19. Pasha
Fyodor’s Rules #14 – Trust, but verify. Always confirm information before acting on it.
It was probably a good thing that Alexei had put her to sleep, because at that point, the room exploded. Nikolai was on the verge of losing control, baring his fangs and snarling at her. I’d dived onto his desk to get between them, bringing him up short. Lukas had also lunged at her; whether to escape with her again, or for some other reason, I was unsure. Alexei had stepped between them, holding a knife to Lukas’ throat. While the knife was probably a bit much, it had gotten Lukas to step back.
Tensions were high, and Alexei and I stood with our backs to the slumped over woman. Lukas was stiff as he backed up to the wall.
“She has to be lying.” He spat out the words, glaring at her prone form.
I looked at Nikolai, who had slid back into his seat. He was trying to smooth out his suit like he hadn’t just lost control of himself.
“Could she be lying? You were the one in the pact with her. Did you feel it break?” I asked Nikolai. The slight shake of his head had me looking down at her as he spoke.
“So she wasn’t lying then, but that doesn’t mean she’s our sister, either. All she did was say her name. Maybe they just have the same name. If she was our Yana, where has she been all these years and why hasn’t she reached out to us? Our sister is dead. We all saw the photos and viewed the claimed bounties. Lukas couldn’t find her. And now that someone is fucking with us, she’s suddenly back?” The scoff he gave had me doubting it was her, but it wasn’t enough to kill the brief glimmer of hope I felt.
Alexei gave voice to some of the doubts I was feeling. “From all the intel we have gathered, the Bratva are the ones fucking with us now. The same Bratva who told us she was dead.”
I had to resist the urge to reach out and stroke her hair. “No wonder she hates us.” Even saying those words made me feel sick in my stomach. What if it was her? Where had she been for the last decade? What had she been through that made her hate us this much?
“What about Fyodor?”
My eyes snapped toward Lukas.
Oh fuck! What about Fyodor? Did she know where he was? If she was alive, that meant he might be as well, right? There was a pang in my chest at the thought of seeing him again. I had often wondered what he would think of what we had made of ourselves; would he be proud of what we had built in his absence?
I wasn’t the only one thinking about that. And the mood in the room had become somber, each of us looking at the others, as though anyone in the room had the answers to what the fuck was taking place. Whatever was happening, there was something that needed to be taken care of first.
“We need to speak with her properly. But we can’t do it when she’s like this, or when we are. We need a plan. We need to talk about what we want to know, and how we’re going to get her to tell us, especially since she said she wants us dead. I’m going to take her to one of the guest rooms and heal her. I’ll lock her in and Lukas can have the hounds sit with her until she wakes. Maybe then all of this will make some sense,” I said that last bit like I believed it. However, I wasn’t sure any part of this was ever going to become clearer.
Lukas nodded, which threw me, as I had expected him to be the one to fight most. But if this was really Yana, seeing her hurt had to be making him feel as uncomfortable as it was making me. Alexei looked like he wanted to argue, but in the end, he just nodded. Nikolai said nothing, but I could see the redness creeping into his silver eye. He was going to need to feed before we brought her back into the room.But that was something to talk about once she was settled and healed.
Hearing no more arguments, I picked Yana up in my arms, wincing as I felt the ruined skin of her back touch my shirt. I was going to have to change afterwards. I was glad Alexei had her unconscious because this would have been agony for her otherwise.
Lukas helped me with the door, and both his hounds stood ready out in the hallway, like a pair of creepy canine bodyguards. They walked ahead of us, leading me towards the couple of guest rooms we had on this floor. I wasn’t even sure why we had them, nobody had ever slept there, but I guess there had to be a first time for everything.
Once they were standing guard outside the door, I opened it with just a wave of my fingers and a flash of light. Sometimes there was a lot to be said about being the descendant of a fallen star; it came with a range of very niche abilities.
I moved to the bed and set her down on her front. It would make healing her easier, and I couldn’t be sure there wouldn’t be some residual tenderness. I’d never tried to heal someone this injured, usually restricting it to the occasional bullet or knife wound. The hounds had followed me into the room, and one of them settled on the far side of the bed, the other on the floor. I couldn’t tell them apart, so I didn’t know which dog to ask to give us space.
Brushing her hair back from her face, I took a moment to look at her without my brothers standing over me. Her hair was the wrong shade for Yana. She’d had lovely blonde hair that tumbled down her back. She was always asking Fyodor to let her cut it short, and given her spirit, I had always been surprised she didn’t just hack it off without his permission.
But that was the hold Fyodor had over us. We’d do anything to make him happy.
Her back was bleeding again, probably from the way I’d been forced to carry her. I considered cleaning her up before I got to work, but there would be time for that later. Besides, I would be worried about waking her if I tried to clear the blood first. I was glad it was late afternoon, as I was going to have to spend the entire night up on the roof under the stars after this. Healing always took so much out of me. Having to find that part of myself that could connect with the energy of another, then giving my own energy to heal them. I was glad I didn’t have to do it often.
Determined not to watch her back knit itself together, I kept my eyes on her face while my hands did their work. It was so hard to tell if it was really her—our Yana. People changed a lot in a decade, especially when they left their teen years behind. My brothers and I had all filled out and grown taller. Matured into ourselves, I liked to think. We didn’t have many photos from back then, as camera phones hadn’t become a thing yet, and Fyodor wasn’t sentimental enough to keep a camera around.
It was amazing just how much you could forget about a person who had died. Even someone as close to your heart as Yana had been to ours.
I probably imagined the fact that she relaxed while I worked. Her sleep was unlikely to get any deeper, but it soothed me to think I had brought her a moment of peace. I was reluctant to leave her, but I couldn’t let the boys do too much talking without me. I compromised by getting a warm cloth and cleaning up her back, before slipping out of the room, leaving her in the care of Ghost and Demon.
The sound of my brothers arguing could easily be heard from the corridor as I approached Nikolai’s office, so I took a moment to linger and listen. Nikolai was adamant that this couldn’t be Yana. Lukas was adamant that it was. Alexei didn’t seem adamant either way but wanted to find out for sure before committing to an action, and honestly, I was with him. I hoped it was her, as I had missed her a lot over the last decade. The other guys could be a lot, and sometimes it was nice to have someone to talk to who listened without judgement. And she knew what it was like to have social pressures on her.
Growing up, Fyodor had often set the two of us to work together, and we complemented each other well. I drew people in, and she kept them there. But maybe this was all just a dream. We were going through a bad time, and like Nikolai kept saying, this was a little too convenient.
Not wanting to eavesdrop any longer, I entered the room. Everyone was sitting now, glasses of whiskey in hand. Stepping over to the bar, I poured myself a drink before taking a seat. The tension in the room was still heavy, although it was different now, no longer feeling like a rubber band about to snap. Now it was like the air had turned to cement.
“If this is all some Bratva fucking trick, I am going to murder a lot of fucking people.” Alexei’s exclamation got a chuckle from me. He was going to murder numerous people, regardless of who was behind this. If it was a trick, he would murder everyone involved. If this wasn’t a trick, he was going to murder everyone who had kept us apart.
Glancing over at Lukas, I watched as he stared into his glass like the answers to all our problems lay in its depths.
“Do you really think it’s her, Luka?” He flinched as I used his nickname, a clear sign things were bothering him. He was usually the stoic one of all of us—the cold-faced killer—and with Alexei and Nikolai in the mix, that was saying a fair bit. Alexei was likely to smile as he killed you though, and Nikolai was liable to be lost in the bloodlust.
Speaking of which, I got out of my seat and moved around his desk, sitting on the edge and holding out my wrist to him. He just looked at it for a long moment, then at me, his brow rising questioningly. I wasn’t in the mood for an argument, so I just brought it up to his lips, using actions, not words, to make my point. I wished he would stop acting like this was such an imposition, we all wanted him to be at his best, and this was just a part of that. As his fangs sank into my wrist, I turned my attention back to Lukas, waiting for him to continue the conversation.
“It’s her. She smells like her. You can’t fake that. Why does she hate us, though? I don’t understand, why would someone tell us she’s dead? What could they gain from that?” He took a sip of his drink and looked directly at me, pain in his eyes, but I didn’t have any answers. “What if someone with abilities like hers got to her and Fyodor, turning them against us? What have they had her doing for the past decade? And why are they sending her back now?”
That line of questions was something that I hadn’t considered, and it turned my blood to ice.
“Surely you can’t siren song a Siren? Otherwise, they could fall under the spell of their own powers, right?” I looked around, but they were as clueless as me.
“Even if they did, the influence can be broken, it just takes a lot of work. Remember, we all used to practice shaking off her control. We know how to do it, so we help her. What other option is there?” Not sure I wanted to hear what Lukas had to say, I looked at Nikolai.
He still had his fangs buried in my wrist, taking long pulls that I was doing my best to ignore. Now wasn’t the time to bend over his desk and beg him to fuck me; it’s why I had offered him the wrist and not my neck. Pulling my hand back, I used my dwindling pact magic stores to heal the wound while Nikolai licked his lips, then spoke.
“Keeping her here is a risk, but letting her go is more so. We need to find out what she knows about the last decade, and why she hates us. Torture is . . . not the best option, especially if she is Yana. Not that I’m saying she is.” He looked between Lukas and me, but neither of us argued with him. “You two have a week to get her to open up. If you can’t get her to talk, we will have to try something, less pleasant.”
A week—an entire week to overcome a decade’s worth of Siren’s influence and conditioning, assuming that was what had happened to her. Giving Lukas my best grin, I jumped off the desk. “Well, I guess we’ve got plans to make. Come up to the roof and we can chat, I need to spend some time under the stars.”
This was going to be a delicate game, but we could do it. We needed to succeed, for Yana.