It still irked me in the way that only betrayal does—differently from an enemy’s attack, deeper, more personal, the kind of thing that makes you review every conversation and every room and every man you thought you knew.
I stared out of the window.
The first light was beginning to find the edges of the sky, a thin line of grey against the dark. The streets were empty. The city slept. Everyone slept.
It took considerably more vodka for me to sleep these days.
I watched Chernograd pass in the dark and calculated how long it would take Iskra to heal. How long before I could claim another child.
That's what this was.
A fight for survival of the Dragunov genes.
My heir.
??????
The house was silent in the way that only holds in the hours before anyone has a reason to move through it. The stairs creaked beneath my feet—each step familiar, the particular groan of the third from the top that I had stopped noticing years ago and noticed now.
At the landing I paused.
Radovan, at his post outside her door. He straightened when he saw me and stepped aside without being told.
I turned the brass knob and pushed the door open.
Her perfume met me before my eyes adjusted to the dark. Something warm and faintly floral—entirely hers, entirely distinct from anything else in this house. In an instant I was pulled back into the intensity of the breeding months. The way she had opened for me. The way she clenched around my cock, milking me dry, her body doing what it was designed to do even when her mind had decided otherwise.
I stood over her.
The covers were pulled high, her hair spread across the pillow—that golden hair I had used as a harness on more than one occasion. In sleep she had that quality again. The one she lost the moment she knew I was watching. Small. Still. Entirely unguarded.
I could see the edge of a bruise above the covers. Fading but still there.
Her body would heal. The bruises would fade and the womb that had failed to hold what I put there would be ready again.
Then I would be back.
To claim what was mine. To replace what had been taken from me.
I stood there longer than I intended.
I didn’t drink that morning to sleep.
Chapter 40
Iskra
Tau’s energy seemed different today.
I sipped my tea and contemplated it across the kitchen. Olya was simply glad I had come downstairs for breakfast—she had been making her feelings about me staying in my room known through a series of pointed silences and strategic appearances at my door with increasingly elaborate food. This morning she was whizzing around the kitchen with the energy of a woman who had decided that pastries were the solution and was not open to discussion on the matter. The scent of them filled the room, warm and buttery, the kind of smell that belongs to a different kind of morning than this one.
You could never tell with Tau. Happy and sad occupied the same expression on his face—or rather, no expression at all. Even anger only announced itself in the tightening of something around his jaw, the slight curl of his fingers toward his palm. I had been learning to read him the way I had learned to read the house—in fragments, in small physical tells, in the things that changed by degrees so small anyone else would miss them.
Today something was different. I couldn’t name it yet.
“I’m getting a complex,” he said dryly, without looking at me.
He stood beside the window, hands clasped at the front of his trousers, gaze on the garden. The morning light found the slight scarring along his jawline and the stillness of him—the particular stillness of a man who has learned to take up exactly the space he needs and no more.
