Page 111 of Blood Mosaic

Wait. She wasn’t poor anymore.

“Your humor is grimmer than Oleg’s,” Elene muttered. “Maybe you twoarea good match.”

It was a strange turn of conversation. Not that it mattered, because Tatyana was going to die. “Do you think Oleg will give my commission to my mother when I’m dead? That would be fair, right?”

Elene snapped at her. “We’re not going to die.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Tatyana grew up on a farm. She knew how the natural order worked.

The hawk ate the pigeon.

The fox ate the hawk.

The human ate the chicken.

And the vampire ate the human.

Her head was starting to swim again. “I think I’m going to pass out.”

“She doesn’t want to kill us. Tatyana, stay awake. She won’t kill us. She’s going to use us as leverage to get her gold. She knows Oleg will want us back.”

“You? Maybe.” She wiggled her finger like a teacher chiding a student. “But I’m the bait, remember? The bait doesn’t usually survive the trap. That’s the whole point of being bait.”

Whatever Elene said, it drifted away as Tatyana fell back into darkness.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The warehouse lay on a deserted street on the edge of the waterfront, surrounded by barbed wire and a guard shack where two guards stood holding machine guns that were typical for private security.

Oleg and Mika waited in the shadows across the street. In a few more minutes, a dozen of Oleg’s druzhina would be gathered—all the ones in the immediate area—and they would take the warehouse, the humans and vampires inside, and any information they had about Oleg’s missing women.

It had been three hours since Tatyana and Elene had been taken.

“Remember,” Mika murmured, “we need the leaders alive.”

His boyar had identified the warehouse as the temporary headquarters of a faction of the Albanian vampire mafia that Zara had hired to abduct Elene and Tatyana.

“Waiting for Karl and Oksana.” Mika signed across the dark street where Ludmila was waiting in the shadows. “They’re almost here.”

Ludmila and Oksana were mated. The sniper would feel her mate as she approached.

Oleg was wearing a pair of black canvas pants and nothing else. His amnis was frantic and furious. He felt a muscle in his cheek twitch, and his fangs were long and aching in his mouth. He gripped the leather-wrapped handle of his favorite axe. He hadn’t used it in a decade, but he kept the edge sharp, and he would feed his old friend blood that night.

He forced himself to be patient.

Zara wouldn’t kill them immediately. She would want information from Tatyana. She would want to use Elene for trade because she knew the woman was valuable to Oleg.

He blanked out what they must be suffering at that very moment and hoped that wherever Zara’s people had taken them, his daughter was not yet present.

She was… unpredictable.

Oleg was doing everything possible to dampen his own energy, so he couldn’t reach out and sense how many immortals were in the building, but Mika’s spies said that roughly a dozen vampires and twenty or so humans were hiding out, waiting for a boat back to Sarandë. They had been hired the week before, transported by Greek freighter, and were now stranded in Odesa.

They were at Oleg’s mercy, but he had none.

“They’re here,” Mika said. “Wind first?”

“With Rudov.”

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