Page 17 of Dragon Kissed

She turned to look at him. “What?”

“The color palette, the border technique.” He kept his eyes on the road. “There was a family of jewelers in Petersburg in the late Romanov period — the Morozov workshop, I believe, before the revolution changed everything. They used that exact cobalt. Very few hands could manage that quality of work. It’s an extraordinary piece.”

She looked down at the pendant. She’d known it was old. She’d known it was beautiful. She’d spent three years cataloguing decorative arts and had never once been able to place it, because the enamelwork sat above the level of her knowledge — and she’d never had the courage to have it formally assessed, afraid the assessment would confirm it was worth more than everything she owned by several orders of magnitude.

“You know what workshop it came from,” she said. “Just by looking.”

He glanced at her, brief and dark and intense, and something in that glance snagged low in her belly before she could stop it. “I’ve been looking at Russian work for a very long time. That piece belongs in a museum case. That it’s around your neck instead, and was your grandmother’s, and she gave it to you —” something shifted in his voice “— I’d like to know everything about it, if you’re willing to tell me.”

She studied his profile. She’d never told anyone about the pendant; she wore it every day and no one ever asked, because no one in her life had ever looked at her the way this man looked at her. Like she was interesting. Like she mattered. Like the small ordinary facts of her were worth collecting.

“She said it was all that was left of where we come from,” Nica said. “It belonged to her grandmother, and to hers before that. She pressed it into my hand the last Christmas before she died.” She paused. “I’ve worn it every day since. It’s the only thing I have left of her. Of any of them.”

“Then it is exactly where it belongs,” he said quietly.

She looked at him. His profile gave nothing away — the composed jaw, the long nose, the mouth that didn’t smile easily — but something in the set of his shoulders had changed, gone taut and careful, and she had the sudden, irrational sense that the man beside her knew more about the small enamel oval at her throat than she’d ever known herself.

They’d crossed the Golden Gate twenty minutes ago. When the fog thinned she’d seen the city behind them, San Francisco reduced to distant lights across black water — her apartment over there, her bed, her books, the chipped blue mug Baba Yelena had used every morning — and then the bridge gave way to redwoods, and a private road closed over them, single-laned and unmarked, threading between trunks so enormous theymade the SUV look like a toy. The air that seeped in through the vents changed with the trees: colder, greener, resinous, the deep wet smell of a forest that had never once been cleared.

A pair of iron gates appeared ahead, set between stone pillars. No guardhouse. No keypad. No cameras she could see. They simply opened as the vehicle approached, silent and smooth, then closed behind it with a finality she felt between her shoulder blades.

“Motion sensors?” she asked, because she needed to say something ordinary.

“Something like that,” Demetri said.

Beyond the gate the road curved, and ended, and the house appeared out of the fog, and Nica forgot to breathe. It rose from the very edge of the cliff in pale stone and dark glass, three long stories angled toward the Pacific — not the cold glass box she’d half expected from a billionaire. Old stone walls formed the heart of it, edges softened by time and climbing ivy, modern wings extending from either side. The oldest part looked as if it had stood on this cliff long before there was a San Francisco across the water to look back at it. A copper roof gone green with age. The whole western face was glass, floor to ceiling, and through it, past the house, there was nothing at all — only the open Pacific, the horizon, the fog lifting off a sea that crashed against the rock far below.

“Wow,” she said, helplessly.

The SUV stopped beneath a covered stone entrance. The driver opened Demetri’s door first — of course he did — and Demetri stepped out, then turned and offered her his hand: long fingers, neat nails, a faint pale line across his palm that might have been an old scar, though she’d watched a far worse one close on his shoulder not two hours ago.

No.I did not watch that. The hallway light was terrible and I was panicking, and human bodies do strange things under stress. They do not heal in minutes.

She looked up. He waited — didn’t reach into the car for her, didn’t take her elbow, didn’t turn her hesitation into a performance — so she put her hand in his. Heat closed around her fingers, and her pulse stumbled.Every time. Every damn time he touches me, my body behaves as though it’s never met a man before.His thumb pressed once against her knuckles, a small deliberate pressure that she felt travel all the way up her arm. Then he released her, too soon, which was good. Which was a relief. Which she was absolutely not disappointed about.

The great front doors opened before they reached them, and Nica’s first thought, before she could stop it, was that the people waiting inside were too beautiful to be entirely safe.

The man stood in the doorway as though he’d grown there — tall, lean, so perfectly composed he made Demetri look almost careless. A charcoal suit, a black shirt, dark hair swept back from a face that seemed carved rather than born, with pale green eyes the precise color of light through a deep forest. Not a line on him anywhere. And yet he felt older than the stone under her feet, older than the trees along the road, and when his sleeve shifted at the wrist she saw a faint pattern wound across the skin beneath — vines, silver-green, almost glowing — that were not, she was abruptly certain, any kind of tattoo.

His gaze found her, and the temperature of his attention changed by a precise, deliberate degree, the way a blade is angled to catch light. “Sir,” he said to Demetri, without looking away from her. Then, to Nica, with a courtesy that had something heavier moving underneath it: “Ms.Sokolov. We have been expecting you.”

Something about the phrasing was all wrong. Not unwelcoming. Just — strange, as if her arrival were the answer to a question that had been asked in this house for a very long time.

“This is Caelen Aldrith,” Demetri said. “He manages the estate.”

The wordmanagesdid not fit the man it was attached to. Whatever Caelen Aldrith did in this house, Nica didn’t think it was scheduling the landscapers.

A woman appeared behind him, and Nica lost the next thought in her head. Pale-blond hair swept into a knot. Gray-blue eyes she had no name for. Ivory cashmere over dark trousers, and the strange impression that she carried her own light — not glowing, exactly, but the air around her looked softer, the way air looks softer near a fire. She crossed the entry hall with both hands already extended, and the same silver-green vines wound across her inner wrists before vanishing beneath her sleeves.

“Veronica,” she said, and her accent was faint and musical and like nothing on any continent Nica could name.

“Nica.”

“Nica.” The woman repeated it as if testing whether it suited her, and, apparently satisfied, took both of Nica’s hands in both of hers. They were cool — which should not have felt strange, except that Demetri ran too warm, and the contrast made something prickle at the back of Nica’s neck. “I am Lirien. You are safe in this house, Nica. I want you to hear me say it, and I want you to believe it, because the rest of us are about to make very certain of it.”

It was not the kind of welcome one offered a consultant.

And then Demetri said her name — “Nica” — and turned, and spoke again in a different voice. Quieter. The kind of quiet that fell over a room like a hand laid against the back of the neck.