Page 228 of Golden Eagle

“You want me to tell you that you don’t belong – that we don’t need you or care about you – so you can take off without feeling so damn guilty about it. Look at you – your face?Guilt. I interrogate murderers for a living, and I can tell when someone feels like shit for what they’re doing.”

Jamie bit his lip, and didn’t say anything.

Guilty.

Lanny sighed, and let the stern note bleed out of his voice. “Everybody’s scared, kid. Even me.”

Jamie’s brows lifted, doubtful.

“Nik’s over there learning how toswordfight, we’re talking about storming a lab like it’s a freaking castle, and Trina and I aredefinitelygonna lose our jobs. So yeah, scared.

“But what are we gonna do? This is our life now. This is our pack. If you don’t want to be a part of it, no one’s gonna stop you, but don’t put that on us, ‘cause we’ve gotten kinda attached at this point, and–”

The rest of his sentence turned into anoof, as Jamie tackled him in a hug.

Lanny blinked down at him a moment in surprise. Then he felt the heat of the kid’s face against this chest, the unsteadiness of his breath, and hugged him back. Patted the back of his head. “You’re alright,” he soothed. “Maybe a little fucked up,” he added with a laugh, “but that means you fit right in.”

~*~

When Nikita flipped him the bird, Val finally put his hands up, laughing, and turned away from the match. “Clearly, I’m a distraction, he called over his shoulder.”

“Bite me,” Nikita growled.

“Oh, no, darling, you’d enjoy it too much.”

A scan of the rooftop revealed that Mia and Anna were working together – and that Mia was smiling. He smiled, too, and kept looking: Trina held her own against Kolya; the former Chekist was letting her get in some good hits, but it was still an admirable performance on her part.

Alexei stood off to the side, arms folded against the chill. Dante stood beside him, but a half-step back, his shoulder stooped slightly in an effort to lessen his height advantage over the tsarevich; whether this was intentional or unconscious, Val couldn’t tell. Farther back, freckles visible in his pale face, was the mage. Alexei had called him Severin.

Val drifted in his direction, unhurried, slouching, even, but Alexei intercepted him.

“What do you want?”

“Such hostility.”

“Your charm doesn’t work on me,” Alexei spat, “and if you’re hoping for concession to your royalty, let me remind you that I outrank you.”

Foolish child, Val thought.From irresponsible hedonist to playing at being your father’s proper heir. But he had been a sickly boy; one not just spoiled – but coddled. Cossetted, kept apart from his peers and raised like a child made of spun sugar, apt to melt in the gentlest rainstorm.We all have our traumas.

He wiped the smile from his own face, and watched Alexei’s soften a fraction in response, uncertainty flickering in his gaze. “I thought to inquire after your mage–”

“He isn’tmine.” He blushed. That was interesting.

“–but what I really wanted was to speak with you.” He dipped his head. “Your majesty.”

Alexei sucked in a breath, clearly shocked, and then made a visible effort to smooth his features.

Val elected to ignore the slip; to treat him like the tsar he was trying now so valiantly to be. “Shall we sit?”

After a long moment of consideration, Alexei jerked a nod, and they settled on the electrical box together. Dante sat on Alexei’s other side; hovering, Val thought. Protective but nervous, uncertain, but emotionally invested.

“I’m not sure if you go in for fate,” Val began, “but it’s been my experience that, though coincidences happen, often the largest coincidences are in fact a bit of destiny.” When he earned a doubtful look, he said, “The first time I ever dream-walked away from my own familiar environs, the first time I entered the astral plane and stepped into someone else’s life, I found myself in Byzantium – in Constantinople, meeting the emperorpro-tem…who would go on to be thelastemperor: Constantine Dragases.” Even after all this time, saying his name was painful. “I didn’t understand the significance, then. He was my friend, and I enjoyed talking to him; he was a kind man, without children of his own, and surprisingly amenable to the idea that an apparition could speak to him.

“I had no way of knowing, at the time, that Mehmet would one day throw Constantine’s bloody head at my feet.”

Alexei blanched. At his other side, Dante’s lips thinned, gaze sorrowful.

“Perhaps I meet the people I do because they’re doomed, and I’m their angel of death. Perhaps meeting me, being touched by whatever magic I possess, alters the course of their lives for the worse. Perhaps I have a kind of foresight that I don’t yet understand. But I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that your path and mine have crossed.” And he told him what Liam had said, his theory of the three Romes.

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