Her older sister in particular, bless her.
The cab dropped her off in front of the correct address, a house that sprawled over a sizable piece of property right on the road. Indy pulled out her key and walked toward the door, unable to hear anything but the way her blood rushed through her. She thrust it into the lock on the front door, held her breath, and turned it.
The bolt clicked open.
Indy pushed her way inside, having absolutely no idea what to expect, but aware that she was no longer holding her breath. Because the key worked. It worked. She hadn’t let herself think about what she would do if it hadn’t. She slipped it back over her neck as she shut the door behind her, taking comfort in the familiar weight between her breasts.
Inside, the house seemed light and airy—or possibly that was just the foyer she stood in that soared upward to a set of skylights. She could hear music playing, something smoky and instrumental, and her impressions of the house seemed to shudder into her from afar. Clean. Nearly stark, were it not for the odd pieces of intriguing art set here and there. Or the surprisingly ornate banister of the grand stair directly in front of her.
She followed the music through a sitting room on the same floor that opened into another, nearly blinding her with all its great windows that looked down over Prague and the Vltava River that cut through it.
But the music wasn’t coming from those rooms or the bright gallery beyond, so she kept going. She wound her way down a hall until she came to a study at the end of it, drenched in the same sunlight.
And froze, because he was there.
Stefan sat in an armchair next to a bookcase, far more beautiful—and brutal—than she’d recalled. His poetic blue eyes came to hers. Held.
And she was sure she heard some kind of thunderclap in the distance.
It still felt like fate.
Better still, that gaze of his on hers felt like a command.
Indy only realized then—as she started moving toward him, unable to tear her gaze from his—that she hadn’t been afraid that he wouldn’t be here. That hadn’t really worried her. But she had been afraid that he would be here—but that she wouldn’t feel this again.
That she wouldn’t feel all this heat and glory, greed and longing.
This sense of coming home in a strange place.
And through it all, fate making them one.
The way she knew they had always been meant to be.
As if she’d been built for him alone.
Indy kept moving until she stood before him. She shrugged off the small backpack she wore and tossed it aside. Then she sank down on her knees, there before his outstretched legs, and smiled up at him as if he’d given her the world.
Maybe she thought he had.
Already.
“Finally,” she whispered, gazing up at him.
“Finally,” Stefan agreed, with a voice like gravel and a hard, bright light in his gaze that made her feel like she might be shimmering. Inside and out. “We can begin.”
CHAPTER THREE
STEFAN ROMANESCU WAS not a man of faith.
In anything.
But he had seen a vision in a shitty back alley two years ago. And even though he would have said he believed in visions even less than in the dour Orthodox god of his childhood, long since happily renounced, he had immediately known one thing above all others.
A man should never turn down a vision, no matter how inconvenient it was.
Though the word inconvenient was a mild way indeed to describe how he’d spent the past twenty-four months.
None of his former associates—because a man like him didn’t have friends—had understood. But then, how could they? All they’d seen was Stefan systematically dismantling a network he’d worked hard to put in place, removing himself completely, piece by piece.
For no good reason, he was sure they would have said if he’d encouraged such conversations. Because his network made money and for a long while, that was the only thing he’d cared about. It was the only thing that mattered to most of his associates, as it had to him, too. Before.
Only people who had always lived safe and secure—and rich—ever imagined that money wasn’t power.
But he’d met her in Budapest and everything had changed.
He couldn’t have explained it himself. He’d seen Indy March, bright with a fresh beauty though it had been the middle of the night. And no one who was wandering around that particular neighborhood at such an hour could possibly have been fresh in any sense of the word. Still, she was such a tiny little thing, with glossy dark hair and a heart-shaped face. Picking her way through the rubble and ruin of the world he lived in as if she hadn’t noticed the state of it.
She’d looked at him the same way.
His heart, that useless organ, had stopped. Then kicked back in, hard.
She had looked like an angel, and what fallen man could resist?
He couldn’t. He hadn’t.
And now here she was on her knees again, only this time Stefan had no gun aimed at her head. No collection of associates he barely tolerated himself. This time, she appeared before him of her own volition. Not because she’d wandered down the wrong alley in the wrong part of the wrong city.
Not to mention, she’d had two years to think better of the whole thing.
These were all important distinctions.
His cock might have been rock hard, the way it always had been every time he’d thought of her since he’d dropped her at the airport in Budapest, but he was in no rush now. Not now.
Because she was here. And Stefan could see from the expression on her face that her hunger was as fierce as his.
“Welcome to Prague, foolish girl,” he murmured, settling back in his chair and regarding her almost lazily. “Why don’t you tell me, at last, how you ended up in that alley?”
Her chest moved, telling him
