Page 14 of The Storm
“I’m not a myth.” She started eating again. “Do I look like a myth?”
“You look like a dream,” Max said.
She rolled her eyes. “How old are you?”
“Nearly two hundred years.”
She went silent.
“Tell me your name,” Max said. “My name is Maxim of Riga. I was born—”
“I don’t need to know anything about you,” the woman said. “And you don’t need to know my name.”
“Why?” He’d beg if she asked. She was the most beautiful—the most hopeful—thing Max had ever seen. “Are the Irina returning?”
“We never left.”
“You did,” he whispered. “I had no mother. No aunts. No sisters. I’ve never even felt an Irina’s touch. How can you say you never left?”
She looked up. “You’ve never felt an Irina’s touch?”
Max’s cheeks flushed. “Of course I haven’t.”
She looked him up and down, her eyes wide. “So you’ve never—”
“That’s none of your business.” He grew irritated with her stubbornness. “Contact with human women is not sanctioned by the Watchers’ Council. It’s too dangerous.”
Not that he’d been wholly obedient. Max gave lip service to the Watchers’ Council, but he was far from a model scribe. Much could be accomplished with a willing woman and a pair of gloves.
“The Watchers’ Council,” she muttered. “Mandating even the sex lives of their scribes since 1810.”
“Someone must have control,” Max said. “Or we will turn into the monsters we hunt. We no longer have our Irina.”
“We were neveryours.” Her eyes flashed. “Your council forgot that, didn’t they?”
“At least they didn’t run.”
She pounded a fist on the table. “Don’t lecture me about running.”
He leaned forward, unafraid of her anger. “What is your name?”
“Why do you need to know?”
“Because…” He didn’t have a reason. “I just need to know. I won’t tell anyone about seeing you. I will vow it on my mother’s name, if you wish. I won’t tell anyone you killed those boys.”
“Those boys had two human girls in that room with them,” she said. “I don’t know why you thought they were innocents, because I saw them. They were looking at those girls as if they were dinner and the girls were more than happy to go along with it. I saved their lives.”
“I believe you.”
“Who was that Grigori with you? Why were you talking to him?”
“He claimed to be living a peaceful life,” Max said. “He said it’s possible to live without violence if the angel who fathered you is dead.”
“You don’t seem like a fool. You don’t believe him, do you?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Max said. “The older Grigoriwasdifferent. As for the younger men, I suspect that fresh temptation was too much to resist, no matter what their training. Their brother said they hadn’t been around human women before, and when that level of temptation exists…”
Max stared at the hand that rested on the table. Her fingers were long and delicate, but there were calluses there. She fought with the staff and the dagger. A lethal female of his own race. Could there be anything more tempting? Max’s confusion over the events of the evening was quickly being overtaken by fascination for the woman before him.
