She stirred a little.
“Kiska, wake up,” he commanded more firmly.
Elena rolled onto her back and yawned. “God, how long did I sleep?”
“Not long, but it will be cold out here soon. You should go inside and sleep.”
She sat up and ran her hands through her hair before she picked up her towel, and he followed suit. They were both silent as he let her into the house first, then locked the door to the patio behind him. They should be safe here, but he’d been trained never to take a chance with an unlocked door.
“See you tomorrow?” she asked from the top of the stairs.
He looked up at her from the bottom. “I’ll be here,” he promised.
He waited until he heard the door click before he pulled his phone out and dialed a private secure line.
“Dimitri, I was worried you might have fallen into the ocean,” Nicholas teased.
“Yeah, how are the beaches?” Leo cut in dryly.
“The three of us are freezing our asses off, and here he is suntanning,” Maxim grumbled.
It was good to hear their voices again.
“I haven’t fallen into the ocean. The beaches are nice; no, and I’m sorry you’re freezing, Maxim,” he answered them with a chuckle.
“Maybe she needs three more bodyguards,” Nicholas volunteered.
“Yeah, I’d like in on that assignment. I’ve been pulling more of her records. Do you know she’s got ancient Russian DNA?” Leo asked.
Dimitri walked to the living room and sat down on the sectional. “What? That wasn’t in the dossier you sent.”
“Well, I just hacked into her ancestry account an hour ago. Do you think you could get me a DNA sample? I’d like to run one in our databases. I can’t pull certain info off the basic records they run on these civilian DNA sites.”
“What, like blood?”
“Or saliva. It’s a lot better than a hair sample,” Leo said.
“I swear you get hard when you talk about that science shit,” Maxim grumbled in the background.
“I have blood. I’ll have it overnighted to you.” Dimitri headed into the guest bathroom and retrieved the bloody cloth from earlier when he’d cleaned the cut on Elena’s head. He put the cloth into a clear sandwich bag and tucked it into his briefcase.
“Can you tell me anything about her profile?” he asked Leo.
“Well, she has some interesting matches. You know there’s a lot of DNA that our government has removed from all public databases except for ours, and they don’t know we have it. She has a few common ancestors that make me wonder . . .”
“Wonder what?” Dimitri asked, the hair on the back of his neck rising.
“I can’t say for sure. Just get me that DNA and I think I can get answers.”
“How is she doing?” Maxim asked. Of their quartet, Maxim was the most serious. Nicholas was a charming player, and Leo was their technical genius. Maxim had been the one to poison Vadym and send Dimitri proof of his death.
“She is badly hurt, but not broken. Her fire is still there, just very weak.” Dimitri would never have been able to talk to anyone else about Elena and the way he’d felt that first time he’d seen her. It had been difficult enough to explain to Royce Devereaux that he had this unexplainable need to be near her, to protect and heal her. But these three men understood.
“When she’s ready to hear who you really are, you must show her that he is dead,” Maxim said.
Vadym had taken one of Maxim’s sisters. They never found her body, didn’t even know if she was alive or dead, and the trauma had broken his family apart. Killing Vadym had been Maxim’s right, and he had succeeded where so many others had failed.
“I will, but I’m still a stranger to her. She doesn’t know I was there at the embassy in Ulaanbaatar the day she was rescued. I need to keep it that way, at least for now. She doesn’t need any reminders of what happened, not until she’s ready to talk about it.”
“How are you going to go about this?” Nicholas asked. “I mean, I’m no psychologist, but you need to be careful with her . . .”
“I’m not sure. I will have to let her guide me as to what she wants and needs.”
“Call us if you need us,” Maxim said. “Seriously, I want to be on a beach right now.”
Dimitri hung up and stared out the window at the front gardens for a long while before going to bed. He stripped out of his clothes and changed into a light pair of cotton pajama bottoms and lay back in the king-size bed. Next door was the room Elena had chosen. He gazed at the ceiling. His eyes had just started to close when he heard a strangled scream. Dimitri was on his feet in an instant, rushing into her room.
Elena was on the floor, her sheets tangled around her body as she writhed and screamed. He knelt and tried to free her, but her fist hit his jaw with an unexpectedly strong blow.
“Fuck,” he muttered as he blocked the second punch while she thrashed beneath him. “Elena!” He barked out her name, and her movements stilled. He had a firm grip around one of her wrists, and he could feel the frantic beat of her pulse beneath his fingertips.
“Please don’t hurt me. I’ll do anything,” she whimpered. Her eyes were clamped shut, and she had angled her body away from his as much as possible.
“Elena,” he said gently. “You were dreaming. It’s over now. Open your eyes.”
She gave a childlike shake of her head, and he realized that she was still locked in whatever nightmare she’d been having.
“Kiska,” he said even more softly as he released her wrists. She curled herself into a tight ball inside the tangled blankets on the floor. Her entire body was shaking. He stroked her hair back from her face. “Did you fall out of the bed?”
“No—no. I can’t sleep on
