Chapter 13
“Dear God,” Bella said. “No wonder everyone in the department hates you.”
The lab doors slammed closed, abandoning the pair of scientists alone in the blue glow of Yasmine’s laboratory. Bella was stuck like gum, immediately enraptured. Yasmine just laughed, opened a drawer, and snapped on a pair of nitrile gloves.
“They’re going to hate me even more next week,” she said. “When the newly formed Urchin Research Foundation drops thirty-three million dollars in my bank account.”
Bella nodded. She was sure the resentment would be torrential.
Before this, she had never completely understood why Waldorf had it out for Yasmine so badly—almost as soon as Bella arrived at Columbia, he’d informed her of the singular professor she was to avoid at all costs, the “red-haired eastern European nymph,” which only added to Yasmine’s allure—but now she understood.
Her laboratory was ridiculous.
Yasmine kept her lab like a dictator kept his prison: overflowing. It was hard to imagine that even the Boston Aquarium possessed this kind of marine inventory, and Yasmine was managing it in a facility an eighth of the size.
“I ordered this for you,” Yasmine said, stealing her attention away. She casually tossed Bella something long and white. “If it’s not your size, let me know. I’ll have it sorted.”
Bella caught it, turning the fabric over in her hands.
A lab coat?
Not just a lab coat. An exceptionally expensive one, judging by the feel of it. It had a small red insignia embedded in the chest pocket: the initials B. D. written in cursive.
Bella let out a short, disbelieving laugh to distract from the way her chest clenched.
“You had it embroidered?”
Yasmine shrugged her own coat on as she shot Bella a bewildered look.
“Of course. What, did Dr. Idiot have you wearing an old rag?”
Bella covered her mouth with a gloved hand, trying not to laugh too hard.
It was genuinely hilarious how much that silly human man got under Yasmine’s skin. It was as if she saw herself in genuine competition with Waldorf.
In competition with him… for me.
The thought made Bella’s stomach flutter. If she didn’t know better, she’d think Yasmine was being genuinely possessive of her.
Bella’s smile faltered.
Don’t do that. Don’t be foolish.
She had to keep herself far, far away from those fantasies.
Especially now.
In the back of her mind, a tape played on repeat. That hollowed, bloodless corpse from the television screen felt so close, like it was in the room with her, walking the tank-filled rows.
Every so often, she would hallucinate it—its freeze-dried face would pause behind a tank, twist its snapped neck, and glare at her from behind bubbling water.
Bella took in a breath, shook away the apparition, and started speed-walking in the opposite direction.
“Hey! Where are you going?”
“I want to get a sense of the place,” she replied, keeping a step ahead of Yasmine so she didn’t have to look at her. “Will I be responsible for cleaning the tanks?”
Unfortunately, trying to stay ahead of Yasmine was a Sisyphean task. Being the wired little monkey that she was, Yasmine caught up to her in seconds. And once she was in front of Bella, she started walking backwards like a campus tour guide.
“If I wasted your talent on scrubbing glass all day, I would hope you’d kill me in retaliation,” Yasmine scoffed. “My little, er… night helpers take care of all the cleaning.”
Yasmine’s utter confusion at what to call her staff forced a laugh out of Bella, even through the fog occupying her brain.
“Let me take a wild guess,” Bella said. “You’ve never actually met the people who clean and maintain your labyrinth of a lab, have you?”
Yasmine bit her lip. It wasn’t a guilty expression, but it was at the least mildly embarrassed. She clearly didn’t like how easily Bella could read her.
“Not once,” she confessed. “My assistant takes care of them.”
“Ah, your assistant.. And how many of those do you have?”
Narrowing her eyes in thought, Yasmine abruptly stopped walking. She cocked her head to the side adorably, then counted on her fingers.
“Um… twenty? Thirty? Gosh, I don’t know. I have an assistant who oversees all my assistants. I call her the Lead Assistant. I think her name’s Rebecca. Or Ashley.”
“You don’t even know your Lead Assistant’s name?”
Yasmine shrugged. “I try not to form attachments.”
Bella snorted, even when that made her chest hurt.
Because she knew it wasn’t just a throwaway comment.
Even before Bella had arrived in America, she’d known about Yasmine.
She was a bit of a living legend in vampire society.
Even though the outcast Dragomirs had always fluttered like bloodletting fruit flies on the perimeter of the vampire world, her mother collected gossip like a vacuum—and the red-haired nightmare queen was a very prominent topic at their dinner table.
“It seems Ms. Sokolov has done away with another companion. So many gravestones in that backyard. She sounds like a real pleasure, doesn’t she, girls?”
Bella never heard the definitive story about what happened to Yasmine’s family, but their deaths seemed to be the beginning of a longstanding pattern.
Any vampire who proposed to her? Graveyard.
That thrall she’d married, Richard? Buried.
So, by any logic, Bella was certainly next on the chopping block. And yet here she was, neck under the guillotine, maddeningly attracted to the executioner.
“Anyway,” Yasmine said, clapping her hands together so loudly that it made Bella snap to attention. “These are not the questions I’m paying you to ask. Let’s get into the research.”
“Right,” Bella replied unsteadily. She cleared her throat. “I’ll follow your lead, Professor.”
Yasmine rolled her eyes and grabbed Bella by the waist, piloting her in the correct direction, towards where Yasmine kept her instruments. “Do not call me that.”
***
Bella learned several things in the next couple hours, as the pair of them hunched over a computer screen and examined a year and a half of data.
One, Yasmine “I try not to form attachments” Sokolov gave each one of her sea urchins their own unique name.
Two, Bella found fact number one incredibly endearing.
And three, Yasmine’s research… had gone absolutely nowhere.
Okay, not nowhere. She’d made remarkable progress in understanding the mechanisms that slowed cell degradation in sea urchins.
But as far as applying it to humans? Uh…
How could Bella phrase this nicely?
Reading Yasmine’s research was like watching an incredibly intelligent alien try to explain the difference between humans and monkeys.
To the highly advanced alien, these two species of hairy primates are incredibly similar, to the point where there are almost no noticeable differences beyond the superficial. Of course, ask a human, and they’d be insulted by the question.
Yasmine was viewing vampires and sea urchins the same way. Since she didn’t understand the mechanism of immortality, she assumed she could reasonably replicate it between species.
Bella probably would have started there as well, if she didn’t know better.
“So,” Yasmine said, rolling her chair back to look at Bella. “What do you think?”
“It’s, uh…”
“A complete waste of a year and a half of my life?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that…” Bella trailed off, trying to find the right words. She was not very good at sugarcoating things. “It’s a very impressive study of sea urchins. The marine science community will be, um, overjoyed.”
Yasmine grew visibly more miserable, shoulders sagging, and Bella couldn’t help herself.
She grabbed the edge of the other woman’s chair and rolled it forward, so their knees were flush.
“It’s very good science, Yasmine,” she said seriously, laying her hand on Yasmine’s thigh. “Don’t put yourself down.”
Yasmine looked at her with an impassive expression, eyes flitting to Bella’s hand, then back to her face.
To Bella’s surprise, Yasmine didn’t coil into a spiky defensive ball like she usually did when her scientific ability was brought into question.
She didn’t even yell at Bella about the unnecessary touching.
She clearly wasn’t happy with the critique, but she didn’t run away from it.
Instead, she looked up at Bella with a starkly different expression than usual. She frowned helplessly, with a limp sort of frustration.
“I’m completely lost in this,” she admitted.
“Do you know how long I’ve been slamming my head into this problem?
I’m scared one and a half years is going to turn into thirty.
Time passes so quickly without me noticing, it just flies through my fingers, and that terrifies me.
I can’t just be doing really good sea urchin research.
I need to be doing research that actually extends human life. I need to, Bella.”
Exasperated tears were forming under Yasmine’s eyes. When Bella noticed, Yasmine immediately blinked them away, took a breath in, and hung her head down.
Bella was stunned.
She knew Yasmine was obviously passionate about this research from a theoretical perspective—all vampires had some sort of life’s work, it was how you made the years pass without going insane—but this pet project seemed to wade deeper for her.
Bella found herself grasping at straws to understand why.
Was there a human being that Yasmine loved? Had she fallen for one?
No. That would make no sense. Why would she be casually hooking up with her post-doc if she was head over heels for some human? And beyond that, she’d been going on unsuccessful dates with vampires for months before she met Bella.
What else could it be, though? Was she mourning her late thrall husband? Did she actually care about him on some level?
Yasmine got up from her chair, shaking out her shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” she said in an unreadable tone. “My passion got away from me.”
“Come on. Your passion is what I came to New York for,” Bella said, launching herself out of her chair at the same time, so they ended up much closer than either of them planned—practically toe to toe.