Page 172 of Nikolay

Her head tipped against me for one disoriented instant. Auburn hair, dry and tangled, brushed my jaw. Up close, I could smell fear on her, yes, and starvation, old sweat, dust, and the faint iron trace of healing skin around those raw wrists. Under all of it lay her own scent, nearly buried by damage, but there. Human warmth worn thin. Something delicate and stubborn. Life refusing extinction out of sheer refusal to grant others the satisfaction.

Her heart beat hard and fast against the ruinous line of her ribs.

I looked down at her face.

A stranger’s face.

And somehow not.

Not familiar in any rational sense. I had never seen her. I would have remembered. Yet the bond did not traffic in reason. It reached deeper than acquaintance, farther than preference. It had found something in her and something in me and slammed the two together with divine indifference to timing, convenience, or that she appeared half a grave away from collapse.

Her lashes lifted. Her eyes found mine again, dazed now, frightened, searching. If she felt anything of what had just torn through me, it did not show in any articulate way. Perhaps exhaustion spared her the full impact. Perhaps the bond moved differently through a human body. Perhaps shock had already laid claim to too much territory.

I did not know.

Taras came into the edge of my vision at last, cautious only because he knew me well enough to recognize the danger in touching any part of this moment carelessly.

“Maks,” he said.

I heard the question inside my name. I heard three others behind it.

“Do you feel it clearly?”

“Yes, have the car brought around,” I said.

That was all I gave him. It was enough.

He glanced once at the woman in my arms, taking in the wrists, the starvation, the way I held her, and something altered in his expression. He nodded. Beneath his expression came something rare and solemn. Protective interest. Calculation already reorganizing itself around a new center.

I bent my head toward the woman just enough that my voice reached only her. “You will come home with me.”

Her fingers curled weakly into my coat.

Whether that was agreement or simple physical collapse hardly mattered. I intended to treat it as assent.

I straightened, keeping her against my chest when it became obvious standing unaided was beyond her. She weighed almost nothing. That fact angered me in ways I would examine later, preferably while killing someone.

For all my talk about not tempting fate and keeping catastrophe away from the west, it turned out both were hiding behind a planter outside my club and had auburn hair and terrified eyes.