The Secret

  Malachi had to remind himself how young she was. When he was her age, he was still in the middle of his training, the reality of battle years away. Ava had been picked up and thrown into a war that had been raging for centuries, and she’d lost the first battle when her mate had been killed. Both of them were still recovering.

  “Your grandmother’s mind was broken by violence,” he said. “And by a continued violation she has no way of stopping.” He put a palm to her temple. “You never have to fear that. The only one allowed in your dreams is me.”

  “Volund could get in.”

  “I don’t think he could.”

  She rolled toward him. “If Jaron wasn’t shielding me—”

  “But he is.” He kissed her forehead and whispered, “We will find a way to free her, Ava. Volund is powerful, but so is Jaron. There must be a way. And we’ll find it.”

  She blinked away the shine in her eyes. “But his evil is still in me. And it’ll never go away. I have his blood.”

  He knew a lifetime of fear couldn’t be washed clean in a single year or with a single revelation. They were both works in progress.

  “Do you remember our dream on the plane?”

  “Of Istanbul?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes.”

  “That was your magic touching mine. Healing me. And there was nothing evil about that. That was beautiful.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not saying you’re all sweetness and light.” He smiled when she narrowed her eyes. “I wouldn’t want you to be. And you are Jaron’s granddaughter.”

  He saw her shoulders tense, but he continued. “I do not fear it. Nor should you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You hold power. And soon, you’ll learn to claim it. Control it.” The corner of his mouth turned up. “This city has not seen your like before.”

  A quiet knock came at the door.

  Malachi brushed a hand along the talesm at his wrist and opened his senses. His ears recognized the familiar step. There was the scent of coffee and flour. And the irritated murmur when hot liquid spilled on skin.

  “Get dressed. Rhys is here.”

  “Bossy.” She rolled over and huddled under the covers. “I’m tired.”

  “That’s because someone decided to be insatiable last night just when I was trying to get to sleep.” He winked at her.

  She threw a pillow at him and he laughed.

  “Go back to sleep if you wish. We can go out for breakfast.”

  She peeked from under the covers. “You sure you don’t mind? I just… don’t feel like seeing anyone. Not yet.”

  “It’s fine.” He smiled. “We won’t go far. Don’t leave the apartment.”

  RHYS muttered the entire way to the coffeehouse a block away.

  “Don’t know why I bothered bringing you an espresso—”

  “Rhys, you brought me Starbucks.” Malachi shook his head disapprovingly. “What were you thinking?”

  “It’s perfectly good coffee, and there’s one right downstairs from my flat?”

  “We’re in Vienna.” He pulled open the wood-and-brass door and the happy scent of roasted coffee, sugar, and flour assaulted him. “If I have to put up with the politics, I should at least take advantage of the coffee.”

  “Anything is better than that mud you make at home.”

  The waiter looked up from his newspaper and nodded toward a table in the corner. Malachi and Rhys both unwrapped their scarves and coats to hang them by the door. Winter had come with a vengeance, and icy wind bit his cheeks. A few flurries of snow had dusted the sidewalk the night before, but he had a feeling they wouldn’t last.

  “Why did I leave Istanbul?” Rhys asked.

  “If it’s hot, you complain about that. If it’s cold, you complain about that.” Malachi settled onto the leather-wrapped bench and shook out a paper someone had left nearby. “Is there any weather you do like?”

  “England.”

  Malachi frowned. “Really?”

  “In the spring.”

  “When the flowers are blooming, or do those give you sneezing fits?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “I’d forgotten how amusing your snits could be.”

  “You’ve forgotten pretty much everything about me, old friend.” Rhys’s eyes were sharp on his face. “Has that changed?”

  “Some.” Malachi leaned forward, glancing around the wood-paneled restaurant. “Is this place—?”

  “It’s friendly.” Rhys nodded at an older gentleman who sat across the room sipping a cup. “It’s owned by one of us.”

  “The waiter is human.”

  “But discreet and lacking in curiosity. Excellent qualities in a human, I’ve always found.”

  Rhys paused to give his order to the man. Malachi did the same.

  “Now,” he continued, “what has changed?”

  “My talesm have returned to”—he leaned back and motioned halfway across his right pectoral muscle—“about here. A few more are scattered down my arm. And as my talesm have returned, I’ve recovered more memory.”

  Rhys’s face was pale. “So you know about—”

  “The badger prank was your idea, not mine. I cannot believe you tried to let me take the blame.”

  Rhys was affronted. “It was not! And if you hadn’t started laughing, we would have got away with it.”

  “We were right little demons at school, weren’t we?”

  Rhys burst into laughter, and Malachi couldn’t help but grin.

  “We were,” Rhys said. “Our poor mothers.”

  “It’s amazing we survived to adulthood.”

  His old friend paused. “Your family marks?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, brother.”

  The tattoos his father had given him when he reached the age of thirteen hadn’t reappeared. While they gave Malachi little power, they were part of his identity. A way of marking his lineage, given to him by his father. Because he’d not scribed them himself, he had no idea if they would ever return.

  “It will be as it is meant,” Malachi said. “I’m blessed that any have returned at all.”

  “Ava?”

  “She sings to me. She heals me.”

  Rhys shook his head slowly. “Lucky bastard.”

  “I am.” He lowered his voice again. “Has Max told you—”

  “About the Grigora?” His smile fell. “He called everyone to Damien and Sari’s as soon as he and Renata got into town. I’m still trying to understand how we could have missed something as big as this.”

  “They prefer to be called kareshta. Silent ones.”

  “Silent ones?” Rhys asked.

  “Those who survived had to be.”

  Rhys slowly shook his head. “All these years, Malachi. How many have suffered? How many have been killed? They were the Fallen’s first victims, and we knew nothing.”

  “How were we to know?”

  “How could we not? It seems so obvious now. The Forgiven fathered daughters, why wouldn’t the Fallen?”

  “The stories only ever speak of male hunters. That’s all we were ever taught.”

  Rhys was incredulous, barely noticing the human waiter who was back with their coffees and two glasses of water, along with a couple of small pastries.

  “And we shouldn’t have known better?” he asked. “Asked more questions? Our own scrolls speak of the mighty men of ancient times. Heroes, not heroines. And yet we know that the Irina were always there.” Rhys leaned forward with bright eyes. “And I believe the early singers were with the scribes in battle as well. The Dacia manuscript—”

  “This sounds like an academic argument I’m completely unprepared to have with you.”

  Rhys paused, his mouth likely ready to launch into an explanation of some ancient language interpretation Malachi had no interest in.

  “That’s… probably true,” Rhys admitted. “But it may be relevant to the Irina problem.”

  “Can we st
op calling them a problem?”

  The corner of Rhys’s mouth turned up. “Oh, I think they rather like being problematic. And you know where Orsala and Sari are going to fall on the Grigora—kareshta question, don’t you?”

  “Probably where Ava is.”

  “She is one, you know.”

  “She’s part kareshta. It’s…” He hesitated. It wasn’t his story to tell. “It’s complicated. You need to ask Ava.”

  Rhys’s curiosity had clearly been sparked. “I will. Can I assume she also anticipates a large family reunion? Welcoming the kareshta into the arms of their Irin sisters?”

  “She’s more cautious than that. You have to remember, Ava has been in their place. She had no idea she was anything but human, and she had no control the way our women have. She thought she was insane, and I’m guessing more than one of the Grigori females is in the same situation. She sympathizes with them, but I think she’s also more realistic about how damaged or dangerous some of them might be.”

  Rhys shook his head. “The main question is, can they be trusted? If what Max said is true, then any with living fathers can be tracked by the Fallen who sired them. They have no free will unless their sires are dead. We have to consider them security risks as well as victims.”

  “All the more reason to shift focus,” Malachi said quietly.

  Rhys glanced over his shoulder. “Are you saying what I think?”

  “We must start going after the Fallen, not just the Grigori.”

  “A monumentally more difficult task,” Rhys said. “And not one that will be popular with the council.”

  “Rhys.” Malachi fought to explain. “The Grigori we met in Sofia—the ones Max has come to a truce with—they’re not like the others. They’re… more like us. Yes, they are wilder. Untrained. Hungry. But not mindless drones. With their sires dead, they had free will. They were struggling to control themselves, but they were trying.”

  “Not unlike the Irin now.”

  Malachi frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Surely you can see the parallels,” he said, taking a sip of coffee. “We’ve been without widespread Irina influence for only two hundred years, and where are we as a society? Declining. Touch-hungry. More and more aggressive. We’re completely out of balance. We need…” Rhys’s voice grew rough. “Our race is dying without the Irina, and not just because so few children are born.”

  “Then we bring them back. On their terms, not because of some compulsion act dreamed up by old men. And we work to save the women we can, even if that means fighting with the council.”

  “You’re ready for this fight.”

  “Yes.”

  Rhys smiled ruefully. “You’re almost panting for it.”

  “And what if I am?”

  “Yes.” He drained his coffee. “You definitely seem more like yourself.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “WELCOME TO VIENNA,” Ava whispered to her reflection. “Your father is an angelic bastard. Your grandmother was driven insane by the angel who raped her. Your great-grandfather is an archangel who kills things for you as tokens of his twisted affection. And somewhere in the middle of this, you mated a four-hundred-year-old man with amnesia.”

  She blinked and looked at the cat that had wandered into the apartment when she opened the door to its meow.

  “How is this my life?”

  The black feline only blinked guileless gold eyes.

  “Do you come with the apartment?”

  It gave a scratchy growl and jumped down from the dressing table where Ava had been brushing out her hair. It was clean and seemed well fed. She thought it must belong to someone in the building. As long as it didn’t trash her stuff, she was fine with him hanging out. She liked cats and dogs; she just couldn’t keep one herself because she traveled too much.

  Ava sighed as she turned back to the mirror. She needed a haircut badly. And a pedicure. A massage would be a good idea, along with her regular medical checkups. She had a bunch of vaccinations that needed updating, and she felt like she’d put off the regular business of life for way too long.

  She checked her phone. No e-mails from her mother or father, but one from Luis, asking how her grandmother was. Ava hoped he didn’t feel like he needed to be chatty with her now because she was engaged to the guy who’d threatened his life.

  That would be awkward. And frankly a little disturbing.

  She shot him back a quick response and checked her calendar, only to realize she had a job coming up. In fact, it was a job she’d booked eighteen months in advance, right before she’d taken the assignment in Cyprus that eventually led her to Istanbul. She remembered it because she felt like the magazine was being overly cautious, booking her so far in advance to cover their summer beach spread for the next year.

  Now the shoot was approaching and Ava had some decisions to make. She still had three months before she needed to be on location, but she couldn’t cancel any later than six weeks out and not seriously piss them off.

  She also realized that she and Malachi had officially been reunited longer than they’d originally been together in Turkey. She didn’t know why that seemed significant, but it did.

  She heard the key turn in the lock.

  “Ava?”

  “In the bedroom.”

  “Why do we have… a cat?”

  “He wandered in,” she said as Malachi entered the bedroom. “Seemed nice enough. Probably belongs to a neighbor.” He leaned down to brush a kiss across her temple and flopped on the bed, only to have the cat jump up and sit on his abdomen.

  “I don’t think it likes me.”

  “Well, you are in his bed.”

  “I’m fairly sure we’re the ones renting it.”

  “That reminds me, I need to get some money transferred to Rhys to pay him back.”

  He frowned. “Or don’t, because the scribe house is covering it.”

  “Or let me do it, since I’m not worried about my budget? The house resources are probably strapped with the reconstruction.”

  “Ava, you don’t need to do that.”

  She spun around in her seat. “Is this going to be a macho alpha-male problem for you?”

  “Am I a macho alpha-male?”

  “Yes. And I’m loaded. It makes more sense to let me—or let’s be honest, my asshole of a father—cover the bill for stuff like this. It’s a better use of resources. Besides, I’d probably be paying for a hotel and a guide—possibly a bodyguard—if I were traveling on my own.”

  He propped up on his elbows, his lips twitching. “Are you saying I’m your bodyguard and guide?”

  “No.” Her face reddened.

  “Because I am very fond of your body. So guarding it isn’t a problem.”

  “I’m just trying to help.”

  Now he was grinning. “You don’t have to pay me though.”

  “Shut up!”

  Malachi scooted off the bed and got on his knees, shuffling over to her as she sat at the dressing table. The cat gave an irritated yowl and abandoned the room. The stool she sat on was low enough that Malachi was level with her when he wrapped his arms around her waist from behind. She could see him laughing in the mirror.

  “Am I your kept man, canım?”

  “If you are, I feel like a lot more breakfast in bed should be happening.”

  “Mmmm.” His lips trailed along her neck. “Now I feel this pressure to earn my keep.”

  “Coffee in bed, at least.”

  It was getting harder and harder to concentrate. The traitor cat had completely abandoned her. She should probably be getting ready for… something.

  But he was playing with her. Teasing her. More and more of his personality was coming back. His humor. His bravado.

  Ava fell in love all over again every time she turned around.

  “All right, you’ve convinced me. I will take the job as your kept man. So…” He lifted her in his arms and turned to the bed. “Now it is time for work.”

&n
bsp; TWO very work-filled hours later, they met the others in the back room of a coffeehouse off Bäckerstraße. It was dark and smoky in the front room, the walls plastered with movie posters and flyers for avant-garde art exhibitions, but the small back room was bright and clean. The smell of coffee, beer, and sausages filled the midday air.

  And Ava’s friends, both scribes and singers, filled the room.

  Suddenly she was fighting back tears.

  Orsala sat in quiet conversation with a nodding Rhys. Mala was signing to both Leo and Sari, who was holding Damien’s hand as he read from a tablet computer with a frown on his face. Max and Renata were there, even though both were pointedly ignoring the other by checking their phones.

  Malachi unwrapped his scarf and hung it with the others tossed over a bench near the door.

  “Ava, give me your coat and I’ll—what’s wrong?”

  She turned, smiling. “Nothing is wrong. Sorry. Happy tears, babe.” Her hands went to his cheeks. He’d let his beard start to grow, and she was getting used to it. It suited him. “You’re coming back to me. And everyone is here. I feel like I’ve lived with this knot of fear in my stomach for months now, but I just… I know it’s going to be okay. Somehow, it’s all going to be okay if everyone is here.”

  He held on to her wrists and squeezed them as she smiled.

  “I love you,” he whispered, and Ava realized the whole room had gone silent.

  She turned, and everyone was smiling at her.

  “Hello, Ava.” Sari stood and opened her arms. “It’s good to see you, sister.”

  Sister.

  Ava would only admit it to herself, but part of her had wondered whether the Irina would treat her differently now that they knew her blood was from the Fallen. She should have known better. Orsala embraced her. Mala pinched her bicep in mock disapproval. And Ava knew without a doubt that Karen would still bake her too many cakes and Astrid would still share a self-deprecating joke to break the tension.

  They were her sisters. For the first time, her heart was light enough to enjoy it.