Page 14 of Blood Mosaic

“And Tatyana?”

Oleg shrugged. “She’ll walk away with what I promised her. Ten percent of anything she can recover. I told her earlier tonight: I don’t steal from my business partners.”

“She’s human.”

“So are you.” Oleg brought his hands together, steepling his fingers and resting them against his chin. “I’ve learned more than a little over a thousand years, Elene. Never underestimate a human.”

Chapter Four

Sevastopol

Three years before

Was karaoke ever a good idea?

Tatyana sat at the back of a lively club near Ushakov Square. It wasn’t smoky. The drinks were good, and the groups on stage were like any karaoke club, a mix of amazing and terrible.

“Another drink?” A friendly server walked over. She was wearing a black apron and her hair was tied back in a neat twist.

Tatyana stared at her. “Do you like working here?”

The woman shrugged. “It’s okay. Are you looking for a job? The waiting list for this place is pretty long.”

“Right.”

That was the answer everywhere. She’d had to leave her job and move back to her mother’s city when her grandparents had passed. Her mother couldn’t be alone, and now Tatyana couldn’t find work.

Just go apply at the city somewhere, Tanya.

That was her mother’s attitude. Find a nice government job somewhere that paid pennies but offered the security of never being fired.

The problem was, if they were going to pay the bills, she needed the kind of money she had been making in Kyiv. The kind of money that no one in Sevastopol was going to pay her these days.

But she couldn’t live in Kyiv because her mother couldn’t be alone.

Life was… impossible.

“Did you want another drink?”

“Sorry.” Tatyana quickly finished her vodka tonic and nodded. “Yes. Sure.” At least the drinks weren’t terribly expensive here. She hadn’t planned on ordering a second, but she felt guilty about staring into space in front of the server. “It’s mostly tourists here, right?”

The woman smiled ruefully. “Mostly, yes. In this part of town, it’s pretty much all tourists.”

Perfect.

She’d gone out after another passive-aggressive exchange with her mother in the hope that going to a karaoke bar would point her in the direction of some people her own age who might be friendly.

She was twenty-four, not eighty. She hadn’t had a huge group of friends in Kyiv, but she’d met other people at the university and stayed in touch. She’d been rooming with a nice girl from the north. She went out on the weekends. Her friends from work invited her to bars and concerts.

Then life and politics became horrible and everything went to shit. Instead of working at a nice accounting firm in a city she loved, Tatyana was living with her mother, everything in the world was upside down, and she couldn’t find a job. Her mother’s pension barely stretched through half the month.

She muttered under her breath, “People had to pay their rent when the Roman Empire was falling too.”

A sharp laugh came from the table next to her, and a woman with long, dark hair glanced over. “You’re right.”

Tatyana shrugged.

The woman was with a half a dozen people, most of whom seemed to be watching and cheering the woman singing on the stage. Tatyana saw her look away, then look back at Tatyana. Her eyes locked on her face.

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