Defiance

“I will not trust your safety to the Silverhead.”

“Yeah, well, he’s more faithful than some I could name.” I shut my mouth, but it was too late. The damage was done. And I’d been sucking at keeping my mouth to myself lately.

Christophe’s face slammed shut, almost audibly. The aspect fled, blond streaks moving back through his hair as if painted by invisible brushes. He examined me one more time, let go of me finger by finger. “I trust you’re not flinging accusations, Milady.”

That actually managed to hurt me. “Of course not. I just . . . goddammit, Christophe, can’t you be happy? I got away! I fought! I did what you’ve been training me for!”

“Nobody’s disputing that.” As usual, Bruce stepped in to smooth things over. He was good at that. I should be taking lessons. “You did very well. We’re just worried for your safety, Milady.”

I wished I could tell him to quit calling me that.

It was what they called Anna. Each time one of them used the word it was like a pinch in an already-sore spot. The word bruised me on a daily basis.

Christophe leaned forward. “You shouldn’t have—”

Oh, he was so not going to Monday-morning quarterback me. “What, I should have just stayed in there and waited for them to move in and kill me before the combat units could get to me? Then I would have had to fight off six of them instead of just one.”

“I was on the roof,” he said quietly. “You don’t think I’d send you in alone?”

Well, it was kind of comforting knowing he’d been there, and the sound of outside I’d gotten through the earpiece made sense now. But still. “You were supposed to! You were home control! You said I was ready!” Ready for an easy operation, ready for the closest thing to safe you can get while hunting suckers!

“You are ready, but not without me.” His hands flickered forward, and before I knew it, they were cupping my face. He was so damnably fast. “I would not put my little bird in the jaws of a trap without being near enough to make sure it wouldn’t close on her.” Warm skin against mine, and he leaned in. He did smell like a Christmas candle, warm apple spice. It was familiar, and comforting.

He reeled me in. Our foreheads touched.

For the first time since the sun went down that evening, I felt safe. He breathed out and I breathed in, and the shaking in me went away little by little. I was vaguely aware of the others watching, but it didn’t seem important. Nothing seemed important when he did this.

Except sometimes I wished he was someone else. Someone in a long dark coat, with the smell of wulf and wild and strawberry incense on him.

Which was, again, the wrong thought. My chest tightened, and a shiver went through me.

Christophe murmured something I didn’t quite catch. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to pretend it didn’t matter. And also tried to pretend most of me wasn’t running with soft lightning because he was so close. It was like my hormones had decided to stage a revolt whenever he got within a ten-foot radius.

And wasn’t that confusing and unwelcome? Yessir, it was. Right next to being the best thing I’d felt since the night before Dad’s dead meatless fingers tapped at the glass on our frozen back door, way up in the Dakotas.

The night everything went sideways and my life imploded.

He finally pulled away a little and pressed his lips to my forehead, a soft touch. “Nathalie and Benjamin are outside. I’ll be along.”

In other words, I was dismissed. Bruce was looking up over my head, his face set and a little embarrassed. Hiro had folded his arms and turned, staring at the samovar’s gleam.

“What about the rest of the Council?” I tried not to sound petulant. Probably failed miserably.

Christophe’s half-smile would have been chilling if his eyes hadn’t been so soft. He never looked at anyone else like this, and it was a mystery to me how the same blue eyes could be so cold one moment and warm and giving the next. “Would you care to wait for them? I am certain there will be an argument about the night’s events, at which I will be taken to account for risking your safety. It should be most entertaining.”

He had a point. “Okay. I’ll leave you to take care of that, then.”

Christophe actually grinned. Without the aspect, his teeth were perfect, white, and wholly human. “I thought so. Happy to be of service, skowroneczko moja. Tomorrow, bright and early. More malaika practice.”

“Great.” I scrubbed at my forehead with the back of my right hand and scooped the tiny purse off the table. “Bruce, Hiro. Sorry to worry you.” That was as far as I’d go.

Bruce nodded. His aspect had retreated, and he was just a cute Middle Eastern guy in a green cable-knit sweater and fashionably frayed designer jeans. “We’ll celebrate your first kill, Milady. It’s tradition, after all.”

The sick feeling returned. “No. I mean, no thanks. It’s okay. Really.”

And then I got out of there, feeling Christophe’s eyes on me all the way.

CHAPTER FOUR

“The blood won’t come out of this.” Nathalie sighed, tilting her sleek dark head to the side. She held the silver dress up with delicate fingers, as if it was made of tissue paper. “We’ll have to go back to Nordy’s.”

“Not again.” I groaned, dropping down in front of the vanity. A shower and half an hour of t’ai chi in the middle of the room had settled me down, kind of. I didn’t even mind Nat watching, since she very obviously didn’t look at me while I did the familiar movements. “I won’t do it, you can’t make me.”

“You’d think I was taking you to an execution, not shopping. Jeez.” She grinned over my shoulder, the water-clear mirror holding our reflections. I was flushed and tangled, rangy like my dad, my blue Rolling Stones T- shirt torn but the hole-worn jeans I’d shimmied gratefully into mercifully hidden. Nathalie, on the other hand, looked like she belonged in a catalog. Curvy in all the right places, she wore a set of rosy-pink silk pajamas. You could tell she was werwulfen just by the way she moved and the supple grace of her shoulders as she flicked the dress again, laying it over a straight-backed wooden chair in front of the stripped-pine desk. “Really, Dru.”

“It’s the same thing,” I muttered.

She could even make a shoulder holster look like a planned part of her pajama outfit. The coffee-colored leather number carrying a 9mm that she had on today moved as she rolled her shoulders back once, settling them. She ghosted over the pale wooden flooring and picked up a silver-backed hairbrush. This was the part of the night I alternately dreaded and looked forward to most.

“I can take care of—” I began. But she took a handful of my hair and started brushing, just the last few inches and working up.

“It’s traditional. Before Anna, each svetocha had an honor guard of wulfen girls, too. Good way for us to get out of the compound, get to see a lot of boys, and you know . . . it’s bound to be lonely, being svetocha. I’m glad we like each other.”

Yeah, well, the last girl that was around emptied an assault rifle at me. You could just open me up like a soda can. “So Anna changed all that?”

A shrug. “Slowly but surely, yeah. I think my aunt was around when it happened. She never talks about it.”

I sighed. Thin blue lines of warding slid over the walls, complex patterned knots over the windows and the door. Refreshed every night, trembling under the screen of the visible, the wards were at least one familiar thing. I never went to bed without redoing the warding, no sir. Gran would be proud.

The fingers in my hair were soothing, and Nathalie could be trusted.

Christophe told me so. So did Shanks and Augustine. I suppose I could trust them, right? At least, Christophe hadn’t been wrong yet.

I just . . . I wasn’t as trusting as I used to be. I guess. Getting betrayed over and over will do that to you.