Rory stood up. “What’s wrong?” she demanded.
“He’s leaving,” Sasha said. His voice was hoarse.
“What? Who’s leaving?” Yet she knew. She knew. Somehow, this was her fault.
“Dante,” Sasha said. His throat worked and his gaze skittered. He was barely holding it together. “We were talking about a bet. It was a stupid thing and I wouldn’t touch it. He just seemed to…he just started shouting, all at once. It was as if he was just looking for an excuse. He called me a coward and a lot of other things. Then he grabbed his keys.”
“He’s leaving?” She glanced at the window. It was night out there. It was no time for anyone to be wandering the streets. Her heart was back to jumping around again as she hurried over to the window and looked down at the flood-lit gate area. The Viper was easing through the gates and she pressed her hand against the window, her breath venting in a gasp. “He really is leaving,” she breathed. “What in hell does he think he’s doing?” Then she realized. “He’s not thinking at all,” she added softly. She let the curtain fall and looked back at Sasha.
“It doesn’t make any sense.” He still sounded shocked.
“It doesn’t make sense to you,” she said gently. “You didn’t do anything wrong. This is my fault.”
His eyes narrowed. “No,” he said flatly. Denial.
Rory put her hand on his shoulder. “I know you don’t like that, but it’s the truth. I will fix this, Sasha. Where did he say he was going?”
“He didn’t.” His gaze was searching her face. “You can fix this?” he asked and she could see the dawning of hope in his face.
Her heart gave a queer little jerk. Sasha cared for Dante. Maybe more than cared. The blaze of hope in his eyes was hard to look at. It made it even more imperative that she get Dante back for him.
She nodded. “Do you have a car here, Sasha?”
“I…um…I rented one. It’s in the barn.”
“Keys.” She held out her hand.
Sasha reached into his pants pocket. “No one is supposed to drive it except me. Something about insurance.” His mind was starting to work again.
“Come with me, then. I can drive better and faster than you, trust me.” She kept her hand out.
Sasha dropped the key onto her palm, with the rental company logo on the big square tab attached to it.
“Come on,” she told him, heading for the back of the house.
“To where?” he demanded.
“We’ll figure that out on the way. You have to tell me exactly what he said. There’ll be a clue in there somewhere.”
They hurried through the kitchen, Sasha barely keeping up with her speed because she was going slightly faster than human.
Efraim was not at the table. The guard sitting there was human and not someone Rory had seen before. She wondered if Efraim had refused to take another shift in the kitchen or if Nial had learned of what happened in the mysterious way he heard about so many things and had moved Efraim and Kimball somewhere else.
Then she corrected herself. Patrick would have moved them. It was his house. And Patrick was Dominic’s lover and Dominic read minds….
The mystery solved, Rory return to this other greater problem. “What did Dante say to you?”
Sasha shook his head. “A lot of stuff that doesn’t need repeating. He was angry,” he added.
“I’m sure he was. There’s no greater fury than that generated by fear.”
Sasha looked at her, puzzled.
“I wasn’t there when he woke,” she said, as gently as she could.
Sasha’s mouth opened. Then he closed it. “I see,” he said stiffly.
“I said it wasn’t your fault,” she reminded him. “What did he say when he left? Dante can’t stop talking when he’s angry.”
“I noticed,” Sasha said dryly.
Their steps crunched on the gravel in front of the barn.
“Which door?” Rory asked, looking at the four big doors.
“Third one,” Sasha said.
She walked over to the third door and bent and pushed her fingers under the bottom of it.
“There’s a remote control inside—” Sasha begun.
She hauled upward. The door groaned and protested, then the automatic opening system gave way with a clunking sound and the door rose up without resistance. “Don’t bother,” she told him.
“The Audi,” he said, pointing.
She tripped the lock on the key remote and the Audi’s lights flickered and the doors unlocked. “Good car,” she told him. “I own one, myself.”
“An A3?”
“R8,” she said.
“Of course.” He didn’t smile.
“Get in,” she told him and went up to the driver’s door and opened it. Sasha settled in the passenger seat as she started the car, then backed it out. “Think,” she said. “What did Dante say as he left?”
The guards at the gate waved them through after opening the gates.
There were no paparazzi out in the street. It was too late and too dark. There was no moon tonight. The lack of moonlight increased the risk of Summanus attacks on inner suburbs. That was why Patrick had been so keen on clearing out the borders of the city while the moon was full.
Sasha was frowning as he looked ahead at the curving road as it wound through the hills. “He said he wanted to be alone. Somewhere where he could think.”
“Ah.” Rory smiled. “I know where he will be, then.”
“You do? I thought you two were strangers to the city?”
“We both live in San Francisco, but Dante spent ten years touring the country with the team. There’s a hotel room in every football town in America that has his name on it.”
“Including Los Angeles,” Sasha finished.
“The Ritz-Carlton. Room 283 is his usual room. He’ll pick another room, though, just in case I figure it out. Probably room 307.”
Sasha stared at her. “How can you be so certain?” Then he rolled his eyes. “Prime numbers. Yes?”
“Right. Dante has a thing for prime numbers. He thinks he’s picking random numbers out of his head, although the pattern is ingrained.”
“Does he know that?”
Rory shook her head. “I don’t think so. I didn’t tell him.” She smiled. “He wouldn’t like knowing he’s so predictable.”
“You like it, though.” It wasn’t a question.
“I do. There’s comfort in patterns, inside the chaos.”
“Spoken like a true quantum theorist,” Sasha said dryly.
“I am that,” Rory said. She eased out onto the parkway and settled in for the drive downtown. She kept her speed just above the limit and took advantage of any openings to surge ahead and make better time.
Sasha was sitting silently, his face barely visible in the dim dash lights.
“I’m also sorry,” Rory said. “About all of this. This is just a taste of what I can do to your life. You’re better off without me in it.”
Sasha turned to face her. “Have you ever stopped to think that you cause chaos because you refuse to let life flow as it wants? You resist and rechannel and divert and that is what screws up everything.”
Rory sighed. “Of course it is. I know that very well. Only, letting life flow as it wants, as you say, means giving up my freedom to choose how I want to live my life.”
“To live alone,” Sasha said harshly.
“If that’s the cost of the choices I make, then so be it,” she said gently. “Better to live alone than to compromise and adjust and give in. Eventually, after all that giving way, what I am left with would look nothing like what I want.”
Silence.
Rory risked another glance at him. Sasha sat staring ahead again. He was frowning.
“Have you never loved anyone?” he asked.
“I have loved many people,” she replied.
“I mean, really loved them. To the point where you can’t think of living without them, when you would do anything
to have them in your life and anything for them?”
“Once, I loved like that,” Rory admitted. Something grabbed at her throat and squeezed and her eyes ached. Tightness bound her chest and squeezed harder and harder.
She gripped the steering wheel.
“What was his name?” Sasha asked very softly.
Rory hadn’t spoken his name in centuries and wasn’t sure she could now. She gasped in a breath, then pushed it out. “Armand.”
Just speaking the name brought back the images. Sights, sounds. All of them dim because they were human memories. She gasped as they bubbled up in her mind and brought with them the wretched misery of that time. She couldn’t speak. She wouldn’t recreate his memory in anyone else’s mind.
“He was French?” Sasha asked.
“There was no France then. It was the Holy Roman Empire.”
“Did you marry him?” Sasha asked.
Rory clamped her teeth together. This hurt. It hurt too much to speak of it. Yet she had upset Sasha’s life. It was only fair she explain why. “My father, the Count, arranged my marriage to a prince.”
“An advantageous marriage, for those times,” Sasha said carefully.
“The Prince was fifty-three. I was his third wife. On the wedding night, when he discovered I was not a virgin, he beat me into a coma. He beat me every night after that. My mother, when I told her, said I should pray to God for forgiveness for I must surely have sinned to make my husband so angry.”
Sasha pushed out a heavy breath. “Please tell me a stray arrow got him through the eye and he died of gangrene and screaming in pain.”
“He lived another ten years,” Rory said. “He beat me every single night. I lost every child I conceived, one after another. There were eight tiny graves in the graveyard before he petitioned to the Church to release him from his marriage because his wife had failed to live up to her vows and give him an heir. The Church refused because he had made the same request two times already. Yet they still did not question if the fault lay with him, despite his previous two wives also failing to bear a child to term.”
Sasha rested his elbow on the window ledge and put his hand over his eyes. “Saint Christopher and sinners,” he muttered. “What happened?”
“Armand….” She swallowed, as her throat tightened. “He came back from the war.”
“He killed him?”
“He wanted to,” Rory said. “Edmund was his lord and master, but he would have done it, anyway. War had hardened him, although he said it was the thought of seeing me once more that got him through the horror of it all. We met in secret, of course.”
“You were discovered.”
“I don’t know,” Rory admitted. “Nothing was ever said. Only, Armand….” She couldn’t close her eyes, so she squeezed the steering wheel even harder. “He was found dead in the middle of the road to Bourge-en-Bresse, with a crossbow bolt through his neck. They told me marauding Vikings had killed him.”
“They didn’t?”
“The castle was over a hundred miles from the sea or any of the big rivers. And Vikings don’t use crossbows.”
Sasha’s hand rested on her arm. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” She sighed.
“And your husband?”
“I killed him.”
Sasha shifted in the seat, to look at her directly.
“Does that appall you?” she asked, curiously.
“It should,” he admitted. “Yet it doesn’t. I can only wonder why it took you so long to do it.”
“I was only twenty-four—”
“You were married at fourteen?” Now he did sound shocked.
“It was the way of it, then. I was young enough and naïve enough to believe everyone when they assured me all my troubles were my own fault, that I had sinned in some way and God was punishing me. I prayed to God for forgiveness, every single morning. I asked for guidance, for him to show me how I might make amends. I tried so very hard to please my husband.”
Sasha muttered in Russian. A particularly crude curse, that only the Russian language could generate.
“The two days after Armand died, I locked myself in the chapel and refused to eat or drink or let anyone in. They thought I was paying penance. I was thinking, perhaps for the first time in my life. I was thinking for myself, trying to work it out. I knew my husband had arranged for Armand to be assassinated. There had been virtually no attempt to cover up the murder, or find the killer and that told me who was responsible. So I knelt at the altar and did not pray. I thought instead about how helpless I was. I was a Princess, wife to the lord of the land and of noble blood, yet because I was a woman, I was had no power of my own. I was at the mercy of any man with legal claim upon me. They could do with me whatever they wanted and no one would ever question them. There was no one I could appeal to who would listen. I also knew that if my life continued as it was, I would quite likely die very soon. It came down to that crux in the end. I either had to reach out and change things for myself, or I had to accept my lot and die an unsung death through miscarriage or beatings.”
Sasha shook his head.
“I took one more beating from him, in order to lull him into complacency and sleep. I sat over him for more than an hour, a knife in my hand, trying to bring myself to it. When he woke and saw what I held, he reared up and that was when I stabbed him in the heart.”
“Then he didn’t die in pain,” Sasha said regretfully.
“He died slowly and I stood at the side of the bed and watched him writhe,” Rory told him.
“Good.”
“Then I cut off my hair, stole a page’s clothes and ran away. That was when everything changed for me. I spent nearly a year pretending to be a grubby, barely literate boy and it opened my eyes up to the way the world treated men and women differently. I determined that from then on, I would make my own decisions and shape my life the way I wanted it to be. At the end of that year, I met Ariadne, my maker. Life changed again. I acquired true power over my life.”
She eased the Audi onto the off-ramp and into the downtown L.A. street. It was almost empty, just as the streets in San Francisco were most often empty at night.
“I’m glad you told me,” Sasha said quietly. “It’s hard to hear and would have been harder to live through, but it explains so much about you. Why have you never told Dante about Armand?”
“What makes you think I haven’t?”
“Because Dante left,” Sasha said flatly. “If he knew this about you, he would never give up hope. Ever.”
Rory swallowed. “You speak as if he…as if he has left me.”
“You said it yourself, Rory,” Sasha replied. “It isn’t my fault he ran away. There’s only one person with enough hold on him who could drive him to it.”
She could see the hotel ahead and suddenly wished they were still miles away from it. The only reason she did not turn the car around in the middle of Olympic Boulevard and head back to the house, was because she had promised Sasha she would fix this for him.
The last thing she wanted to do now was look Dante in the eye. If she did, she might see blank finality there and that was too terrifying to contemplate.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Rory stood in front of the hotel door, unable to raise her hand and tap on it.
“He’s not going to eat you,” Sasha said, just behind her.
“I know.”
“He’s in your life because he’s the last person to ever try to make you do anything.”
She drew in another breath. “I know that, too.”
“Want me to knock, for you?”
Rory shook her head. “I said I would get him back for you. I don’t break my promises.”
His hand rested on her shoulder briefly. Then he waited.
Rory contemplated the door. It was a poor wood. She could distinguish the grain beneath layers of indifferently applied lacquer.
She was here as a consequence of something she had done. Therefore, she mus
t accept the outcome and live with it. To not do so would be the same as wailing like a five year old that it wasn’t fair.
Life wasn’t fair. Hadn’t she learned that at fourteen years of age?
So she raised her hand and knocked firmly.
There was an almost immediate response. She could hear footsteps on carpet, right through the pathetically thin door.
Dante opened it and just looked at them. His face was completely neutral, revealing nothing. “You’d better come in, then,” he said and walked back into the suite. He left the door open behind him.
Rory moved in behind him, barely taking in the big room, the bedroom beyond it and the elegant woodwork and furniture. Dante had always had expensive tastes. In the last few years, he had been able to indulge them.
“You’re angry,” she said. “To be more precise, you’re angry at me and you’re taking it out on Sasha.”
Dante turned to face her. Behind her, she heard the door to the suite closed with the heavy thud of the door lock falling into place.
“I’m not angry,” Dante said. “Certainly not at Sasha and not really with you, either.”
Sasha brushed past her. He sat on the arm of the nearest chair, crossed his arms and looked at her, too.
“It worked, then,” Dante said to him.
Sasha nodded. “You were right.”
Rory gasped. There was a high buzzing sound in her head. It was the sound of bewilderment and just beneath it, a swiftly building panic. “This was a bluff? One big elaborate hoax?”
“Not that elaborate,” Sasha said.
“You played me like a harp!” she cried. Anger was building swiftly. Oh, how he had fooled her! “I felt sorry for you.”
Sasha nodded. “I had to do that, to make you really see.”
“See what?” she demanded, her voice rising even higher.
“Me,” Dante said simply.
Her chest was rising and falling rapidly. She couldn’t control her heart. It worked frantically, trying to tear its way out of her chest. “You manipulated me.”
“No,” Dante said sharply.
Blood Ascendant (Blood Stone Book 5) Page 23
