Page 145 of Blood Mosaic

Oleg closed his eyes, picturing Elene’s battered face in his mind. “It was entirely your fault, Zara.”

“If you were so fond of her, you should have turned her!”

“I should have…” He let out a twisted laugh as his fangs lengthened. “Is that why you turned Tatyana?”

Zara was quiet.

Oleg snapped at her. “Speak!”

“She looks like Luana.” Zara’s voice was still childish. “I didn’t want her to lie there and rot when she looks like Luana.”

Oleg said nothing, but a sick, twisting guilt curled in his belly. Elene was dead because of him. Tatyana had lost her mortal life because decades ago he had created a monster to amuse his mentally unstable mate.

All of this was his fault, so he would have to make it right.

He swallowed the bitterness at the back of his throat. “Where are you, Zara?”

“Not close to you.”

“You should come back to Sochi.” He picked up a pen on his desk and dragged the tip along a piece of paper Mika hadleft, sketching out a sunflower in the margin of a spreadsheet. “You could spend some time with Tatyana and collect your inheritance.”

Zara was silent again. “You brought my gold to Sochi?”

“Maybe I’ll give Luana’s jewelry to Tatyana instead of you. After all, she’s your child and you abandoned her.”

“You bastard!” Zara screamed. “You fucking bastard!”

Ah, there she was. The childish pouting was gone, and the sociopath was back. “The sun is rising here, Zara. You should be sleeping, so I think you are to the west, huh? Am I right? How far away? Are you hiding in Kyiv? Playing with your friends in Bucharest?”

A second later his daughter hung up the phone.

He hung up the handset, then quickly lifted it and dialed a different number, waiting for his office at the citadel to pick up.

“Listening,” a voice said.

“The call that just came into the Sochi office,” he said. “Trace it.”

“I will make sure it is done, and I will call you at nightfall.”

“Thank you.” Oleg hung up the phone.

Then he stared at the sunflower he’d started only to realize the round center of the flower had morphed into a sketch of Tatyana’s face.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Tatyana woke to the scent of Oleg outside her door.

She rose, wrapped herself in a blue silk robe that had appeared in her closet the day before, and walked to the door, opening it and grabbing the silver carafe from his hand.

His eyebrow went up. “May I come in?”

“Yes.” She stepped back and allowed him to enter her room, trying to ignore the burst of arousal he elicited just by existing.

“I’m not in control of that.” She gulped down the blood as quickly as she could so it didn’t cool. “Just so you know.”

“I know. I am not a man to make assumptions.” He walked to the chair in the corner of the room and sat, perusing the stack of books she’d been reading on the nightstand. “Pushkin poems and Russian fairy tales.”

“You don’t have many current bestsellers in the library.” She finished the carafe of blood and set it to the side, relieved to feel the burn in her throat was even less than the night before. “Old stories from the nineteenth century are about as current as it gets.”

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