Chapter 4
“Live… with you?”
Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.
Why had she said that? She’d meant to say literally anything except that. Yasmine had five apartments within Manhattan alone.
She could have offered any one of them.
Then again, it wasn’t necessarily a good idea to flaunt her exorbitant wealth to a coworker.
As far as the university (and her U.S. tax returns) were concerned, she was upper middle class at most. The only income she registered was the salary she got from Columbia and a handful of stocks and bonds that seemed believable for a professor of her age.
Of course, Yasmine possessed a lot more than a handful of stocks and bonds.
She would easily rank in the top ten of richest people on planet Earth, and hiding that was no simple task.
She had a long list of shell companies and property managers that took care of all her estates and business interests (and, more importantly, heavily smudged her paper trail.) She had enough accountants that she had an assistant who just dealt with her accountants.
And then an assistant who dealt with that assistant.
Her entire life was designed so that she could do exactly what she wanted to do with as little interference from other people as possible. That kind of lifestyle required discretion. She had no interest in disassembling it in one afternoon.
So Yasmine cleared her throat, and doubled down.
“Sure. I have an extra room. Three of them, actually. So you can have your pick of the litter. I see no reason that one of my colleagues should be sleeping on the floor of a coffee shop while I have the space.”
“Would the university staff not find that strange?”
Yasmine bit down on her lip. What she really wanted to say was if any of them did find it strange, I would have zero problem getting Sylvia to Suggest them into taking a long vacation, but that didn’t seem prudent.
So she became the personification of class and dignity instead, propping her hands on her hips and nodding once, solemnly.
“That’s true,” she said, feigning concern. “I have a solution, though. We just won’t tell them.”
At that, Bella full-body laughed. Her head careened forward, her long hair splaying over the countertop. It looked like a blonde waterfall.
“I can see why they hired you. You truly operate on a higher level.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
Bella’s lips spread into a cartoonish frown, and she slowly leaned away from the counter. Yasmine thought for a moment she might have actually injured the girl’s ego, but then the blonde circled around the countertop, slung her tiny black purse over her shoulder, and gestured toward the door.
“Fine. Lead the way.”
Yasmine blinked. Then, realizing Bella was actually agreeing to her ludicrous plan, she panicked. Internally, of course. Externally, it probably manifested as a singular eye twitch.
It’s fine. You’re just being charitable. You’re always being charitable.
After all, with the amount of money she gave away to Sylvia every month, she was practically Mother Teresa.
***
“Professor Sokolov, this isn’t an apartment. This is a mansion.”
“If you ever call me that again, I will evict you on the spot.”
Bella snickered, closing the door and shutting out the incessant honking. It had been a brisk—and awkward—fifteen minute walk north to the Upper West Side, where Yasmine’s home sat across from Central Park. Or, as Yasmine liked to call it, “Pissing Field For Dogs.”
She had a lot of opinions about twenty-first century dog ownership.
“What should I call you then?” Bella asked.
“My name,” Yasmine said, removing her leather boots and whisking open the coat closet. Distracted by the paintings lining the walls, Bella began to step into the foyer, but Yasmine stopped her with a snappy, “No shoes in the house.”
Bella immediately froze up. “Sorry.”
Yasmine grimaced. Way to go. You probably sound like her mother. “No. It’s fine. I’m—I’m just weird about germs. Outside shoes, inside shoes. You know.”
Bella kicked off her shoes. “You’re weird about germs and yet you choose to hang out at the coffee shop in Manhattan with possibly the worst kitchen hygiene I’ve ever seen?”
Yasmine winced. That germophobe excuse usually worked, but this girl was annoyingly keen.
The truth was, she didn’t care about germs in the least. She was a vampire, meaning her gut biome was built of steel and spikes, and even the most deadly human diseases usually manifested in some bizarre but totally harmless side effect.
For example, when she caught the Black Death, she spent the whole week with a horrible itch between her shoulder blades that she couldn’t scratch. Which was really annoying, because no one in her neighborhood was alive to itch it for her.
She was just very… particular about her home. Which was why—on days where she wasn’t acting like a complete lunatic—she did not invite people over. Ever.
“Forget about it,” Yasmine said, shaking her head and taking Bella’s shoes from her. They were heavier than Yasmine expected—the pointy kitten heel was as weighty as a boulder—and she dropped them onto the carpet. “Damn it.”
She kneeled down to grab them, and Bella apparently had the same idea. Yasmine’s hand fell over Bella’s as it wrapped around the shoe.
Yasmine froze. Her first instinct was to release it and apologize, but the feel of Bella’s hand was strangely distracting: her skin was abnormally warm, and softer than even the rare silks Yasmine had kept through the centuries.
It almost didn’t feel like normal skin. It felt like she was made of mink.
God, I wouldn’t mind a blanket made out of her.
“Yasmine?”
Yasmine’s eyes snapped up. Bella looked confused, perhaps mildly startled.
Please dear heavenly father I pray I didn’t say that out loud.
“Yes?" Yasmine said, her voice strained.
“You’re gripping my hand a bit tightly.”
Yasmine turned the shade of red she expected the sun might turn when it eventually exploded. She didn’t even try to apologize: she just released the woman’s hand, turned towards the dark closet, and pinched the bridge of her nose until the shame lessened.
After a moment, she released a breath.
“It’s late. Must be after ten or eleven now,” she said, as if that might explain her behavior. “Let me show you to your room.”
Without glancing back, she led Bella into the living room, then up the spiral staircase onto the second floor.
Thankfully, Bella couldn’t have been overly affected by the interaction, because she was busy marveling at just about everything in Yasmine’s apartment.
Which, Yasmine would admit, gave her a modicum of satisfaction.
Besides Wallace, no one else was ever over to appreciate it.
And for all the things she loved about her son, appreciation for the art of interior design was not high on his list of qualities.
“I take back what I said before,” Bella said as they made their way onto the second floor landing. “This isn’t a mansion. This is a museum. You have so much… everything.”
“I’m a bit of a collector,” Yasmine said quietly. Every vampire was.
She didn’t put anything on display that she couldn’t afford losing, but that still left quite a few nice pieces.
Her favorites were the maps of the world from throughout the centuries.
It was fun to see the human understanding of the globe widen and warp, the reigning opinions of the time expressed so literally through the shape and size of each continent.
She also enjoyed the oil portraits that hung on the wall by the stairs.
The subjects were mostly humans, people Yasmine had befriended once upon a time, and who she didn’t want to forget.
Her gaze lingered on one of those portraits now, a young, brown-haired girl whose radiant smile was half-hidden by the railing. Yasmine didn’t need to read the plaque to remember who that one was, the nausea in her stomach told her enough.
“Who’s this?”
Yasmine looked behind to find the blonde holding a picture frame.
She turned it in Yasmine’s direction, arching an eyebrow expectantly.
Yasmine’s stomach fell. It was Wallace. A picture of them at his college graduation.
No one at Columbia knew about Wallace. Even during the fiasco of Tommy’s death, she’d managed to keep Wallace out of the public eye.
He’d always gone to local schools in Albany—nothing private, nothing fancy—so outside of Sylvia and Aster, almost no one else in the mortal or the vampire world knew he was her son. He was safer that way.
“My nephew,” Yasmine answered.
“Oh,” Bella said, squinting at it. “Makes sense. His hair color is nowhere near as cool as yours.”
Yasmine laughed in shock. “As cool? You find my hair cool?”
“I mean, I find you cool in general,” Bella said. She set down the picture and joined Yasmine by the doorframe to the bedroom. “But the phoenix hair really sells it. It's so gorgeous. Is it seriously natural?"
“It grows out of my scalp without any interference from me, so I suppose, yes," Yasmine said unsteadily, because Bella was very close again. “So, your room.”
“My room,” Bella echoed, mercifully shifting her gaze from Yasmine to their surroundings. Her voice was oddly quiet when she continued, “Feels strange to say that.”
“Have you… not had a room of your own before?”
Bella turned her head back towards Yasmine. She was wearing a small smile, one that didn’t reach her eyes. Hardly her usual exuberance.
“Always shared with my siblings.”
“Oh,” Yasmine said. She realized in that moment just how little she knew about the stranger she’d invited into her house. “You have siblings.”
Bella laughed, and Yasmine felt a warmth in her stomach seeing how free it looked, her usual impishness returning color to her face.
“As many people do,” Bella joked.
Yasmine rolled her eyes. “Not me. Just one brother.”
“Ah. My condolences,” Bella joked.
“Thank you. He is dead though, actually. Fun fact.”
Bella’s face fell catastrophically. She looked as pale as a corpse. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“It’s fine.” It’s been a thousand years. “It’s been a while.”
Bella frowned at her, and Yasmine decided she didn’t like that expression on her, so she tugged Bella by the arm, dragging her out of the infernally claustrophobic doorframe and into the bedroom.
Then she closed the door shut behind them out of reflex.
(Back before the miracle of central heating, doors needed to always be tightly closed to keep the heat in.)
Bella apparently did not understand this reflex, because her eyes widened and she laughed again. “Yasmine, what are you doing?”
“What do you mean what am I doing?”
“Closing the door to the bedroom?” Bella said. “Is this going to be a sleepover?”
Yasmine spluttered. “Of course not. I have a bedroom.”
“Oh.” Bella folded her arms and frowned. “That’s disappointing.”
Yasmine blinked several times, assuming that she must have heard that wrong.
“What?”
Bella seemed to not care that she was leaving Yasmine in distress, because she proceeded to open the dresser drawers, innocently peering inside.
“These are empty,” Bella astutely observed.
“Well, of course they are. Why would I put stuff in the drawers of a guest room?”
“I guess it’s just hard for me to imagine the existence of a guest room. My sisters and I were constantly warring over closet space.”
Yasmine’s mouth opened, then closed. It’d been so many years since she’d ever had to think about money, she often forgot just how little others lived with.
“Do your sisters live in New York as well?”
Bella slowly shut the dresser drawers, pressing her hands flush to the oak.
“No,” she said, without any emotion. “They’re still back at home.”
“Home, okay. Which is… where?”
Avoiding the question, Bella just flashed her a smile. Then, to Yasmine’s horror, she curled her warm hands around Yasmine’s arms.
“Thank you so much for letting me stay the night, Yasmine,” she said, in a quiet voice that made the hairs on Yasmine’s arms stand straight.
“And don’t worry, I’ll be out of your hair before you even wake up.
I have to teach a class at eight-thirty, and I’ll have to get back to my office by six so I can pick up my lecture materials and a change of clothes. ”
“You keep your clothes… at your office?”
Bella shrugged. “I keep everything there. I only make trips to my apartment when I have to. Dealing with my roommate is like stepping into a lion’s den.”
“You should really find a new roommate,” Yasmine said, an embarrassing stiltedness to her voice.
It was just—she couldn’t help it—this woman’s hands were like portable ovens, and her pupils were fully dilated, and her hair was glowing under the low light of the oil lamp like some kind of fallen angel and—God, she was just annoyingly pretty.
Oh.
Hm.
She could not, under any circumstances, tell Sylvia about this.
“I think I already found one,” Bella joked, curling her fingers into the flesh of Yasmine’s arm again before releasing them. “You know, you should come to one of my lectures sometime. I wouldn’t say our areas of focus overlap much, but I’d be honored to have you attend.”
Yasmine swallowed down the realization she’d just had, and the lengthy spiral of thoughts that immediately followed it.
“Of course. I have to make sure I’m not hosting a bad scientist.”
Bella snorted.
“I’m a lot of things, but not that,” she said, looking at Yasmine with a glint in her eye “Goodnight Yasmine. Don’t get lost on the way to your room.”
Yasmine inhaled, and thought to herself—
You’ve made a really poor decision.
But all she said was, “I’ll try my best.”