Page 19 of Dragon Kissed
A small table by the window held soup, bread, cheese, tea, and a plate of sliced pears. No silver domes, no twelve-course display — food a person might actually eat after finding a knife on her pillow. The smell of the soup reached her, something with dill and butter in it, and her stomach clenched with a hunger she’d been too frightened to feel. Nica’s throat tightened, and she hated that more than she’d have hated champagne and caviar. Champagne she could have refused. This she wanted, and wanting things had always been the dangerous part.
On the bedside shelf, where another house would have set a guest novel and a carafe of water, stood books in Russian — a Pushkin she’d have wept over in a shop, a first-edition Tolstoy she recognized from three years of handling its like — and on the dresser, in the old gold-ground style, an icon of Saint Nicholas.She stood looking at it and felt something she hadn’t felt since she was six years old, standing in Baba Yelena’s apartment for the first time after her mother died: the sense that someone had known she was coming. That someone had been waiting. That someone had taken the trouble to make a stranger feel she’d come home. It frightened her more than the knife had. The knife she understood.
“The controls are here.” Lirien touched a discreet panel beside the door. “This locks the outer doors to the suite. Once you engage it, no one can enter. Not staff. Not Caelen. Not Demetri.”
Nica stared at her. “Not Demetri?”
“Especially not Demetri.”
“He owns the house.”
“He owns the walls. These rooms belong to you while you are here.”
Something in Nica’s chest shifted — a tiny movement, barely there, still dangerous. Lirien showed her the balcony lock, the communications panel, a small silver disk set into the wall beside the bed. “This contacts Caelen or me directly.”
“What about Demetri?”
Lirien’s smile was soft, and faintly wicked. “You will not require a device to summon Demetri.”
Nica’s face heated. “I didn’t mean?—”
“Of course not.”
Lirien opened one more door, onto an office lined with bookshelves and a broad worktable under museum-quality lights, already arranged with archival supports, weights, gloves, lenses, photography equipment. At the center rested a familiar acid-free box.
The manuscript.
Nica crossed the room. “You brought it here?”
“Demetri had the collection moved to secure storage,” Lirien said. “This is the only item he allowed inside the residence.”
“Allowed?”
“He considers it dangerous.”
“It’s a book.”
“So I have been told.” Lirien’s expression remained pleasant — and entirely unhelpful.
“You all do that,” Nica said. “Speak as though you’re answering while carefully avoiding any useful information.”
“Living with Demetri has had an unfortunate effect on us.”
From the doorway, Demetri said, “I can hear you.”
Lirien did not turn. “You were intended to.” She touched his shoulder as she passed on her way out — not deferential, affectionate — and his face softened, only for an instant, and then she was gone, and Nica was alone with him. Not alone in the house. Alone enough that the air seemed to draw tight.
He’d removed his jacket. That should not have mattered. It did. The dark shirt beneath fit his shoulders too well, the sleeves pushed back over strong forearms dusted with dark hair, and a silver bracelet at his right wrist — a simple chain, elegant, unremarkable, except that one section near the clasp had gone dark, almost burned. He saw her looking and lowered his cuff. Too late.
“What happened to your bracelet?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s becoming your favorite word.” She folded her arms. “A stranger broke into my apartment after I posted a video of an old book. You appeared the next morning and bought the entire estate connected to that book. Men attacked us, and you got stabbed, and somehow you didn’t need a hospital. Now I’m in a house with invisible gates and secret stairs and whatever an outer ward is. What am I supposed to believe?”
His expression didn’t change. She hadn’t expected it to.
“That I will protect you,” he said.
