It was mildly irritating that after a thousand years of life and five years being married to this woman, she could still stymie his attempts to decipher her emotions. He felt more through their blood bond than he could read on her face.
Oleg narrowed his eyes. “Sometimes I wish I could still manipulate your mind so you would tell me what you are thinking.”
She curled her lip, and the frozen mask she’d been wearing shattered.
Good.
“That makes me doubly glad you cannot.” She lifted her chin. “Did Ivan insult you by calling our marriage civilized? Is your scheme not working out exactly as you planned, O great Knyaz?”
He reveled in her irritation. “It was not an insult to me. Perhaps it was to him.” He snapped his fingers and brought a ball of fire to his palm. “But the observation is not incorrect. You do make me look civilized.”
He let the fire creep up the wall, licking along the brocade fabric of what had once been a nursery for a very wealthy noble family.
Countless humans had probably been raised in this room; now Oleg was eating the pretty yellow wall coverings that some long-dead mother had probably chosen for her babies.
Maybe it had reminded her of sunshine. That’s why Oleg had chosen it for his resting place.
“What were you thinking?” Tatyana still had her arms crossed over her chest. “Pavel was mortified by your outburst.”
“I’ve already called Lazlo.” Oleg waved a hand. “Lazlo will make him understand.”
“Will he makemeunderstand?” Tatyana stepped toward him, her mood turning. “Because I don’t know why?—”
“You don’t need to know why.” He sliced his hand through the air. “Enough, volchitsa. You are young. Give it a century or two and perhaps you will understand.”
She looked as if he’d slapped her, but Oleg was speaking nothing but the truth.
Tatyana was young, and in many ways she still thought like a human. Her life had been marked by human concerns. Human failures.
She hadn’t been nurtured by a sociopath.
Oleg understood that there was power in unpredictability. There was strength in chaos.
He didn’t indulge in it often because emotional chaos irritated him and too much of it would dampen the reaction he wanted to provoke.
He watched the blue flames that licked over the walls, slowly devouring the evidence of his nightmare. “Every now and then, it serves me to remind the others— Perhaps I need to remind you as well?—”
He turned, and within the space of a human heartbeat, he was at her back, his palm at the base of her spine.
She froze.
The smell of her instinctive fear provoked a bitter taste in the back of Oleg’s throat.
He immediately pulled his hand away and bent to whisper in her ear. “It serves no one for me to be tame, volchitsa. It serves none of my people for the world to forget who and what I am.”
“And who are you?” she whispered.
“I am the son of Truvor the Red.” He backed away slowly. “I am a murderer. I am violent death that comes in the night and ravages entire villages on command. And now I hold Truvor’s empire together with that power. I cannot rely on his madness, so I must use other methods.”
She nodded slowly. “Will Ivan be expecting you to attack him?”
“I honestly don’t know. I doubt he does either. It does not matter.”
She was staring at the scarred parquet floor. “You wanted to unbalance him, and you did.”
“I want to unbalance all of them.” He crossed his arms over his chest as his fire continued to ripple along the walls. “All the civilized vampires from their soft seats of power.” He curled his lip a little bit. “They don’t have wolves waiting at the door.”
She turned toward him and narrowed her eyes. “How do you know? Maybe they’re just better at hiding it.”
