The Castle

Vanya's eyelids felt weighted with stones. When awareness came back, the first thing to hit her nose was a soft scent of beeswax mingled with a faint trace of cedarwood, with no hint of burning sulfur or spent gasoline.

She opened her eyes. The ceiling soared high overhead—about 13 feet—with ornately carved plaster moldings. Wine-red velvet curtains were drawn tight against the light outside, leaving only a few faint streaks falling across the dark oak floor.

Candles stood on the mantel and on a small table by the bed, a dozen of them, all lit. None of them had dripped. The wax stood smooth and white as if it had been poured a moment ago, and when Vanya shifted her head on the pillow, every flame in the room leaned very slightly toward her, the way a cat turns its ear toward a sound.

She held still. The flames held still with her, patient and bright, as if they were waiting to see what she would do next.

Frost had grown on the inside of the nearest windowpane, where the curtain didn't quite meet the frame. It had made the shapes of ferns, long and feathered and delicate, and as she watched, one of the fronds slowly uncurled and reached a little farther across the glass. The room itself was warm. There was no fire in the grate.

She put out her hand and touched the bed curtain. The velvet was soft as fur and cool as water, and it gave under her fingers with a faint, tired sigh of dust that smelled of cedar and very old roses.

A killer's mind booted up at once, driven by the survival instinct Siberian Shadow had hammered into her. She ran her checks in strict order of priority:

● Wound: Vanya put a hand to her left side. The shard of C4 casing buried deep in her and the organ-ripping pain from before she blacked out were gone. The skin under the hem of the shirt was tender, with only a faint, flat scar left, not a single twinge of pain.

● Weapons: Serrated knife, pistol, poison syringe kit—every piece of gear she'd had on her had been stripped away.

Even the thin wire garrote she kept sewn into the waistband of her pants was gone. Whoever had undressed her had known exactly where to look.

● Exits: Three. A heavy double-thick wooden main door, a side door leading into a bathroom, and two large arched windows covered by velvet curtains, looking outside.

● Hostiles: Vanya held her breath and listened. Light, even footsteps in the hallway outside—two people. One moving at a relaxed pace, one standing still like a guard.

And then she froze as she realized what state she was in.

She looked around the room without moving her head. Her own clothes were nowhere. Her boots were nowhere. The only things of hers left in the room were her scars.

Her bloody tactical body armor was gone. Instead, she was wearing a man's white dress shirt, loose and baggy, made of fine silk that fell all the way to her thighs. The relentless scent of cedarwood and cold snow clung to every thread of it.

Was this his shirt? Victor Blackwood's?

Not one flicker of romance or longing crossed Vanya's mind. Humiliation, fury, and disgust surged up into a fire that ripped through her chest. Someone had stripped off her armor. Someone had exposed her entire body to the light—the lash scars from whips, the burns from experimental toxins, and countless life-or-death cuts running all over her pale skin. The only privacy she had ever used to protect herself had been stripped away.

Someone had seen the brand on her shoulder, and every scar around it, and had folded her into a clean shirt as if none of it were anything at all.

At the same time, a hot, low heat flared deep in her belly, throbbing in a strange rhythm. Vanya clenched her teeth and flatly refused to put a name to that treacherous feeling.

"You woke up 10 minutes earlier than I expected."

The deep, cold voice came from the dark corner near the fireplace.

Victor Blackwood sat in a black leather armchair. He had changed out of his scorched clothes into a perfectly tailored handmade suit. His face was pale, and his black eyes were as still as a frozen lake, watching her without a single ripple.

In the dim room, without an old woman's face in front of it, his face was worse than she remembered from the scope. It was too still. He didn't blink when he should have. His chest didn't move unless he was about to speak, and she understood with a slow, crawling certainty that he only breathed at all to make words.

Vanya sprang out of the bed with her back pressed flat to the wall, eyes locked on him like a wild animal caught in a trap.

The floor was cold under her feet. Every muscle she had was ready to move, and every one of them was still shaking.

"What did you do to me?" she rasped, her voice hoarse but raging with murder.

Victor stood, clasped his hands behind his back, and walked toward her at an easy pace, but he stopped at a safe distance. He explained—briefly, precisely, and coldly, like a medical report:

"C4 shrapnel tore your iliac artery. Acute blood loss, less than 90 seconds left to live. I gave you my blood to regenerate your cells."

He paused for a beat, his dark red eyes flickering under the dim light: "My blood and yours mixed while you were near death, and that created the Blood Bond."

"From now on, your life is bound to mine. You can't go more than a certain distance from me without the blood lashing back at you."

"How far?" Her voice came out like gravel. "What's the distance?"

"I don't know," Victor said. "Nobody has formed a bond like this in over 300 years. The texts disagree. Some of them say a mile, and some of them say the width of a kingdom."

"You don't know," she repeated.

"It is not a thing I've made a habit of doing, Miss Nikolai."

Vanya didn't believe a word of it.

She had heard beautiful explanations before. Volkov had been full of them. The more elegant the words, the uglier the thing they were covering.

The past 19 days had taught her that every word out of this creature's mouth was sugar-coated poison. She stared at him and ignored the whole ridiculous explanation about magic and bloodlines. She asked him one question—the question that had been gnawing at her mind for the past 19 days:

"The 14 people on Aegis's night-hunting squad on the North Shore 10 days ago... did you kill them?"

It was the only question that mattered to her. Everything else he could say would keep.

Victor went still. For the first time, his black eyes wavered slightly.

He took one step forward and met Vanya's stare head-on, a stare that wanted to drink his blood. Under the law of the Blood Bond, if one of the two bound to each other lied to the other, the blood in the liar's throat would tighten like barbed wire and cause a pain that tore through the larynx.

He spoke: "It wasn't me."

Vanya watched his throat when he said it. She watched it the way she watched a target's hands, and it didn't so much as tighten.

His throat was completely calm. No tightening, no pain.

That chilled Victor himself. He had never given the order or personally killed those 14 people—that was the work of another faction within the Five Houses using his name. But he didn't have the whole truth yet either. That half-truth was what let his words pass the Blood Bond's unforgiving test.

Victor stood very still after he said it. He was listening to his own throat the way a man listens to a floorboard he has just stepped on, waiting to hear it crack.

Vanya's lip curled into a smile full of hatred. She didn't believe him. To her, his hesitation was nothing more than the tell of a seasoned manipulator.

She was counting while he talked. Two men in the hall. One door to the bathroom, one to the hall, two windows. Eleven steps to the side door if she didn't stop.

WHOOSH!