Her smile was breathtakingly beautiful. "I like the sound of that." She kissed him again. "And I love you."
The dresser was heavy, with solid wood construction that had been built to last centuries. As a human, Dimitri would have struggled to move it even with help. Now, he lifted it with ease.
"Careful of the doorframe," Mattie cautioned as he maneuvered the piece out of their room.
"I've got it."
He set the dresser down in the hallway, positioning it against the wall.
"Perfect." Mattie ran her hands over the damaged finish. "I can work here. The light is so-so, but there's enough space to move around."
Dimitri watched her for a moment, marveling at the transformation. The sense of purpose was what she'd needed. Something to focus on, something to build, something that she could claim as her own.
"I'll be back as soon as I can," he said.
She nodded. "I'll be up here, cleaning the pieces we got."
"Don't work too hard." He planted a kiss on the tip of her nose and then forced himself to walk out the front door.
He locked it behind him, double-checking that the mechanism had engaged properly.
The hotel seemed like a good place to start. Perhaps Anil would know where he could get the supplies for Mattie. The walk took him through the resort's main thoroughfare. Some of the construction work continued throughout the weekend, but most of the workers took either Saturday or Sunday off, so it was quieter than usual, or at least it was supposed to be.
Things got busier as he neared the hotel.
A crowd was gathered in the plaza, clustering around something he couldn't see because it was obscured by the bodies of the spectators. There was tension in their postures, and they seemed agitated with the kind of energy that preceded violence or followed a disaster.
Was there a fight?
His pace quickened.
He pushed through the edges of the crowd, using his shoulders to create space, until he had a clear view of what everyone was staring at.
A body lay on the ledge of the fountain in front of the hotel's entrance.
It was a big male, an immortal warrior, given the uniform. He was sprawled on his back, and his chest was a ruin of torn flesh and shattered bone. There was a gaping cavity where his heart should have been.
There were three ways to kill an immortal. A beheading, removal of the heart, or catastrophic damage that was too massive for their fast healing.
Whoever had murdered this one had gone for option number two.
The heart had been ripped out with a force that had destroyed everything around it, leaving a hole the size of a fist where the organ had once been.
He knew that signature. He'd seen it before in the reports about the enhanced soldiers and what they had done when grippedin the madness of the enhancement drugs. But that was before he and Petrov had calibrated the dosage. Dave was perfectly balanced. They couldn't have done that.
The truth was that any immortal was capable of this. The chest cavity wasn't much of a barrier, and a regular immortal warrior could punch right through it with the right motivation.
Someone must have been really pissed at this poor guy to end him this way.
"Who is it?" someone in the crowd asked.
"It's Tarik," another voice answered. "His body was already cold when I found him, so the murder must have happened last night."
Tarik.
Dimitri felt a chill slither down his spine. The one who had attacked Mattie, the one Dimitri had stabbed with the syringe, and who had bitten him and activated his immortal genes. The one who had been the threat hanging over them ever since that evening at the bar, and the reason Mattie couldn't leave the lab out of fear.
Tarik was dead.
