Chapter 18
CHAPTER 18
Nathaniel set the scissors down on the kitchen table. “Done my best.”
“I don’t think it looks that bad,” Vincent said as he wandered over to where Nathaniel kept his cleaning supplies. He grabbed the broom and began to sweep the floor around Roger.
Josefina had a hand over her mouth. She sat on the kitchen counter, an empty blood bag beside her. Changing their hair had been her idea, and she had allowed Nathaniel to lop off her long braid in favor of a much shorter cut. Her hair still reached her shoulders, though.
Roger took up his phone and turned on the selfie mode. His hair hadn’t been so short since 1857, the one and only time he’d considered keeping to a mortal fashion and trimming his hair up from his shoulders.
But now, his hair was up above his ears. Vincent had helped him bleach his ebony locks to a light brown. He’d also started cutting Roger’s hair, but Nathaniel had caught sight of what he was doing to Roger and what had happened to Josefina, and he declared that he was taking over.
No wonder Josefina was ready to laugh. He looked horrible . Nathaniel wasn’t bad with scissors, but he was far from a professional.
Roger played with the strands and made a face at the screen. A real-time “reflection” was still a novelty and one he typically enjoyed. This was like watching a stranger.
“Stop fussing. It’ll grow back. Eventually.” Nathaniel reached into the fridge and took out a blood bag. “Has he drank yet?”
“I left him another bag, but he hasn’t touched it.”
“I don’t have the blood to keep wasting like this.”
“I’ll pay you back,” Roger promised.
“It’s not that,” Nathaniel grumbled. “I can’t go out and buy another dozen blood bags every couple of nights. Someone’s going to wonder why I keep getting more. It’s going to raise flags.”
“Something we can’t afford,” Josefina said.
“I can feed you,” Vincent offered.
“No one’s drinking from you for at least another two weeks,” Roger said.
Vincent puffed up. “I have blood, and you need it.”
Roger gave him a stern look. The boy had been wearing Zack’s clothes for the past few nights, which was a special pain. While he smelled a little like Zack—the washing of clothes hadn’t entirely removed Zack’s scent from some of his older garments—he didn’t carry himself at all the way Zack did. And despite Roger’s effort to keep from being Vincent’s master, Vincent kept offering to become his pet in little ways if not completely.
“Your health has been suffering for too long. You need your blood, Vincent.”
Vincent met Roger’s gaze but swiftly broke off from the impromptu staring contest. “Fine. But if you get me money, I can buy more blood. I used to do it for Seamus all the time.”
“People will know you’re connected to me, and I am in exile. That means if anyone suspects you are acting on my behalf, you will bring trouble on yourself.”
“Then find something for me to do. I’m going stir-crazy!” Vincent snapped.
“I might have something,” Nathaniel drawled. “My apartment’s never been so clean. If you’re that bored, I’ve got a storeroom that needs cleaned and inventoried.”
“You’ll pay him?” Roger said.
Nathaniel glared at him. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t insult me by suggesting I’d take advantage of your lot’s current situation and start using slave labor. Yes, I would pay him. Jesus wept, Roger. You have got to get away from the elite vampires more often.”
“How much would you pay?” Vincent asked cautiously.
Roger left the kitchen as Vincent and Nathaniel talked over the specifics of the task. Josefina began to trail after him, but he made a motion for her to remain behind. Quietly, he went into Nathaniel’s bedroom.
The windows had been bricked over long ago so that the sun couldn’t penetrate the sleeping space. Roger had turned on a soft-glowing lamp on the nightstand the first night that he had brought Dmitri in here. The lamp had remained on.
Roger had taken care to wash the blood off Dmitri before putting him in the bed. Once placed, Dmitri had curled into a ball, and Roger had put a blanket over him. Dmitri hadn’t moved, at least not as far as Roger could tell. The blood bag he’d left in the room sat on the night table. The blanket was eerily smooth, suggesting that he hadn’t thrown it off and pulled it back over himself.
Time could provide healing, but Roger couldn’t keep pacing in hopes that Dmitri might come back to himself. He shut the bedroom door and moved to the end of the bed. “Can I sit?”
No response.
“Dmitri, please,” Roger murmured, “I need to know that you’re conscious. If you don’t want to speak, move your hand or something at the least.”
Still, no response.
Moving slowly, Roger rounded the bed. He lifted the blankets and carefully folded them back enough to see Dmitri’s face.
Dried blood trails created paths down Dmitri’s cheeks. A bloodstain colored the sheet under his face. Several different shades of dried red mottled the puddle. He’d cried more than once.
As the light reached him, fear clouded his eyes until he focused on Roger. Then he frowned. His voice was dry as bone as he whispered, “I thought I was hallucinating again, but I would never picture that .”
“That?”
Dmitri pointed at Roger’s head.
Self-consciously, Roger touched his hair. “Ah.”
“Anton wouldn’t give you a blond streak.”
“I thought Vincent knew what he was doing, but he was reading instructions from the internet. Josefina claims she didn’t know any better either.” Roger motioned at the empty space on the bed. “May I sit?”
“Not like I could stop you,” Dmitri muttered.
Raw, terrible pain filled Dmitri’s voice, and Roger hated how it echoed through him and struck a familiar note. For three hundred years, they had suffered side by side and yet never spoken a word of what haunted their waking hours.
Because Roger had laughed and drank and pretended that his life was not so miserable. He had never told anyone of the nights he had crawled into bed and cried like this. To the best of his ability, he’d made himself forget them, too. If the pain wasn’t felt, it couldn’t be real. Yet that only left him with gaping wounds that had only recently begun to heal. His lovers had done that for him.
Dmitri had been his lover. They’d tried to make a relationship work again and again, only to break each other’s hearts over and over. Or perhaps we were already too broken and our jagged edges cut one another too deeply .
Roger remained at the edge of the bed, but he knelt so Dmitri would not have to raise his gaze so high. “I won’t crowd you. I want to care for you. That’s all.”
Slowly, Dmitri slid his hand along the bed, reaching for him. “You came for me. That’s enough.”
Guilt made Roger hesitate.
Some facet of his anguish must have crossed his features because Dmitri frowned. “You didn’t?”
The pressure of centuries of failure threatened to drag Roger down. With a careful, light touch, he put his hand in Dmitri’s and let him feel the depth of his regret. “I thought you were dead and beyond reach. Had I known … I won’t lie to you, Dmitri. I don’t know what I might have done. But once I saw you, I couldn’t leave you behind.”
“How long did they have me?” Dmitri asked.
“A few weeks. Much has happened.” Roger quickly sketched out the details of what had occurred, lingering on how Anton had told him at the ball about the wager. “He claimed the bet was settled, then took that back during the attack on the hotel suite. Do you have any idea what he meant?”
Dmitri closed his eyes, then tightened them further. “He … he kept bringing in these tools. I thought he was preparing me for the draining ritual, but if he’s let me go, then he must have been doing something else.”
Trying to remember was clearly distressing Dmitri. Roger brushed his fingers through Dmitri’s dark hair. “Let’s not worry about that now.”
Anger twisted Dmitri’s frown into a scowl as he opened his eyes. He sat up, pulling away from Roger, and the blanket puddled over his lap. Though Nathaniel had set out clothes for him, Dmitri hadn’t put them on. He was still naked. The red marks from the silver wires had healed. His skin was smooth and perfect again. Outwardly, he seemed better.
Inwardly, Dmitri had always struggled. Depression created a vicious cycle he had never broken in life, let alone in his immortality. “That is your specialty, isn’t it? Ignore the pain. Running .”
The accusation was one of the oldest between them. Roger had never faced the truth of the stinging word.
Because when Seamus and Anton had descended on Dmitri and Roger behind the tavern, Roger had slipped Seamus’s grasp. At least, he’d believed he had. Seamus had been playing a fatal game and allowed him those ten steps. Ten awful footfalls where Roger had abandoned the man he had claimed to love with all his heart and ran.
He had left Dmitri.
He had abandoned him yet again on that horrible stage in the modern Devil’s Cove.
That didn’t feel like something he would do now, but he wouldn’t have believed himself such a coward before those pivotal moments. Had he changed at all? Had he grown more craven through the years? Less? Could he manage any bravery?
Old pain would not deliver a new future. Roger cleared his throat. “Dmitri?—”
“ He did something to me ,” Dmitri hissed. “Besides his usual ‘fun.’ And you would ignore it.”
Roger moved to the far side of the room from him. It wasn’t much space, but the distance was enough to clear his mind of Dmitri’s swirling fears. He had always been a tempest, and Roger had always sought calm seas. His own anger bubbled, but Dmitri hadn’t truly hurt him. Not in a way that deserved his rage. Oh, how his lungs wanted to vent all his vitriol upon Dmitri and shred open old wounds from their past love.
But he would be a better man. He would not cause harm upon someone who did not deserve it.
Roger took one step forward, then stopped himself and remained in the corner. In one of their more recent arguments, Dmitri had called him the same as Seamus. Another cruel and violent creature. Roger wouldn’t be that. Not toward those he cared about. “Just because I choose to smile instead of howl does not mean I am without injuries. You are not the only one they have tortured.”
“You had another set of toys taken away from you? How terrible,” Dmitri replied.
“I love them.”
“You claim it’s that, but I’ve heard you utter such pretty words before.” Dmitri slid to the edge of the bed, the blanket covering his lap. “You don’t know how to love, Roger. No vampire does.”
“No, no. No. You will not disregard my emotions and hide behind that lie,” Roger snapped. “I love Zack. I love Takashi. They are my stars and wind. Without them, I am listless, hoping for a tide to carry me onward until, through some chance of luck, I may yet find my way back to them.
“But luck will not bring back Takashi and the beauty of his smile in the first moments he wakes. It won’t preserve the starlight in Zack’s eyes. I do not know where they are. I had the choice to learn, and instead, I chose to save you. To save those Zack once called family. Because that was what my love would have wanted. And so I am left with a shattered heart that was of my own making twice over. You will not belittle my pain, Dmitri.”
For a long, agonizing moment, they held each other’s gazes. Roger would not blink, would not budge from what he had said. His mind felt scrubbed clean and, though raw, might heal anew.
Dmitri broke his stare and looked away to the floor, blinking rapidly. “I had thought the poet in you had died.”
“I don’t have to pretend to be a vapid fuckboy any longer,” Roger said. “There is a freedom in being exposed to have my own mind. And terror.”
Dmitri made a noncommittal grunt.
With a languid ease, Roger sat on the corner of the bed near him. “I do not wish for you to forget your wounds. That wasn’t what I meant. I wanted to draw your attention to the present because I need you.”
“Do you love them that deeply?” Dmitri murmured.
Roger stared at his hands. The walls of his defenses were remnants, and he struggled to put any of them in place around Dmitri. Too many years of suffering had driven them to this weird place when they might have found strength in one another. Strength like he found with Zack and Takashi.
“From the moment Zack woke me, he has challenged me. He has made me realize that there are things I have not healed and damage I could stop inflicting,” Roger whispered. “Takashi has pointed to those same injuries and given me the space to air them. He has faith in what I could be. And they are both so clever and handsome. They knew when to push me and when to hold me.”
Silence stretched between them. Eventually, Roger let his gaze drift to Dmitri and discovered that Dmitri was watching him closely. His expression was closed off, but when Roger started to speak, Dmitri cut him off. “Once upon a time, you were that for me.”
And that was an arrow through the heart, laced not with Cupid’s love but tipped with silver. Roger ached to love Dmitri, to have their tender moments renewed, but that way had poison barbs waiting for him. And he could not—would not—enter into anything without his lovers’ approval.
But Dmitri needed hope.
Roger needed a shred of it.
“If you can ever reconcile what you are and stop believing that you are a monster, then there might be time for us. But we can’t be like we were before.” Roger put his hand on top of Dmitri’s. “I can’t love your self-hate.”
Dmitri’s blue eyes went wide. The dried, bloody tears on his cheeks lent his reaction a painful beauty. Longing to feel some bit of comfort, to give what he could to Dmitri, Roger moved forward and pressed his forehead against Dmitri’s. He lightly put his hand on Dmitri’s cheek and jaw, his fingers more against his neck than anywhere else.
Dmitri shuddered with fresh tears. “I’d forgotten how insightful you can be.”
“How do you think I manage to get laid?” Roger leaned back and tried for a smile, but no joy crested his lips. “I’m sorry, but I did have a purpose in disturbing you. I’ve had a wild idea, and you might be able to help me.”
“I doubt it,” Dmitri said. He grabbed the sweatpants Nathaniel had put out and slid his legs into them. “What idea?”
“I want to empty Seamus’s bank accounts. Drain him and the coven of everything.”
Dmitri twisted and, in his haste, started to topple over. With liquid grace and speed, Roger caught him and helped him steady. Dmitri finished tugging up the borrowed pants and gaped at Roger. “You want to what ?”
“Honestly, I want to burn the entire coven to the ground,” Roger replied smoothly. “I want Seamus to feel every ounce of pain that I have tenfold. Since what he cares for is status and money, obviously, the money has to go. You were his financial advisor. Could it be done?”
“I … I could. I’ve dreamed of it enough times.” Dmitri grabbed the T-shirt set aside for him and pulled it on. “I built an administrator back door for myself. Provided no one’s found that, I could wipe clean what is in my—at least what was my—firm.”
“What would you need?” Roger asked.
“Ten minutes in the firm’s server room.”
“That long?”
“Accessing the money wouldn’t be the difficult part. It’s the sending of it.” Dmitri folded his arms over his chest and pondered for a long moment. “It won’t be everything. He has a little with an Unseelie firm, and there are his general bank accounts. I have access to them, but the bank would likely shut down large withdrawals until they had his approval, which we clearly won’t have.”
“But we’re talking a significant amount,” Roger said, trying not to let his giddiness get to him.
Dmitri smiled. “Eighty percent of his. Seventy-five percent of the coven’s, should we empty those as well.”
“That will definitely hurt him.”
“You’re not hoping I will dump all this wealth on you, are you?” Dmitri asked.
“I want it to disappear,” Roger replied. “Though, if we could slide five million to Nell so she won’t come after me for a debt, I’d appreciate it.”
“I could arrange that if I had an account number for her.”
Roger grinned broadly. “Oh, I might know someone who could help us with that.”
“We’ll have to deal with security. The place runs all hours anymore.”
“If you can sketch out the details, I’m certain Thomas will aid us in figuring out how to combat it.”
Dmitri narrowed his eyes. “Who is Thomas?”
“Zack’s father.”
“You’ve managed to get another Wright to help you?” Dmitri put a hand to his head. “Perhaps I am still hallucinating.”
“You aren’t,” Roger said gently.
“If you say so.” Dmitri sighed and leaned against Roger’s shoulder. “But should I open my eyes and find myself still tied in silver, I won’t be surprised.”
Instinct begged Roger to slide an arm around Dmitri, and so he did, giving Dmitri every opportunity to move away from him. Instead, Dmitri leaned into him all the harder. No one in the world might understand what the other had endured so much as they could understand each other. Roger yearned to haul him close, to let him deeper into his heart. But he couldn’t betray Zack and Takashi like that, couldn’t risk hurting Dmitri’s heart or his own.
He ought to prod for answers, descriptions—anything to make his plan move forward. But he hoped they wouldn’t want him to deny Dmitri this moment of solace and comfort as he sank against Roger and relaxed.
“You’re anxious for action,” Dmitri murmured.
“I am,” Roger said. “I’ve waited too long to strike like this.”
Dmitri laughed, wiping away a tear as he sat straight again. “You have no idea how good it is to hear you admit that. Come. Nathaniel must have paper and pen. Call your Wrights. Perhaps together, we can rob the monsters blind.”