a waist-high stone wall, and fog swallowed everything beyond it.
She could hear the ocean but not see it, the wind pulling at her hair, the stone icy under her bare feet.
She wrapped her arms around herself. Someone broke into my home.
Demetri Vasiliev intends to court me. A man stabbed him, and his wound closed, and his eyes turned red.
Normal people don’t own old Russian icons bearing their family name and refuse to say when they got them.
Normal people don’t have gates that open without sensors, or panels that lock the owner out of his own rooms. Normal people don’t—
Something moved inside the fog.
Nica froze — not below her, but above her.
A heavy rush displaced the air, and the fog rolled backward in a vast curling wave, and the sound came again, slow and rhythmic, like canvas snapping under impossible weight.
A shadow passed over the balcony, too large to be a bird, too silent to be an aircraft.
The shape circled once beyond the veil of white, and she caught the impression of a long body, enormous wings, and something that glinted deep red where the moonlight found it.
Nica gripped the stone wall. The creature vanished into the fog, and a heartbeat later a roar rolled across the Pacific and entered her bones — ancient, furious, alone.
It was the loneliest sound she had ever heard, and some reckless, exhausted part of her answered it before her fear could, recognized it, the way you recognize your own face in a dark window.
She stood barefoot in the rain, staring into the empty sky, and behind her, from somewhere inside the locked suite, a man’s voice said softly, “You should not be outside.”
She turned. Demetri stood just beyond the open balcony doors, bare-chested, wet, and burning hot enough that steam rose from his skin.