Chapter Fifteen
Abigail wanted a shower in the worst way. She also wanted to curl up and go back to sleep, but she was no coward. If there was one thing she’d learned, it was that the Knights never gave up. They’d keep coming until they were stopped. Permanently.
If anyone had told her a few months ago she’d see violence as the answer to a problem, she would have been appalled. But being kidnapped and used in an ongoing war and dying had a way of changing one’s perspective.
And she had died. They hadn’t talked about it, there’d been no time, but she knew she’d died, knew he’d used his blood to save her. Even now, she could still taste it. It was unlike anything she’d ever had in her life. It reminded her of the richest chocolate chased down by an expensive glass of red wine.
He’d given it to her freely and without hesitation. He could have left her there but hadn’t. That had to mean he had feelings for her.
She had to stop acting like some teenager with a crush. They had more important things to take care of.
“I need a shower and clean clothes.” Best to take care of that problem first. She’d think better.
“You can use the bathroom in my room,” he told her.
She pushed away from the counter and went to grab her bag. She didn’t have a change of clothing, but she at least had a hairbrush and a toothbrush. As soon as she saw her bag, she noticed the long, cylindrical dart.
It had done so much damage. She hated the thing but forced herself to yank it from her bag and hold it up. “What about this? I wasn’t sure if you wanted to study it or not.”
Vasili walked over and took it from her. It looked much smaller in his hands than it did in hers, but it was still large considering what it was.
“This is what they shot into me?” He turned it over in his hands, examining it.
“Yes. I yanked it out as soon as I could, but it was too late.”
He shook the cylinder, and they both heard liquid. “Not too late. I want to analyze what’s left.” He held up the tube, and his smile disappeared.
“What? What is it?” She squinted, trying to see what he did, but she couldn’t find anything alarming.
“Here.” Near the top of the cylinder there seemed to be a thick band. That’s what he was pointing to.
“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be seeing.” It looked like metal to her.
“One of the rivets isn’t a rivet.” He lowered it so she could see it better. “It’s a tracking device.”
Her stomach dropped, and the meal she’d just eaten threatened to come back up. “A tracking device,” she whispered. What had she done? “We need to get rid of it. Now.”
He shook his head. “Too late. If they checked, they already have our location.” He pried off the top of the tube, popping the rivets like they were nothing more than buttons on a shirt. He studied the tracker before crushing it.
“What do we do?” The thought of having the Knights descending on them made her chest tighten. She slapped her hand over her heart and tried to breathe slower. What if they’d come while she and Vasili had been asleep? They’d have been sitting ducks.
He tossed the cylinder onto the counter and cupped her face in his hands. “Look at me, little one.” His calmness helped her settle slightly. Their gazes met. “I won’t let them hurt you,” he promised.
“Or you.” She grabbed his wrists, but her fingers wouldn’t wrap all the way around them. “They can’t have you.” No way was she letting that happen.
The corners of his mouth tilted upward. He was so handsome when he smiled. “Or me,” he readily agreed. “I flew directly. It will take them much longer to get here, that’s even if they did manage to track us. They might have assumed the dart was destroyed.”
She shook her head, not believing that for a second. “No, they tracked it.” The Knights were nothing if not thorough.
He rubbed his hand over her head and down her back. “Go and shower. I have security around the perimeter. If someone shows up, we’ll know.”
Abigail nodded. She needed a few minutes alone to pull herself back together. She needed to be strong and not panicking if they were going to get through this. Then she had a thought so obvious she was surprised it had taken her so long to think of it.
“Can we fly out?” After all, he’d flown them here in the first place.
“And go where?” He ran his hand back up her spine and sent goose bumps racing across her skin. “They know who you are. Even if we escape now, they’ll still look for you.”
That was the problem. She was the problem.
She swallowed hard. “You can get away.” They didn’t know about him, not really. “You could disappear for years, decades if you needed.”
His scowl was so fierce it made her tremble, but she stood her ground.
“I will not leave you.” His voice was low and calm, but she flinched as though he’d yelled. “Do not suggest such a thing again.”
Her drakon was mad, but she didn’t care. “What if I asked you to go?” One of them should make it out of this situation alive. She didn’t want to die, but the thought of them catching and imprisoning Vasili for decades, if not longer, made her heart break.
He shook his head, and his gaze narrowed, his blue eyes seeming to glow. “I will not leave you. We will deal with this together.” He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward the bedroom. “Shower. Feel free to raid my closest. When you’re done, we’ll talk. Trust me.”
It all came down to that, didn’t it? He knew what he could handle more than she did. It had been Vasili who’d fought the magic and managed to get them both here alive. She had to believe he knew what he was doing.
“Okay.”
His gaze narrowed, but he nodded, seeming to be placated by whatever he saw on her face. He leaned down and dropped a quick kiss on her mouth. The urge to wrap herself around him was strong, but there wasn’t time for that.
Forcing herself to turn from him, Abigail padded across the floor and into the bedroom. She didn’t look behind her, afraid if she did, she’d run into his arms and never leave. The bathroom was big. It had a rather large tub and a huge shower stall. Everything was so luxurious it was hard to remember they were inside a mountain. It must have taken him years to build such a place. But when you were basically immortal, she supposed time was irrelevant.
She removed her sweater, taking care to remove her credit card, passport, and money and store them in her bag. She wouldn’t be wearing the garment again until it was washed. She stripped off all her clothing and washed her socks and underwear in the sink before hanging them on a rod. They wouldn’t be dry when she finished showering, but they would eventually.
She brushed her teeth and then turned on the water in the shower to let it warm up. When she stepped inside and spread her arms wide, she couldn’t touch both sides at the same time. She’d never been in a shower so large before.
The water was hot, and there was shampoo and soap on a ledge. She made use of both. As the warm spray beat down on her, and the soap washed away the dirt and sweat, the reality of the situation came crashing down.
She’d actually died.
She pressed her hand over her heart as the first sob broke from her lips. There hadn’t been time to really be afraid, to think. This was the first time she’d been alone for more than a couple of minutes since Vasili had chased her down in Moscow. That seemed like years ago rather than days.
Tears streamed down her face, and she let them. She tipped her face toward the spray, letting it wash them away. Better to do it here where no one could see her, where Vasili couldn’t see her.
“Abigail.”
She spun around when she heard her name. He was there, big and naked and now wet. He pulled her into his arms and simply held her as she sobbed. He petted her back and kissed her head. He didn’t try to get her to stop. He simply let her cry until there were no more tears left.
Feeling like an idiot, she swiped at her cheeks and raised her head. “I’m sorry.” He had enough to worry about without her crying all over him. He’d saved her life. If not for his blood, she’d be dead. Even her bruises had faded.
He let his hands slide down to her hips and lifted her. She automatically wrapped her legs around his waist and twined her arms around his neck.
“Don’t be.” He nuzzled her neck. “You’ve been through so much, been so brave.”
She didn’t feel brave, had been avoiding certain topics, but that time had passed. “Thank you.”
He lifted his head and gave her a quizzical look. “For what?”
His hair was plastered against his skull, and his skin was slick with moisture. Beads of water rolled down his chest. She wanted to lick them. She forced herself back to the topic at hand.
“For giving me your blood. For saving my life.” Saying thank you was the least she could do.
“You remember that. I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I remember.” She had a vague memory of him yelling at her, telling her to live.
“I had no choice.”
“You did,” she told him. “You could have let me die, but you didn’t. So thank you.”
He gave a curt nod, obviously not wanting to discuss it. Did he regret having to share his precious blood with her?
He backed her against the wall of the shower. With the steam rising around them, even the tiles were warm. She was surrounded by moist heat and Vasili. And she was truly clean for the first time in days.
The Knights might be coming for them, but they were alone now. Who knew how much time they had left? They might defeat the Knights, but they might not. As mighty as Vasili was, he was only one man, one drakon.
She wanted these few stolen moments just for them. That’s all they’d had in the time they’d been together—stolen moments. Each was precious and stored in her heart.
She loved her drakon. It didn’t matter that it was too soon, that they hadn’t known one another for that long. They’d both risked their lives for one another. And when they made love, it was truly special.
She slid her fingers through the locks of his wet hair and pulled him closer. When their lips met, she sighed. This was what she wanted, what she needed.
Vasili growled. Not a low, male growl, but something inhuman, deeper, louder. She shivered with longing. She rubbed her breasts against his chest as her need for him began to grow until it was almost too large to contain.
“We should slow down,” he began.
But she didn’t want slow. Not this time. She wanted hard and fast. She wanted to claim her man and have him claim her.
“No.” She sank her teeth into the thick cords of his neck and nipped, not hard enough to break the skin, but enough for him to know she meant business.
He groaned and bent his knees. The blunt head of his shaft nudged her opening, and then he was pushing inside. They’d made love before, but each time he stretched her, filling her until she didn’t think she could take all of him, and yet each time, she did.
She shuddered and clung to his shoulders, kissing his lips, his chin, his neck. She squeezed her thighs tightly around him. They were both struggling to catch their breath. The air was thick with steam, making their bodies slick, so when he began to move, they slid easily against one another.
He pulled out a couple of inches and pushed back in. She tilted her head back and moaned. “Yes. More. Harder.”
She ran her fingers over his tattoos. One day, she wanted him to lie naked on a bed so she could spend hours tracing them, studying them. If not for his knowledge, for these tattoos, she’d be dead. She knew the Knights had worked some kind of magic, had tried to make him kill her. She’d heard chanting in her head. She’d forgotten that until now.
“What? What is it?” Vasili was so in tune with her every mood.
“Nothing important,” she assured you. “I’ll tell you later.”
His eyes narrowed, but he started moving again, driving out all thought about anyone or anything else. There was only Vasili, their bodies coming together in the most primitive and beautiful way.
He worked his thick shaft in and out, driving her higher. He canted her hips forward and ground his pelvis against her with each thrust, stimulating her clit until she couldn’t hold on any longer.
She cried out his name and clung to him as her orgasm hit. He growled and slammed into her several more times before his big body stiffened. His shaft rippled as he found his release. She rested her head on his shoulder, trusting him to keep her upright. He leaned against the shower wall for support.
They didn’t move until the water began to cool. When she shivered, he slowly released her, letting her feet touch the floor. She quickly moved out of the way and stepped out of the shower.
It wasn’t cold, but it seemed that way after the heat and steam of the shower, not to mention the heat generated between them. She grabbed a towel and dried off, watching with avid interest as Vasili quickly showered. He didn’t seem to mind the cold. He was also still fully aroused, even though he’d just come.
Sensing her gaze on him, he turned and stared at her until her entire body grew warm. Her nipples were hard nubs against the towel. She grabbed her jeans and fled the room.
She might not have underwear, and her jeans weren’t the cleanest, but they were all she had that fit well. She yanked them on and went to his closet and found a long-sleeve cotton shirt. After pulling it on, she dug out a flannel shirt as well, rolling the cuffs so they didn’t cover her hands.
Vasili joined her, a towel wrapped around his waist but the rest of him bare. She wanted him again. It was as though some mythical gods had gotten together and created the most beautiful and powerful male possible. He was almost too perfect to be true.
“Don’t look at me like that unless you want to find yourself flat on your back in my bed.”
She swallowed heavily. Not much of a threat since that was exactly what she wanted. She managed to look away. “After.” The word came out as a croak, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “After the Knights are gone.” She didn’t say dead, even though they most likely would be if they showed up here.
He dropped the towel, exposing his taut, full backside. The left cheek bore his birthmark tattoo. She wanted to follow the swirls with her tongue.
She spun away and dug through a dresser drawer until she found a pair of socks. They were big, but they were warm. By the time she’d donned them, Vasili had pulled on his sweatpants and added a black T-shirt. His feet were still bare. Why she found that so darn sexy, she had no idea.
He walked over to her and straightened the flannel shirt she wore. “What were you thinking in the shower? It was something you remembered, wasn’t it?”
She nodded, knowing she had to be totally honest with him. “I remembered hearing chanting in my head back in the clearing. It was magic, wasn’t it?”
Once again, his expression grew dark and forbidding. “Yes. Someone was casting a secondary spell, trying to turn me against you, to make me kill you. Your blood would have activated the spell. Blood magic is the darkest kind there is.”
She shivered and was once again in awe of him. Not only had he managed to fight off the spell, the compulsion to kill her, he’d saved her life when the spell had gone too far and caused her heart to stop.
The tattoos he’d inked on the right side of his body—chest, back, and arms—had allowed him to fight the compulsion, the dark magic.
“We need information,” he began.
He was right. The more they knew, the better off they’d be. “Do you have a way to communicate with the outside world?”
She could see the suspicion in his eyes, and it bothered her deeply.
“Why?” he asked.
“We need information, and I know where to get it.”
“Nic and his friend?”
She nodded. “If anyone can help us, they can.” She waited, knowing this was a turning point in their relationship. If he trusted her, he’d let her contact her family. If he didn’t, he’d find some excuse and put her off. Of course, he might not have a way to reach the outside world from here. As a drakon, he really didn’t need one.
He held out his hand. “Come with me.”
…
Vasili led Abigail out of the bedroom and away from the bed. Probably for the best. Their lovemaking in the shower had done nothing but whet his appetite for more. He wanted to spend hours making love to her, marking her as his.
He hated the reminder of how close he’d come to losing her. The mage was dead, and they weren’t plentiful. It was doubtful Bruno could find another one, especially on short notice. That was one thing to be grateful for. But Bruno was still out there searching. And thanks to the damn tracker, he probably knew where to find them. Getting men and equipment up the mountain would take time, but they’d already lost a lot of it sleeping, eating, and showering.
But all of it, especially their lovemaking, had been necessary. He was stronger now, the last of the drug and magic purged from his system.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
They’d gone down a short hallway to another door. He shoved it open to expose another mining elevator. He’d gotten them from a nearby mine after it had been abandoned some twenty years ago. It had been nothing for him to yank them out of the ground and fly them in during the dark hours of the night.
He pulled the gate across, and they both got inside. He reached up and pushed the hidden lever near the top. This time, instead of going down, they went up.
“How does it work?” she asked.
He hadn’t shown her before. No doubt she’d have figured it out if needed, but that was an oversight on his part. “There is a lever here.” He pointed to the one he’d pushed. “Push this way, and it goes up. Push it the other, and it goes down.”
“Do you have many of these elevators?” She looked up and down, examining it. It occurred to him that she wasn’t used to living in a cave. Maybe she wouldn’t like it.
“Yes.”
A huge smile lit her face with pleasure. “That is so cool.” He found himself standing a little taller before he could stop himself. When the elevator came to an abrupt halt, she was jolted and fell against him. He caught her easily.
“Should have warned me about the sudden stop,” she told him, but she was still grinning.
Deadpan, he nodded. “The elevators come to an abrupt stop.”
She laughed and lightly punched him in the stomach. This was teasing, playing, something he wasn’t really used to, but he found he liked it, very much. At least with her.
He yanked open another door and ushered her inside. This room was small, but it held a computer system hooked up to a satellite dish. He spent so much time alone, he’d wanted to have a way to connect, to explore the outside world, to contact his connections like Father Petrov, and to widen his search for artifacts.
He didn’t know everything there was to know about computers, but he knew enough to do what he needed to do. If he needed something more, he’d learn how to do it. But right now, all he needed was his phone and a basic internet hookup.
“Wow, this is quite a setup.”
There was only one chair, because he was always alone. He solved that problem by pulling her down onto his lap. He took a deep breath and took a leap of faith. “How do I contact your brother-in-law?”
…
Nic was worried about Constance. She’d barely eaten in days and wasn’t sleeping. He had men from the agency he’d hired scouring Russia for any sign of Abigail, but so far, they’d turned up nothing.
Then Tarrant had heard some chatter and hacked a phone that belonged to a mercenary who worked for the Knights. There’d been talk of going to an area near the Ural Mountains, and then nothing. The phone signal was gone.
Tarrant hadn’t stopped working since they’d first lost contact with Abigail. He was video conferencing with them now in order to keep their phone lines open, but Nic had run out of patience. “I need to go to Russia.” It was the only way.
“No,” his brother told him. “That’s only giving the Knights another chance at you.”
“Why hasn’t Abigail or Vasili contacted us?” Constance asked. She had her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. She’d done nothing but drink the stuff since her sister had gone missing.
Nic didn’t want to have to be the one to tell her that Vasili might have handed her over to the Knights. They knew barely anything about him. Even Tarrant hadn’t found much beyond some online chatter of him being a buyer and seller of artifacts, exactly what he’d told them. But nothing more. They had no idea where he lived or how to go about finding him.
He couldn’t allow the situation with Constance to remain the way it was. It would destroy her if something happened to her sister. “No, I must go to Russia.” He was reaching for his phone to order his private jet readied when it rang.
He glanced at the number. It was unknown. “I have a call coming in.”
“Tracing it,” his brother told him.
Constance was beside him in a heartbeat. He grabbed his phone and pushed the answer button. “Hello?”
“Nic, it’s me.” He released a huge sigh of relief when he heard Abigail’s voice.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. Constance had been through pure torture wondering what was happening with her sister.
“You do not speak to her that way.” The voice was male and hard and belonged to Vasili Zima. He was still with Abigail. Vasili was proving to be a man of many talents.
“Are you okay?” Constance asked her sister. “Abigail?”
“I’m alive, thanks to Vasili.”
That did not sound good. Not at all. Nic glanced at the computer screen. Tarrant was still working fast and furious on the keyboard. If anyone could find them, he could.
“Tell me everything,” Nic ordered.