Chapter 12
Lirien: Please do not leave.
Nica: i have to
Lirien: You are safer here. And he is worse without you.
Nica: that’s not my problem
Lirien: It will be. It already is.
He did not tell her everything. That was the answer. Nica had spent the last hour hoping he’d prove her wrong, and he didn’t, and the hoping had cost her more than the disappointment.
Demetri stood near the windows while dawn grayed the ocean behind him, the light coming up cold and colorless over a sea that had swallowed a whole night’s violence and given no sign of it.
He’d pulled on black trousers but no shirt, and the wound beneath his ribs had vanished, leaving unbroken skin where an enchanted sword had nearly killed him hours earlier — and that unmarked skin, more than the photographs, was the thing she couldn’t stop looking at.
Her laptop showed seventy-eight years of lies — Andrei Vasiliev, Nikolai Vasiliev, Anton Vasiliev, men with the same face, the same shoulders, the same habit of standing slightly apart from everyone else, as if a part of him had always known he’d outlive the room — and Demetri did not deny any of it. He simply refused to say what he was.
“I told you my age,” he said.
“That isn’t enough. You told me elves exist. But you can’t tell me what grows scales and claws and heals from a sword wound?”
“No.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both.”
Nica laughed; her chest hurt too much for anything else. “You keep saying the law. What law?”
“The law that governs every hidden species on this earth. Made by the Draquonir king and the imperial council.”
“What are Draquonir?” Demetri’s entire body went still, that total predator stillness she’d learned to read as the sound of a door closing. There. She’d found the edge. “Something you can’t tell me.”
“Yes.”
“Are you one?” He looked at her. No answer.
Enough. Nica stood, and Demetri did not move toward her, and that hurt too — the discipline of it, the way he held himself back even now, when everything in his face said he wanted to close the distance.
“You knew from the first day that I was walking into this blind. You knew when you questioned me about the book. You knew when you brought me here. You knew when you slept with me.”
His jaw flexed. “Yes.”
“Did you know I was connected to you somehow?” Silence. Nica’s heartbeat accelerated. “What does that mean?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Stop.”
“I am sorry.”
“Stop apologizing while you keep doing the thing.” His face changed. Pain. Good. She wanted him to feel some fraction of what she did, wanted the ache in her own chest to have a match somewhere in the room so she wouldn’t be carrying it alone.
Nica crossed to the chair where her clothes lay folded — Lirien must have collected them during the night, laundered and pressed them, set them where Nica would find them; even now the house cared for her in a hundred small wordless ways, and that made leaving harder than any argument could have. She dressed. “I’m leaving.”
Demetri closed his eyes once, and when he opened them the cold discipline had returned, sealing over everything, and she hated that she’d learned to tell the difference between the mask and the man beneath it. “A car will be ready.” The answer hollowed her out. “That’s it?”
“What would you have me do?”
“Fight.” The word escaped before she could stop it, and Demetri’s control cracked. He crossed the room and stopped inches from her, close enough that his heat reached her, close enough that her traitor body leaned a fraction toward it. “You want me to fight you?”
“I want you to fight for me.”
“I am.”
“No. You’re protecting your secrets.”
“I am protecting your life.”
“By refusing to tell me why it’s in danger.”
“Yes.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I know.”
“Then break the law.” The plea came raw, torn out of the part of her that wanted, desperately, to be given a reason to stay.
Demetri’s hand lifted and stopped beside her face, hovering, not touching.
“If I tell you what I am before you meet the legal condition for knowing, the penalty is death.” Nica forgot how to breathe. “Whose?” His eyes burned red. “Yours.”
The room fell away. “My death. Because you tell me the truth.”
“Yes.”
“That’s insane.”
“Yes.”
“Who would kill me?”
“The king’s executioners.”
“And you would let them?” Fire flashed behind his eyes, sudden and total.
“I would burn every kingdom on earth first.” The certainty in his voice frightened her more than the threat had — because he meant it, meant it the way other men meant nothing, and she had no framework for being loved by something that would raze the world for her.
Nica stepped back. “What is the legal condition?” He could not answer.
Of course. She laughed, and this time it sounded broken.
“You love me. You won’t tell me why. You won’t tell me what you are.
You won’t tell me what I have to do to earn the right not to be executed. ”
“That is not what it is.”
“It sounds exactly like that.”
“Nica.”
“No.” She picked up her laptop. Demetri did not block the door. He’d promised. She hated him for keeping that promise — hated that the one time she wanted him to override her, to be the tyrant she could righteously flee, he stood aside and let her go and made her do the leaving herself.
Lirien waited in the gallery, her eyes moving over Nica’s face and understanding immediately, the way she seemed to understand everything. “Let me speak to him.”
“No. I need to leave.”
Caelen appeared at the far end of the gallery, the tie gone, exhaustion marking the skin beneath his eyes, grief still raw in the set of his shoulders from the photograph of his brother.
“Your vehicle is ready.” No argument. No manipulation.
Respect. Nica almost cried at it, at being handed her own choice without a fight by people who had every reason to keep her.
Instead she hugged Lirien, and the elf froze, then her arms closed around Nica — cool, strong, smelling faintly of green growing things.
“Come back,” Lirien whispered. Nica could not promise.
Demetri stood in the entry hall, fully dressed now — black suit, white shirt, no tie, the perfect image of a billionaire who had not killed men with claws before dawn — and he held her coat.
She turned and let him place it around her shoulders, his hands not touching her skin, careful even now to give her nothing she hadn’t asked for.
“I have secured a suite at the Fairmont,” he said.
“Eight men. Four in the hotel, four rotating outside.”
“Margaret? The manuscript? Caelen and Lirien?”
“Safe.”
“And you?” The question escaped before she could stop it, and she despised how much the answer mattered. Demetri looked at her, the broken Chain beneath his cuff. “No,” he said. Nica’s heart clenched. “Then tell me.”
“I cannot.” She nodded. There it was. The wall neither of them could cross, standing between them as solid as the stone the house was built from.
He followed her as far as the steps. She turned before entering the vehicle, the cold morning air off the cliff pulling at her hair. “I don’t regret last night.”
“I do not regret any moment with you.”
“That isn’t the same as trust. I need the truth more than I need protection.”
His eyes held hers, ancient and certain and sad.
“I hope you never learn how wrong that is.” Nica got in.
The vehicle pulled away, and she watched him through the rear window until fog swallowed the house, until the pale stone and the copper roof and the man standing motionless on the steps all dissolved into gray, and only then did she let herself cry.
The driver’s name was Lewis — late forties, close-cropped hair, calm voice — and a second security vehicle followed.
Her phone showed three messages from Margaret, all variations of CALL ME.
She didn’t. Not yet. She needed ten minutes without explaining why she’d left the safest house in California after discovering that the man who lived there had been alive since before the United States existed.
Ten minutes to put herself back together, the way she always did, alone, in a moving vehicle, watching a place she’d almost belonged to disappear behind her.
They crossed the bridge, the towers vanishing up into the fog, the water far below flat and pewter.
Traffic slowed near the toll plaza. Lewis touched his earpiece.
“Rear vehicle, check in.” Static answered.
His posture changed — a subtle thing, a tightening she wouldn’t have caught a week ago, before she’d spent days learning to read the small tells of dangerous men.
Nica looked through the back window. The second SUV had disappeared. “Where are they?”
“Seat belt. Tighten it.” The light ahead turned red, and Lewis did not slow; he drove onto the shoulder and accelerated.
A delivery truck pulled out from an access road, too fast, directly into their path.
Lewis swore and cut the wheel, and the SUV struck the truck’s front quarter.
Metal screamed. Nica’s body snapped against the belt, airbags exploded, and the world filled with white powder and the chemical stink of the propellant as the SUV spun and stopped.
For several seconds Nica heard nothing but a high, thin ringing.
“Lewis?” He slumped over the wheel, blood running from his temple.
Nica reached for the door. Locked. A shadow moved outside, then another, and the window beside her shattered inward, safety glass raining across her lap.
A gloved hand reached through and unlocked the door, and she kicked, her heel striking someone’s chest. Another hand caught her ankle.
Nica grabbed the emergency hammer from the console and swung, the pointed end tearing through a black mask, and the man screamed and fell back.
She unlatched the belt. The opposite door opened, and a woman leaned in and fired something — a dart struck Nica’s shoulder, and cold spread through her arm, fast and numbing.
“No.” She tore it out. Too late. The street tilted, the fog smearing sideways.
She crawled toward Lewis. His hand moved.
Alive. Thank God. She reached for his radio, and a gloved fist closed in her hair and pulled, and Nica screamed and drove her elbow backward into something that gave.
She got one hand around the radio. “Demetri—” The world darkened at the edges, closing in.
Someone took the radio from her, prying her numb fingers loose one by one.
A man’s voice spoke near her ear, amused, unhurried.
“Tell the dragon we have his little translator.” Then everything disappeared.