Page 25 of Reckless Heir
Silver Venetian mask covering the upper half of his face, but I know the smirk before I clock the jawline. Dimitri Drakos moves through rooms the way weather moves — apparently directionless, actually systemic. He's been at the edges of every Obsidian event since I arrived at St. Gabriel. He exists in the particular way of people who want to be noticed by specific people and invisible to everyone else.
Tonight he's noticed me.
"Dimitri," I say.
"Sofia." He steps closer, invading the space between us with the casual ease of someone who has never been told no by a room. He smells like bourbon and deliberation. "I heard Aleksei bought you."
"That's a very coarse summary."
"Is there a more accurate one?"
I hold his eyes through the silver mask. "Go away, Dimitri."
"I will. Shortly." He glances toward the north transept where Aleksei is still in conversation, his back to us, and something shifts in Dimitri's expression — the calculation becoming visible for just a moment before the ease reasserts. "He's boring, you know. Obsidian usually is. Too many rules. Too much—" he tilts his head, "—control." The word lands with a weight that suggests he knows exactly what the word means in this context.
"I'm not interested."
"You haven't heard the offer." He leans in slightly, his voice dropping. "I could buy out the debt. Your family's. Double what he paid. Make him a profit and get you out of a contract you didn't sign." His eyes hold mine. "I have the liquid assets. I've done the math."
"I'm not a stock option," I say, stepping back.
"Aren't you?"
The question doesn't have a clean answer, which is why he asked it, and he knows it doesn't have a clean answer, and we both know I know, and the knowing sits there between us like something that will need to be dealt with eventually.
"Dimitri."
The name cuts through the fog like a blade.
Aleksei is there. I didn't see him move — he has that quality, the particular stillness of very controlled people that means their movement barely registers until they've already arrived. He's standing between me and Dimitri with the presence of someone who has decided on an outcome and is producing it, and the air around him has the specific charge that I've learned to identify as the version of Aleksei that has stopped performing calm.
"Romanov," Dimitri says, not backing down. His voice is pleasant. Everything about Dimitri is pleasant. "Just admiring the merchandise."
"She's not for sale."
"Everything's for sale." Dimitri raises his hands slightly — not surrender, inventory. "I was just telling her?—"
"Touch her," Aleksei says, and his voice is quiet, which is worse than loud, "and I'll take the hand. Speak to her again tonight, and I'll take the tongue. There won't be a conversation about it."
Dimitri looks at him for a long moment.
Then he smiles — a real one, or close enough — and steps back. "Enjoy your evening," he says, to me rather than to Aleksei, and disappears into the fog.
Aleksei's hand closes around my wrist.
He doesn't grip hard. He doesn't need to — the grip is just enough to communicate direction, and direction is established, and we're moving through the fog and the crowd and a velvet curtain that separates the nave from the side chapel before I've fully registered that we're going.
The side chapel is lit by a single candelabra — five flames, the only light except for what bleeds under the curtain from the cathedral. It's cold in here, colder than the main room, the stone holding the November air in its walls. The room smells of old incense and iron.
Then I see the men. There are five of them.
Masked, all of them, seated in the remnant of the old choir stalls: five figures in formal wear and identical black masks with the Obsidian crest at the temple. The Regents. The inner council that exists above the Heirs, that writes the rules the Heirs enforce, that watches everything and decides everything and has apparently decided that tonight requires their presence in this room.
They don't speak. They don't move. They sit and they watch with the particular quality of people who have been watching things for a long time and have learned to be very patient about it.
Aleksei spins me to face the altar.
The altar is stone, bare, stripped of whatever it once held. He pins me against it with one hand at my hip, and I feel the cold of the stone through the fabric of the dress and his warmth at my back and the heat of five pairs of masked eyes from the choir stalls, and my blood is doing something I can't name — not quite fear, not quite the other thing, some compound of the two that my body apparently has its own vocabulary for even if I don't.
