Veil of Midnight (24 page)

The answering pause didn’t give her the impression he was going anywhere. She cranked the water to a higher volume and waited, unmoving, her eyes on the closed door.

“Renata…your wound,” Nikolai said through the wood panel. There was a gravity to his tone. “It’s not healed yet? It should have stopped bleeding by now…”

Although she hadn’t wanted him to know what was going on, there was no use denying it now. All of his kind had impossibly acute senses, especially when it came to detecting spilled blood.

Renata cleared her throat. “It’s nothing, no big deal. Just needs new dressing and a fresh bandage.”

“I’m coming in,” he said, and gave the doorknob a twist. It held, locked from the push-button mechanism on the inside. “Renata. Let me in.”

“I said, I’m fine. I’ll be out in just a—”

She didn’t have a chance to finish. Using what could only have been the power of his Breed mind, Nikolai sprang the lock and opened the door wide.

Renata might have cursed him out for barging in like he owned the place, but she was too busy trying to yank the long, loose sleeve of the shirt up to cover herself. She didn’t care so much if he saw the inflamed state of her gunshot wound; it was the other marks that she wanted to make disappear.

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The permanent ones that had been burned into the skin of her back.

She managed to get the soft cotton cloth around her, but all the shifting and tugging made her shoulder scream and her gut turn inside out as the pain brought on a hefty wave of nausea.

Panting now, awash in a cold sweat, she plopped herself down on the closed toilet lid and tried to act like she wasn’t about to lose her stomach all over the tiny black-and-white tiles under her feet.

“For crissake.” Nikolai, bare-chested, his borrowed warm-ups hanging low on his trim hips, took one look at her and dropped into a squat in front of her. “You’re far from okay in here.”

She flinched as he reached for the sagging open collar of the shirt.

“Don’t.”

“I’m just going to check your wound. Something’s not right. It should be healing by now.” He moved the fabric away from her shoulder and scowled. “Shit. This doesn’t look good at all. How does the point of exit look?”

He stood up and leaned over her, his fingers careful as he slid more of the shirt out of his way. Even though she was burning up, she could feel the heat of his body as he hovered so near to her in the small space.

“Ah, fuck…this side is worse than the front. Let’s get you out of this shirt so I can see exactly what we’re dealing with.”

Renata froze, her entire system seizing up. “No. I can’t.”

“Sure you can. I’ll help you.” When she didn’t budge, just sat there holding the front of the big shirt in her tight fist, Nikolai grinned. “If you think you have to be modest with me, you don’t. Hell, you’ve already seen me naked so it’s only fair, right?”

She didn’t laugh. She couldn’t. It was hard to hold his gaze, hard to believe the concern that was starting to darken his wintry blue eyes as he waited for her answer. She didn’t want to see revulsion there, nor, even worse, pity. “Will you just…go away now? Please? Let me take care of this myself.”

“Your wound is infected. You’re running a fever because of it.”

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“I know.”

Nikolai’s face went sober with some emotion she couldn’t discern.

“When was the last time you fed?”

She shrugged. “Jack brought me some food last night, but I wasn’t hungry.”

“Not food, Renata. I’m talking about blood. When was the last time you fed from Yakut?”

“You mean drink his blood?” She couldn’t mask her revulsion.

“Never. Why would you ask that? Why would you think it?”

“He drank from you. I saw him feeding at your vein in his quarters at the lodge. I guess I assumed it was a mutual arrangement.”

Renata hated to think about that, let alone be reminded that Nikolai had witnessed her degradation. “Sergei used me for blood whenever he felt the need. Or whenever he wanted to make a point.”

“But he never gave you his blood in exchange?”

Renata shook her head.

“No wonder you’re not healing faster,” Nikolai murmured. He gave a slight shake of his head. “When I saw him drinking from you…I thought you were mated to him. I assumed you were blood-bonded to each other. I thought maybe you cared for him.”

“You thought I loved him,” Renata said, realizing where he was heading. “It wasn’t that. Not even close.”

She exhaled a sharp breath that grated in her throat. Nikolai wasn’t pushing her for answers, and maybe precisely because of that, she wanted him to understand that what she felt for the vampire she had served was anything but affection. “Two years ago, Sergei Yakut plucked me off a downtown street and brought me to his lodge along with several other kids he’d collected that night. We didn’t know who he was, or where we were going, or why. We didn’t know anything, because he put us all in some kind of trance that didn’t lift until we found ourselves locked up together inside a large, dark cage.”

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“The one inside the barn on his property,” Nikolai said, his face grim. “Jesus Christ. He brought you in as live game for his blood club?”

“I don’t think any of us realized that monsters truly existed until Yakut, Lex, and a few others came out to open the cage. They showed us the woods, told us to run.” She swallowed past the bitterness rising in her throat. “The slaughter began as soon as the first of us broke for the forest.”

In her mind, Renata relived the horror in excruciating detail. She could still hear the screams of the victims as they fled, and the terrible howls of the predators who hunted them with such savage zeal. She could still smell the summery tang of pine and loamy moss, nature’s scents smothered all too soon by that of blood and death. She could still see the vast darkness surrounding her in the unfamiliar terrain, unseen branches that smacked her cheeks and tore at her clothes as she tried to navigate her escape.

“None of you stood a chance,” Nikolai murmured. “They told you to run only to toy with you. To give themselves the illusion that blood clubs have anything to do with sport.”

“I know that now.” Renata could still taste the futility of all that running. Terror had taken shape out of the black night in the form of glowing amber eyes and bared, bloodied fangs like nothing she’d ever dreamed in her worst nightmare. “One of them caught up to me. He came out of nowhere and began to circle me, readying for the attack. I’d never been more afraid. I was scared and angry and something inside me just…snapped. I felt a power coursing through me, something stronger than the adrenaline that was flooding my body.”

Nikolai nodded. “You didn’t know about the ability you possessed.”

“I didn’t know about a lot of things until that night. Every thing had turned inside out. I just wanted to survive—the only thing I knew how to do. So when I felt that energy flowing through me, some visceral instinct told me to turn it loose on my attacker. I pushed it outward with my mind and the vampire staggered back as if I’d physically struck him. I threw more at him, and still more, until he was down on the ground screaming and his eyes were bleeding and his entire body was convulsing in pain.”

Renata paused, wondering if the Breed warrior staring at her in silence was judging her for her total lack of remorse over what she’d done. She

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wasn’t about to apologize or make excuses. “I wanted him to suffer, Nikolai. I wanted to kill him, and I did.”

“What other choice did you have?” he said, reaching out and very tenderly brushing his fingertips along the line of her cheek. “What about Yakut? Where was he during all of this?”

“Not far behind. I had started running again when he stepped into my path and headed me off. I tried to take him down too, but he withstood it. I sent everything I had at him, to the point of exhaustion, but it wasn’t enough. He was too strong.”

“Because he was Gen One.”

Renata gave an acknowledging tilt of her head. “He explained it to me later, after that initial bout of reverb had knocked me unconscious for three full days and I woke to find myself pressed into service as a personal bodyguard to a vampire.”

“You never tried to leave?”

“In the beginning, I tried. More than once. It never took him long to locate me.” She tapped her index finger against the vein at the side of her neck. “Hard to get very far when your own blood is better than GPS for your pursuer. He used my blood as insurance of my loyalty. It was a shackle I couldn’t break. I was never going to be free of it.”

“You’re free now, Renata.”

“Yeah, I suppose I am,” she said, the answer sounding as hollow as it felt. “But what about Mira?”

Nikolai stared at her for a long moment, saying nothing. She didn’t want to see the doubt in his eyes, no more than she wanted empty assurances that there was anything either one of them could do for Mira now that she was in enemy hands. All the worse when she was currently weakened by her wound.

Nikolai pivoted to the claw-footed white tub and gave the twin handles a crank. As water rushed into the basin, he turned back to her where she sat. “A cool bath should bring your temperature down. Come on, I’ll help you clean up.”

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“No, I can manage on my own—”

He gave her a no-arguments lift of his brow. “The shirt, Renata. Let me help you out of it so I can have a better look at what’s going on with that wound.”

Obviously, he wasn’t about to give it up. Renata sat very still as Nikolai unfastened the last few buttons on the tent-sized oxford and gently eased it off her. The cotton fell in a soft crush on her lap and around her hips. Despite that she was wearing a bra, modesty ingrained in her from her early years in the church orphanage made her lift her hands up to shield her breasts from his eyes.

But he wasn’t looking at her in a sexual way just then. All his focus was on her shoulder right now. He was gentle, careful, his fingers probing lightly around the area. He followed the curve of her shoulder over and around to where the bullet had left her flesh. “Does it hurt when I touch you here?”

Even though his touch was barely a skimming contact, pain radiated through her. She winced, sucking in her breath.

“Sorry. There’s a lot of redness and swelling near the exit wound,”

he said, his deep voice vibrating in her bones while his touch moved lightly on her. “It doesn’t look great, but I think if we flush it out and…”

As his voice trailed off, she knew what he was seeing now. Not the raw gunshot wound, but two other blemishes on the otherwise smooth skin of her back. She felt those marks sear as hotly as they had the night they’d been put there.

“Holy hell.” Nikolai’s breath left him in a slow sigh. “What happened to you? Are these burn marks? Jesus…are they brands?”

Renata closed her eyes. Part of her wanted nothing more than to shrink away and vanish into the tile, but she forced herself to remain still, her spine rigidly erect. “They are nothing.”

“Bullshit.” He stood before her and lifted her chin on the edge of his hand. She let her gaze drift up to meet his and found his pale eyes sharp with intensity. There was no pity in those eyes, only a cold outrage that took her aback. “Tell me. Who did this to you—was it Yakut?”

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She shrugged. “Just one of his more creative ways of reminding me that it’s not a good idea to piss him off.”

“That son of a bitch,” Nikolai fumed. “He had his death coming. Just for this—for everything he did to you—the bastard damn well had it coming.”

Renata blinked, surprised to hear such fury, such fierce protectiveness, coming from him. Particularly when Nikolai was one of the Breed and she was, as was made clear to her often enough the past two years, merely human. Existing only because she was useful. “You’re not like him at all,” she murmured. “I thought you would be, but you’re nothing like him or Lex or the others. You’re…I don’t know…different.”

“Different?” Although the intensity hadn’t left his eyes, Nikolai’s mouth quirked at the corner. “Was that almost a compliment, or just your fever talking?”

She smiled despite her state of general misery. “Both, I think.”

“Well, different I can handle. Let’s cool you down before you start throwing around the n-word.”

“The n-word?” she asked, watching as he took the bottle of liquid hand soap from the sink and squirted some into the running bath.

“Nice,” he said, and tossed her a wry look over his thick shoulder.

“You’re not comfortable with nice?”

“It’s never been one of my specialties.”

His grin was crooked and more than a little charming as it made his lean cheeks dimple on both sides. Looking at him like this, it wasn’t hard to imagine he was a male of many specialties, not all of them the bulletsand-blades variety. She knew firsthand that he had a very nice, very skilled mouth. As much as she wanted to deny it, a part of her was still burning from their kiss back at the lodge, and the heat she felt had nothing to do with her fever.

“Get undressed,” Nikolai told her, and for one addled second she wondered if he’d been able to read her thoughts. He ran his hand back

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and forth through the sudsy water in the tub, then shook it out. “It feels about right. Go on, climb in.”