Page 15 of Crimson Oath
Oleg had the absurd thought that he could build a light-proof warehouse as large as the one they’d just left, plant it with lavender, and put enough lights in it that Tatyana could have her own lavender field to walk through like the ones near her family farm.
“Oleg?”
He looked up. “What?”
Mika narrowed his eyes. “You’re thinking about the woman again.”
“What did your people in Kutaisi find?”
Mika didn’t roll his eyes, but Oleg could tell he wanted to. “She’s been going to an internet café, bar-café kind of thing. The bartender remembered her coming in with a silver-haired man.”
“The wind vampire.” Oleg had to swallow the urge to snarl audibly. The vampire was a favorite of Arosh’s; more importantly, he was the immortal who had flown away with Tatyana in his arms.
“The two of them come in fairly regularly,” Mika continued.
“How regularly?” Had she taken this silver-haired immortal as a lover? Was she attached to him? Oleg felt his fangs aching in his jaw.
“They come in once a month. Same day of the month. Around the same time. She’s been going there for over six months.”
Six months meant that she’d mastered her bloodlust at a year or less. Good. That was good. She would have more freedom that way.
But the same place for six months? It wouldn’t only be Mika who noticed a pattern like that. “When is her next meeting time?”
“Yesterday.”
Oleg curled his lip at Mika. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She didn’t show.”
Damn.
But good. His visit to Tatyana’s mother must have spooked her.
“She won’t go back.”
“Not if she’s smart,” Mika said.
“She’s smart.” He wouldn’t be this fascinated with her unless she was intelligent. “I wonder if she knows we could track her down anywhere in Arosh’s or Alina’s territory and she’d still be perfectly safe.”
“Physically safe? Probably.” Mika turned back to his book. “I don’t think she’sphysicallyafraid of you.”
Then why did she run away?
Oleg had been rethinking their last night together like a detective, analyzing every word. Every expression. Every movement she made before she fled his house and his protection.
You are mine,he’d whispered to her.I am patient. But you are mine. And when you are ready, you will give me your fangs.
He’d all but asked for her fangs in his neck, the ultimate intimacy between vampires.
And she had run.
Perhaps she had a fear of commitment. Considering her family history, that was not unexpected.
“Oleg, you have to stop.” Mika shook his head. “I feel a kind of… distant obligation to her too. Do you think I’ve forgotten what happened to her and Elene? But you have to leave her alone. Ivan is becoming a problem, and if you don’t deal with him?—”
“Call Bucharest.” Oleg folded the magazine and snapped his fingers at Cesar in the galley. “I changed my mind about Radu. Get the house ready. It would be good to touch base with a terrin of the Eastern Poshani for a number of reasons, and we can ask him about this Poshani who hijacked our truck.”
Mika glanced at Cesar, but the human was still well out of earshot. “The Poshani vampire who is now very dead?”
