Page 120 of Out for Blood
CASSIE
I followedHawk into the house, the gun heavy in my hand. My vision was narrowed by my mask, but I thought I understood now why the men wore them, in the Hunt and elsewhere.
Behind the mask I could be someone else, my true identity distanced from the person who stalked Dimitri Kaprolov’s house.
The person who wanted him dead.
Bram hadn’t liked it, but I’d seen the understanding in his eyes. He hadn’t wanted this for me, but in some ways the course of our lives had been determined the day our parents had been driven off the mountain.
Everything that was happening now led back to that day, and even though it was all kinds of fucked up, it felt right too.
Like it was always supposed to be this way.
War and magic.
That had been my life’s trajectory from the start.
We moved through a large, dark kitchen and down a hall, past a paneled library where a fire roared in a fireplace big enough to stand in.
Eventually we came to a wide staircase with a thick, carved banister, a series of bags dropped haphazardly at the foot of the stairs: Dior, Versace, Maison Valmont.
Alina was definitely home, and I hoped again that we wouldn’t see her. That she was texting with her rich friends or taking a bath or applying $500 eye cream.
Anything to keep her out of the way.
We crept slowly up the stairs to the second-floor landing where two halls diverged.
Hawk froze, obviously listening for something.
I heard it a moment later: music.
Something classical.
It took me a minute to place it:Swan Lake.
It brought me back to a time before my parents had been killed, and I was hit with a visceral wave of memory: the smell of a gymnasium, pink leotards and tights, ballet shoes, the music playing from speakers at one end of the room while Madame Duvall, my ballet teacher counted out the steps as she tapped a stick on the floor.
Hawk started down one of the halls toward the music.
I glanced back at Jagger, Vigo, and Bram. They looked like great beasts in their masks and I knew I looked like one too.
I followed Hawk down the hall, past several closed doors, the music getting louder, building to a crescendo as we approached the source.
We were just a few feet from the room when someone stepped into the hall.
One of the guards, wearing cold-weather camouflage.
He moved with purpose, like he was on a mission, then froze to raise his weapon when he saw us.
I heard the muffled discharge of one of the guns and saw the man fall, blood seeping across his gray and white clothing.
At the front of the line, Hawk hadn’t had time to raise his weapon, and when I looked back, I saw that it was Bram who had fired, his gun still raised.
Hawk met his gaze, then turned to enter the room, the music sweeping down the hall and through the house, carrying an energy all its own.
I entered behind Hawk into a giant bedroom, the furniture elaborately carved. Heavy draperies framed picture windows, the night black beyond the glass. A fire roared in a marble fireplace, smaller than the one in the library, the walls adorned with oil paintings that had probably cost millions at auction.
And there, at the center of the room, Dimitri Markov, sat on the edge of a giant bed in a velvet robe, the kind I’d seen men wear in old movies.
