Page 170 of Blood Mosaic

“I warned her that if she kills anyone, I’ll hunt her down.” Lazlo shrugged. “More than that? I am not her keeper.”

“Fuck you.” Oleg was seething. “She was alone?”

“She had a bit of luggage with her, but I couldn’t see anyone else.”

No one else meant that she had a plan. Tatyana was too cautious to take off into the night without having a plan. He marched back into the house and yelled for help. “Druzhina!”

Moments later, Oksana and another one of his men appeared in the entryway.

“Boss,” Oksana said, “one of the trucks is missing.”

“I know,” he said. “Tatyana took it. Someone call Mika and have him track her phone. I think she still has it.” The phone had not been on the bed in her room. The phone could be traced.

“She left?” Oksana’s eyes went wide. “She’s a newborn.”

“You think I don’t know that?” And she had nothing. She had money in the bank, but did she have any idea how to use gold exchanges? Did she even have any…?

Oleg blinked.

Gold.

He walked upstairs, then down the hallway where he’d once carried her when she had wanted to die.

The Amber Room.

When Oleg opened the door, the chest was still sitting there, but the lid was open and the mahogany box containing all the jewels was gone along with a row of gold bars, probably all she could carry in a duffel bag.

“Clever girl.” The giant chest of gold was far too heavy to carry even for a vampire, but a box of priceless jewelry and loose stones?

Oh yes. That could get her quite far in the world if she were smart. And his little wolf was very smart.

He closed the top of the chest and looked around the room, remembering the first time he’d taken her against the wall, the taste of her blood, the gasping hitches in her breath when pleasure overtook her.

“My clever Tatyana,” he muttered. “Do you really think this makes you any less mine?”

Oleg’s anger cooled to resolve.

She was his. She could run, but he would find her.

He simply hoped she wouldn’t leave a trail of dead humans in her wake.

Oleg shut the Amber Room and locked the door behind him, then walked downstairs to see Mika already in the foyer.

“I ran back as soon as I heard. She’s on the main road heading east.”

Oleg snapped at Oksana. “Start the Land Cruiser. We’re going after her.”

East meant Adler and the airport.

East also meant the river.

East meant… Arosh’s territory.

Chapter Forty-Nine

She sat in a parking lot on the edge of the border crossing, sucking down a bottle of blood-wine and knowing that there was no way she could make it into Georgia on the main road.

She had no papers. No ID. She was terrified to leave the truck when the scent of humans was all around her. She’d raided the blood stores in the kitchen before she left Oleg’s house, and she had a case of blood-wine in the old truck, but even as she drank, her throat was starting to burn.

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