Chapter 10 #2
She laughed — she couldn’t help it — the sound too high, edged with panic, as Demetri moved closer.
“Do not touch me yet.” He stopped. Immediately.
That helped, more than it should have, the instant obedience of him, the way a man who could lift a grown attacker off the floor one-handed arranged all that power around the word no from her.
Nica stared at the floor. Elves. Twelve hundred years.
Glowing vines. A dragon in the fog. Demetri’s scales beneath her hands. She looked up slowly. “What are you?”
His entire body went still. “I cannot answer that.”
“You can tell me elves exist, but you can’t tell me what you are?”
“Because their existence is not the secret that binds your life to mine.”
The words entered her one at a time. Binds your life to mine. Her throat tightened. “Demetri.”
He took one step and stopped beyond reach. “I am sorry. There are laws I must follow. Telling you everything would put you in danger. I cannot tolerate a threat to your life. Especially from me.”
She believed him, and that made everything worse. It was so much easier to leave a man who lied.
They worked for three hours and built the beginning of a map. Crowe’s acquisition clusters overlapped Benedikte’s hunter activity. Weapons moved through shell companies. Two names appeared repeatedly, hidden behind titles: THE MAGISTRATE. THE WITNESS. Demetri recognized neither. Or claimed not to.
Somewhere in the middle of it he set a plate beside her — bread, cheese, sliced apple, the pieces arranged with a care she chose not to remark on. “Eat.”
“You get very commanding around food.”
“You forget it exists.”
She pushed half the bread toward him. “You aren’t eating either.
” His eyes narrowed. They ate in silence, the fog at the windows, the fire behind its glass, the only sounds the sea and the turning of a page.
It felt strangely intimate. More intimate, perhaps, than breakfast had been — two people working a terrible problem side by side and pausing to make sure the other one ate.
“You said you remember everything,” she said. “Do you remember every person you lose?”
The question came without warning, and Demetri stopped chewing. His face changed — the cold discipline remained, but beneath it something old opened its eyes. “Yes.”
She looked down. “Baba Yelena used to say remembering was how we kept people from disappearing completely. I used to believe her.” She turned a pencil between her fingers, and found, to her own surprise, that she was going to say the rest of it.
“My mother died when I was six. Overdose. My father was gone before I was born. Baba raised me until I was fourteen. Then she had a stroke in the kitchen. I called the ambulance. I knew the address but forgot the apartment number. I kept saying the wrong number.” She had not told anyone that in years.
Not even Tasha. It came out of her now in this fog-walled room because the man across from her remembered everything and had just told her he carried his dead the way she carried hers.
“I thought if I’d answered faster, or remembered better, maybe—”
“You were fourteen. You were a child. You were not responsible.”
“I know.” Knowing had never changed the shape of memory. Demetri crouched beside her chair — he did not tower over her; he brought himself level, the way he seemed to know, without being told, exactly how she needed to be met. “What happened after?”
“Foster care. Six homes in four years. Tasha was in the fourth house with me. Closest thing I had to a sister. She died when I was seventeen. Another overdose. After that, I stopped believing Baba.”
“That memory keeps people alive?”
“That loving them is worth what happens when they leave.” The truth emptied the room. She had never once said it out loud, and saying it to him felt like handing over a live wire. “This is why I can’t give you what you’re asking for.”
“I have not asked you for anything.”
“You ask every time you look at me.” His breath caught. Good. Let him feel what his certainty does to me. “The last man I dated told me he loved me. He was kind. Normal. He wanted a future. I spent three days imagining it, and then I ended the relationship.”
“Because you did not love him?”
“Because I might have.” Demetri’s gaze dropped. “I’m not good at staying.”
“You stayed when Margaret was hurt. You stayed when I lost control. You stayed with a collection no one else valued because the objects deserved care.” He said it not as flattery but as evidence, laid out the way she’d laid out Crowe’s dates, and it was harder to argue with than any compliment.
“Objects don’t die because you love them.”
“No.” His voice went quiet. “They merely outlive everyone.” The words held more experience than any normal man could possess, an exhaustion two centuries deep. “How many people have you lost?”
“Too many.”
“Women?”
His gaze held hers. “One.” Something sharp moved through her chest. She had no right to jealousy. It came anyway, quick and ugly and revealing. “Did you love her?”
“I might have, if I had allowed myself. She died.” Of course. Every road led there. It was almost a relief to hear it, proof that his forever was as haunted as her present.
Demetri touched one finger to the back of her hand. A question. Nica did not move away, and his hand settled over hers — warm, steady, careful, that impossible constant heat of him seeping into her cold fingers. “Loving me will not kill me.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can. Because nothing has ever made me feel more alive.” Nica opened her mouth to deflect it, the joke already rising, the reflex of a lifetime — and then stopped, and let it go unsaid, and let the true thing stand between them instead.
Demetri waited. She looked at their hands, then at him.
“Thank you.” The surprise in his face almost made her smile.
He lifted her hand and pressed his mouth to her fingers — no seduction, no demand, a kiss as careful as the hand he’d watched Caelen rest on Lirien’s back — and Nica let him.
That was all. It was enough. For now. The wall was still there.
But for the length of that one soft kiss, she chose not to stand behind it.
She found the photograph after midnight, alone with Crowe’s financial records and the shell companies from Pacific Meridian’s investigation, the house gone silent around her, the fog gone black against the glass.
One name caught her eye. VASILIEV MARITIME HOLDINGS.
Founded 1948. She assumed it was an earlier family company — then she opened the incorporation record, and a newspaper clipping had been scanned with it.
THREE IMMIGRANT brOTHERS REVIVE BAY SHIPPING CONCERN.
Three men beside a warehouse near the Embarcadero, all three faces strangely indistinct.
Except one. The man at the center had turned slightly away, his profile caught beneath the shadow of a fedora. Dark hair. Strong nose. Hard jaw.
Demetri’s face. Not similar. Not a relative. Demetri.
The caption identified him as Andrei Vasiliev. Age thirty-two. Nica’s hands went cold, the warmth of his fingers from three hours ago draining out of her all at once. The clipping was seventy-eight years old.
She searched the name. Andrei Vasiliev in 1952.
In 1961. His face never changed. Then he disappeared from the record, and twenty years later his “son” inherited the company — the same height, the same shoulders, the same face.
She opened the current Pacific Meridian biography.
DEMETRI VASILIEV, SON OF ANDREI. The man in the photograph stared back at her from 1948. Unchanged.
Behind her, the door opened. Demetri stopped on the threshold. He saw the photograph, and his face went still. Nica turned the laptop toward him. “Tell me that isn’t you.”
He did not answer. He didn’t have to. The truth stood between them, wearing the same face it had worn for nearly eighty years.