Page 44 of Dragon Kissed
His gaze held hers. “One.” Something sharp moved through her chest. She had no right to jealousy. It came anyway, quick and ugly and revealing. “Did you love her?”
“I might have, if I had allowed myself. She died.” Of course. Every road led there. It was almost a relief to hear it, proof that his forever was as haunted as her present.
Demetri touched one finger to the back of her hand. A question. Nica did not move away, and his hand settled over hers — warm, steady, careful, that impossible constant heat of him seeping into her cold fingers. “Loving me will not kill me.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can. Because nothing has ever made me feel more alive.” Nica opened her mouth to deflect it, the joke already rising, the reflex of a lifetime — and then stopped, and let it go unsaid, and let the true thing stand between them instead. Demetri waited. She looked at their hands, then at him. “Thank you.” The surprise in his face almost made her smile. He lifted her hand and pressed his mouth to her fingers — no seduction, no demand, a kiss as careful as the hand he’d watched Caelen rest on Lirien’s back — and Nica let him. That was all. It was enough. For now. The wall was still there. But for the length of that one soft kiss, she chose not to stand behind it.
She foundthe photograph after midnight, alone with Crowe’s financial records and the shell companies from Pacific Meridian’s investigation, the house gone silent around her, the fog gone black against the glass. One name caught her eye. VASILIEV MARITIME HOLDINGS. Founded 1948. She assumed it was an earlier family company — then she opened the incorporation record, and a newspaper clipping had been scanned with it. THREE IMMIGRANT BROTHERS REVIVE BAY SHIPPING CONCERN. Three men beside a warehouse near the Embarcadero, all three faces strangely indistinct. Except one. The man at the center had turned slightly away, his profile caught beneath the shadow of a fedora. Dark hair. Strong nose. Hard jaw.
Demetri’s face. Not similar. Not a relative. Demetri.
The caption identified him as Andrei Vasiliev. Age thirty-two. Nica’s hands went cold, the warmth of his fingers from three hours ago draining out of her all at once. The clipping was seventy-eight years old.
She searched the name. Andrei Vasiliev in 1952. In 1961. His face never changed. Then he disappeared from the record, and twenty years later his “son” inherited the company — the same height, the same shoulders, the same face. She opened the current Pacific Meridian biography. DEMETRI VASILIEV, SON OF ANDREI. The man in the photograph stared back at her from 1948. Unchanged.
Behind her, the door opened. Demetri stopped on the threshold. He saw the photograph, and his face went still. Nica turned the laptop toward him. “Tell me that isn’t you.”
He did not answer. He didn’t have to. The truth stood between them, wearing the same face it had worn for nearly eighty years.
CHAPTER 11
Nica: margaret i think i need a personal day
Margaret: is this about the billionaire
Nica: it’s about a lot of things. also his age.
Margaret: you said that already
Nica: it bears repeating
Demetri had faced executioners with less dread. Nica sat behind the laptop, pale and furious, the old photograph glowing between them — his face, his former name, a life he’d buried seventy-eight years ago dragged up into the blue light of a screen. The dragon went silent, which it did only when something mattered too much for even the beast to posture. Demetri closed the door.
Nica laughed without humor. “That seems appropriate.”
“I can explain part of it.”
“Part.”
“Yes.”
“Because of the law.”
“Yes.” She rose, the chair rolling backward to strike the worktable. “How old are you?” He could answer that. “Two hundred and seventy.” Nica stared, no breath, no movement, then looked at the photograph again as though the number needed a face to become real. “Two hundred and seventy.”
“Yes.”
“You were born in?—”
“Russia. 1756.”
Her hands gripped the edge of the table, knuckles paling. “That’s not possible.”
“No.”
“But it’s true.”
