Chapter 1
There’s someone in the apartment!
Cristina felt an icy chill down her spine as she lay beneath the rumpled duvet on the bed, barely breathing and too afraid to move as she heard the soft click of the apartment door closing behind whoever had entered at two thirty in the morning.
A door that had a numbered security lock that only two people knew. One of those people was Cristina.
Her father was the other one, of course, as this was his apartment; her own was on the other side of London.
Except her father seemed to have disappeared, his men along with him. Cristina knew that because there had been no sign of her father when she arrived two days ago. The apartment had been ransacked, and she hadn’t seen anyone since then. The warehouse near the docks from which her father ran his empire had also been broken into and was completely deserted.
How long ago those things had happened, she had no idea. Her phone calls to her father had been a little patchy over the last few weeks. Having recently finished her university degree, Cristina had decided to spend the summer backpacking in Europe with a group of friends.
She hadn’t telephoned to let her father know exactly when she was coming home either, had wanted to surprise him. But she had been the one who was surprised after taking a cab from the airport and letting herself into the apartment, expecting to shout “Surprise!” and instead finding it empty and wrecked.
She’d instantly tried calling her father on his cell phone, but he hadn’t answered. She’d panicked a little after taking another cab to the warehouse and finding traces of blood in several of the empty and ransacked rooms. But still no sign of her father, nor of any of his men.
Calling the police was a big no-no in her father’s world, and not knowing where else to go or whom she could trust, Cristina had decided not to go to her own apartment but stay at her father’s home instead, on the basis it had already been broken into once and so it was unlikely it would be a second time.
To help with the impression the apartment was unoccupied, Cristina left everything as she’d found it. Furniture turned over or broken. Paintings tilted or off the walls completely. Ornaments and photographs smashed on the floor. Her father’s bedroom and study were the worst affected, every drawer and cupboard opened and the contents thrown carelessly over the floor. All of which made it impossible to tell if anything was missing.
Except her father, of course.
Perhaps it wasn’t an intruder at all but her father finally returning from wherever he had disappeared to?
Or whoever broke in the first time has come back for a second look!
“Doesn’t look as if anyone’s here,” a deep voice rumbled.
“What gave it away, Aeran, the smashed and overturned furniture or the fact all the lights were off?” an even deeper voice came back mockingly.
“You know, Rhys, I’m getting fucking sick and tired of your sarcasm,” the first man snapped.
“And I should care, why?” the second man growled.
Sooo not her father, or the same people who had broken into the apartment the first time, but two men called Aeran and Rhys.
“Grigor is going to want us to search the apartment anyway.” The first man didn’t bother to reply to the previous comment.
“No shit, Sherlock,” the man called Rhys mocked.
A heavy sighed followed. “Whoever came up with the idea of the two of us working together needs to have their head examined by a qualified psychiatrist.”
“Everyone else is busy, and it was your intel on Petran’s cell phone that alerted us to the fact she was here at Fescaru’s apartment.”
Oh God…
“Fine. You take the bedroom, and I’ll look in the kitchen and study.”
They’re going to search the apartment!
Cristina desperately tried not to panic as she slid silently out of the bed and onto the floor before crawling on all fours toward her father’s walk-in closet. There was a safe room hidden at the back of it, and if she could just get there without being heard, she could lock herself in. The small room had been designed and built in such a way so as not to be detectable from the outside. It was also soundproof and bulletproof.
Because her father was Cezar Fescaru, head of the Romanian Mafia in London.
Or, at least, he had been when Cristina left London four weeks ago. She had no idea what or where he was now. The hope she’d been harboring, that her father was still alive but just unable to contact her, was becoming more and more remote.
She didn’t have the time, or desire, to think about the alternative right now. She just needed to reach the safe room and lock herself in until these two men had searched and then left the apartment. She could decide what she was going to do next after they’d gone.
Cristina breathed a soft sigh of relief once she’d used the combination lock to open the door to the safe room, crawling inside and pressing the button to close and lock the air-tight door behind her just as she heard someone—Rhys?—enter the bedroom.
The safe room wasn’t large, only the width of the walk-in closet, with just enough depth for a narrow cot-bed, a chair, and a desk with a laptop so she could stream the camera images from each of the rooms in the apartment. She refused to even look at the loaded gun she knew was in one of the drawers, although her father had insisted she learn how to shoot it. There was also a mini fridge she knew would be stocked with energy bars and bottled water.
Yes, because everyone has a safe room hidden in their closet, with a loaded gun in the desk and a fridge stocked with enough food and water for a siege!
Cristina drew in a shaky breath as she turned on the laptop and waited for the cameras in the apartment to come on line. The dangerous world her father lived in meant they had always known it might come to this, which was why her father had the cameras installed and this room built. As she didn’t normally live here, Cristina had just never thought she would be the one to use either of them. After all, her father was one of the most powerful men in London’s underworld.
But not the most powerful, she reminded herself. That honor belonged to Gregori Markovic, head of the Russian bratva.
Had her father done something to upset the Russian?
Stepped over a line and paid the consequences?
Once Cristina moved to London, her father hadn’t tried to hide his illegal activities from her. It would have been impossible with all the dangerous-looking men he had working for him. She also knew from her father that he and Markovic coexisted in an uneasy truce in London’s underworld. A truce that would continue as long as neither of them encroached on the other’s business empire.
She sincerely hoped her father hadn’t done something stupid, like challenging Markovic—
Ah, the cameras had come on line, and she now had eyes on what was happening in the rest of the apartment, even if it was only in black and white.
She didn’t need color to know she was looking into the kitchen at one of the largest men she had ever seen, which was saying something, considering the muscled bodyguards her father surrounded himself with.
The man in the kitchen—Aeran?—had to be at least six and a half feet tall, and possibly aged in his mid-thirties, with slightly curling dark hair and neatly trimmed designer stubble. He was also one of the handsomest men she had ever seen: intense pale eyes, an aristocratic nose between high cheekbones, full and sensuous lips above a strong jaw. Not only tall but ripped. A dark T-shirt clung to impossibly wide shoulders and defined chest and abs, with dark jeans resting low on muscular hips, his thighs as wide as tree trunks.
His head lifted suddenly, and those pale eyes looked straight at the camera. As if he was aware she was watching him.
Which was impossible, wasn’t it?
She had to be imagining the intensity of that narrowed gaze. Understandably so after two days of being shut up here, completely alone with only her own panicked thoughts for company, as she questioned what might have happened to her father.
Besides, the man Rhys was the closer danger.
A second camera showed him having to duck his head slightly as he entered the bedroom. Meaning, if anything, he was even taller than the other man.
The two were also of similar age and even looked a little alike and had the same muscular built. Except Rhys had very short dark hair, which gave him a more severe appearance. If anything, his eyes, also pale, were even more intense than the other man’s.
He came to an abrupt halt once he’d fully entered the bedroom, lifting his head and—
Good God, what he actually sniffing the air in the bedroom? As if he could smell her? Or, at least, the gel and shampoo she had used earlier when she took a shower in the adjoining bathroom before going to bed?
Cristina took another involuntary step back, her calves hitting the chair so that she fell into it as those intense and narrowed pale eyes became fixed on the camera in the corner of her father’s bedroom.
What was it with these two men that they seemed to know they were being watched?
That she was the one watching them?
“Fescaru’s woman is here,” Aeran stated with certainty as he stepped into the bedroom where Rhys was. Only to be almost instantly brought to his knees by the aroma of hot female and spice. A unique and heady scent that he recognized as belonging to his mate. “I felt her looking at me on the camera.”
“So did I.”
“I can also smell her.”
“So can I,” his brother growled.
So could Rhys?
What the hell did it mean that Rhys was as aware of Cristina Petran as he was?
All eight of the Pendragon brothers were dragon shifters, and they had been alive for over sixteen hundred years. Originally, they had helped their brother Arthur, but after he died, they had fought in war after war, but had been constantly on the alert for their fated mate. In the last eighteen months, six of their brothers had found their mates. A couple of them even had offspring. Only Aeran and Rhys remained unmated.
But each of the dragon shifter mates was unique to them.
Belonged only to them.
Didn’t she…?
Rhys’s reaction to Cristina seemed to imply otherwise.
Aeran had previously seen only a photograph of Cristina Petran, Cezar Fescaru’s mistress. He had thought her attractive, but a lifeless, odorless photograph wasn’t enough to tell him the woman was his mate. He and his dragon needed her scent to tell him that. Rhys’s behavior showed he was equally as affected by Cristina’s unique scent.
Rhys now strode over to the bed to throw back the duvet, bending down to breathe in the perfume on the pillow before placing one of his hands on the bottom sheet. “Still warm,” he murmured as he straightened and looked about the room with narrowed eyes. “She doesn’t seem to be anywhere in the rest of the apartment, so there has to be another room hidden in here somewhere.”
“There was nothing on the plans of the apartment.”
“Which is why it’s hidden,” Rhys snapped.
Aeran bit back the sharp reply he wanted to make, damning Grigor for the dozenth time for having partnered him and Rhys together to search for Cezar Fescaru’s mistress.
Rhys was right, it had been his surveillance that picked up on the source and location of the phone calls to Fescaru’s cell phone the past couple of days. But Aeran usually preferred not to leave his room at Pendragon Castle in North Wales, where he was surrounded by the comfort of all his technical and security monitoring equipment.
After the incident at the castle a couple of weeks ago, during which their brother Nathaniel’s mate’s life had been threatened, Grigor had decided that Aeran needed to get away from the family castle for a while.
Aeran had in mind a couple of weeks spent on a sandy beach drinking fruit-filled cocktails, but Grigor had other ideas and had instead partnered him with Rhys to look for Cristina Petran. The woman they could only assume was Fescaru’s mistress, given what Aeran had managed to find out about her, and the fact she had access to Fescaru’s apartment.
From the mess the apartment was in, they weren’t the only ones looking for her.
Which meant they had to find Cristina before someone else did. Or she might never be found again.
Mine, his dragon growled possessively.
Losing Cristina was obviously totally unacceptable to Aeran and his dragon.
All the members of Fescaru’s Romanian Mafia in London were either now dead or in disarray. But it wouldn’t take long for them to regroup and for someone else to take over Fescaru’s illegal empire. As Fescaru’s mistress, Cristina Petran was a loose end they would most likely wish to eliminate.
Gregori Markovic’s second-in-command, Nikolai Volkov, had given Fescaru’s cell phone to Aeran a couple of weeks ago so he could check the man’s past calls and monitor any incoming ones. The only new calls had started two days ago and came from a number Aeran had discovered, after going through several firewalls, belonged to a Cristina Petran. Checking into her further had revealed Fescaru not only paid for the woman’s cell phone but also the rent on her apartment on the other side of London. All leading to the conclusion Cristina was Fescaru’s mistress.
Which was more than a little worrying, considering none of them, Markovic and Volkov included, had even realized Fescaru had a mistress.
There were no pictures available online of Cristina and Fescaru together, so Aeran had to dig deeper still. He eventually found a record of the birth of a Cristina Petran in Romania. The year of her birth showed her age would now be twenty-one, making her thirty years younger than her lover. Only the mother, Ana Petran, had been listed on the birth certificate, and Aeran had found a death certificate for her dated two days after the birth of her daughter.
For all intents and purposes, apart from that registration of her birth, Cristina Petran had then completely disappeared from all Romanian official records. Given the state of the orphanage system over there, that wasn’t so surprising. It had taken a while, but Aeran had finally found a Cristina Petran, right date of birth, listed as having arrived in England three years ago in order to attend university.
Her passport photograph showed a beautiful young woman with long and silky red hair. Her skin was smooth as ivory, eyes dark gray and long-lashed, with high cheekbones and bow-shaped lips a deep rose in color.
Aeran had also learned that Cristina lived in the university halls of residence during the first year of her business degree, as most students did. After that, she had moved into the apartment paid for by Fescaru. So somewhere in that first year, she had to have met Cezar and the two of them had become lovers.
Cristina had left university this past June and gone traveling with friends. Aeran wondered if she had been aware that two of Fescaru’s men had tailed her while she was away. The parties and men she flirted with said no, and those men had returned back to England in any case, when the shit began to hit the fan for Fescaru a week ago.
Aeran gave a wince as he wondered if Cristina actually knew yet that her lover was dead. She must have some idea it was a possibility, considering the state of this apartment and the unanswered dozen or so calls she had made to Fescaru’s cell phone during the past couple of days.
Interestingly, she hadn’t attempted to go to the police regarding her missing lover, which meant she knew about his illegal empire.
Which was another reason he and Rhys needed to find her, before the Romanians chose another leader of their organization and he and his men also came looking for her to find out what she knew. After which they would no doubt kill her.
The other reason, Aeran knew simply from breathing in her scent, was that Cristina Petran was the woman he had been searching for all of the sixteen hundred years of his existence. The one woman who would complete him. The perfect other half of himself. His mate.
Rhys’s reaction to her too was more than a little worrying…
“Don’t just fucking stand there. Help me look for her, damn it!” Rhys’s voice was now so low, it went beyond a growl.
Aeran wasn’t sure which was going to happen first, finding Cristina or him killing his own brother.
One of his seven brothers.
Enough that he wouldn’t miss one?
If that one was Rhys, possibly!
And if Cristina was Aeran’s mate, then why was Rhys continuing to act so strangely?
His brother was bad-tempered at the best of times, but Rhys’s reaction to Cristina’s scent and the way he was tossing aside every piece of furniture in the room and ripping the few remaining paintings from the walls in his search for an entrance to a hidden room showed an uncharacteristic desperation to find Cristina.
Mine, reverberated inside Aeran’s head.
He laid a hand on his brother’s arm. “Rhys—”
“You really don’t want to touch me right now,” Rhys snarled, teeth bared, glaring aquamarine eyes having taken on a fierce and unnatural glow.
Aeran allowed his hand to fall back to his side, more puzzled than ever. “Rhys, she’s—”
“I don’t give a fuck who she’s slept with before me,” his brother dismissed harshly as he strode into the adjoining walk-in closet and began throwing all the clothes and hangers onto the floor. “As long as there’s no one else after me.”
“That isn’t what I meant— Wait a minute.” Aeran frowned as he studied the dimensions of the closet before walking back out of the room and into the bedroom. He paced the length of the closet wall before rejoining Rhys. “This closet doesn’t go as far back as the wall outside.” He started feeling along the back wall.
The concealed door was well hidden, but Aeran’s and Rhys’s dragons both had enhanced vision and could detect the slightest distortion, in a wall or anything else.
Having discovered that distortion, Aeran began looking for the lock or lever to open the door leading into the small room that must be hidden behind this one. “What the hell…?” he gasped as Rhys, too impatient to wait any longer, instead did a partial shift and punched his dragon fist through what turned out to be a reinforced steel door.
There was a gasp from inside the room as Rhys then used the talons on the end of his clawed hands to pull apart the two sides of the hole he had made, as if it were made of tissue paper rather than solid steel.
The scent of Aeran’s mate was overwhelming in this room, invading his senses and causing his dragon to claw inside him to be set free.
Take. Claim. Mine!
“Don’t come any further, or I’ll shoot!”
Aeran stepped behind Rhys into the safe room, his eyes widening as he saw Cristina Petran holding a gun in her shaking hand and pointing it at both of them.