Page 26 of Golden Eagle

“But…so much of it?” Jamie asked, brows lifted skeptically.

“You’re disgusting,” Alexei said with undisguised delight.

“You guys are just jealous,” Lanny said, and shook an obscene amount of ketchup over perfectly good scrambled eggs.

“Of what?” Jamie wanted to know.

Trina checked the time on her phone, and not for the first time wished she wasn’t the only woman in their strange little group. She loved Lanny, and Nik, and Sasha, was starting to love Jamie, and she didn’t hate Alexei. But being the only girl in the boy’s club was getting old.

As was being the only human.

“Where are they?” she wondered aloud. Sasha tended toward punctual, if not early, and always managed to drag Nikita along with him. But they were fifteen minutes late, today.

“Hey,” Lanny said, after he’d already shoveled ketchupy eggs into his mouth. “Maybe my little nudge helped and they’re…” He waggled his brows.

“For the love of God, close your mouth,” Jamie said, turning toward the window with a grimace.

Trina sighed. “You’re–”

“An awesome matchmaker?”

“An asshole.”

“They’re here,” Jamie said, as the two Russians passed the big plate glass window beside them, headed for the door.

“Lanny,” Trina warned. “Don’t you dare say anything stupid to them.”

“What?” he asked, affronted.

Jamie glared at him, then he and Alexei, without prompt, slid out of the booth and went to snag chairs, leaving the good seats for Nik and Sasha.

Sasha slid in first, into the window seat, with a cheerful, “Good morning.” His face looked tired, though, Trina thought, noting the dark smudges beneath eyes that sparkled in the sunlight. Tired, but anxious, too. A rapidly-healing pink bite mark graced his throat, the distinct dots of puncture wounds.

Nik looked as stone-faced as ever; he wore a black hoodie under his denim jacket, the hood pulled up over his head. His color was better than the last time she’d seen him, though; he’d finally fed. Good.

The waitress circled back just as Alexei and Jamie wedged their chairs in at the table’s end, and took Nikita’s order of “black coffee and toast.” Sasha wanted orange juice and oatmeal.

When they were alone, effectively walled in by the clatter and tumble of busy morning diner sounds, Nikita said, “It’s Gustav,” without preamble.

Alexei went very still, for just a second, and then picked up his coffee mug, expression clear.

“Good morning to you, too,” Trina said. “Who’s Gustav?”

Nikita pulled a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, frowned at it when he remembered he couldn’t smoke in here, and put it away. “A vampire we met thirty years ago.”

She felt her brows go up. “Just the once? And you remembered his scent that well?”

He sent her a direct look. “This one I did.”

“Alright,” she said, when he didn’t back down. “Who is he?”

He glanced away, then, just as the waitress returned and thumped down plates. When she was gone, Nikita shook his head and said, “Not a friend.”

Trina looked to Sasha – whose cheeks gleamed rosy pink in the incoming sunlight. A trick of the glass, she guessed. “We met him and his Familiar years ago. It was….” He narrowed his eyes and tipped his head, thinking. “The eighties. Late eighties.”

“You had that mohawk, then,” Nikita reminded.

“Oh, yeah! Eighty-eight, then. I only had it the one winter.”

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