Forget about Sergei Yakut, at least for the time being. That was the sensible, smartest thing to do. And while he was at it, he would be wise to forget all about Renata too. She'd made her bed, after all. The fact that she'd evidently made it with sadistic scum like Sergei Yakut was none of Nikolai's business whatsoever. Beautiful, ice maiden Renata was not his problem, so good riddance to her.
Good riddance to the entire nest of vipers he'd uncovered in Yakut's domain.
Just a few more hours to kill before nightfall, and then he could put it all behind him.
She never had gotten used to sleeping through the daylight hours, not in the whole two years she'd been living in service to a vampire.
Renata lay in her bed, restless, unable to relax and close her eyes even for a few minutes. She tossed and turned, flipped onto her back and blew out a sigh, staring up at the timber rafters.
Thinking about the warrior...Nikolai.
He'd been gone for hours - nearly half an entire day - but she still felt the weight of his contempt pressing down on her. She hated that he'd seen Yakut feeding from her. It had been hard to pretend she wasn't ashamed when he caught her gaze from across the room. She'd tried to appear unaffected, defiant. Inside she'd been shaking, her pulse jackhammering almost out of control. She hadn't wanted Nikolai to see her like that. Even worse that he had learned of Yakut's brutal crimes and clearly thought her to be a part of it as well. She couldn't get the withering, accusatory look he'd given her out of her head. Which was ridiculous.
Nikolai was Breed, like Yakut. He was a vampire, the same as Yakut. Like Yakut, Nikolai had to feed on humans in order to survive. Even in her limited understanding of their kind, Renata knew that drinking from human beings was the only way the Breed could obtain nourishment. No convenient vampire-friendly blood banks where they could pick up a pint of O-Negative for the road. No animal predation as a substitute for the real thing.
Sergei Yakut and all the rest of the Breed shared the same driving thirst: the need for Homo sapiens red cells, taken directly from an open vein.
They were deadly savages who happened to look human most of the time, but who at their core - in their soul, if they even had one - lacked all humanity. Why she should think that Nikolai was any different was beyond her.
But he had seemed different, if only a little.
When she'd sparred with him in the kennel - when he'd kissed her, for God's sake - he had in fact seemed remarkably different from the others of his kind that she knew. Not like Yakut at all. Not like Lex either.
Which probably only proved that she was a fool.
And she was weak as well. How else could she explain the wrenching wish she'd had that Nikolai might have taken her out of this place when he'd left today? She didn't often indulge in futile hopes, or waste time imagining things that could never come to pass. But there had been a moment...a brief, selfish moment when she pictured herself torn away from Sergei Yakut's unbreakable hold.
For one unfettered instant, she wondered what it might feel like to be free of him, free of everything that held her there...and it had been glorious.
Shamed by her thoughts, Renata swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. She couldn't lie there for another minute, not as long as her head was spinning with thoughts that would do her no good at all.
The fact of the matter was, this was her life. Yakut's world was her world, the lodge and its many ugly secrets her unshakable reality. She didn't feel sorry for herself; she never had. Not at the convent orphanage all those years as a child, nor the day she was tossed out of her home with the Sisters of Benevolent Mercy at the age of fourteen and forced to leave for good.
Not even on the night, just two summers before, when she'd been plucked off the streets in Montreal and brought with a group of other frightened humans to the locked holding pens of the barn on Sergei Yakut's property.
She hadn't shed a single self-pitying tear in all this time. She sure as hell wasn't about to start now.
Renata got up and left her modest room. The main lodge was quiet at this hour, the few windows in the place shuttered tight to banish the sun's lethal rays. Renata took the thick iron bar off the exterior door and walked out into a gloriously warm and bright summer afternoon.
She headed straight for the kennel outbuilding.
Amid all the drama that had occurred last night, both alone with Nikolai and in the time afterward, she'd completely forgotten her blades outside. The careless oversight bothered her. She never let the daggers out of her possession. They were a part of her now, as they had been the day she'd received them.
"Stupid, stupid," she whispered to herself as she entered the old kennel and looked to the post where she expected to find the embedded blade she'd thrown at Nikolai.
It wasn't there.
A cry slipped past her lips, disbelief and anguish.
Had the warrior taken her blades for himself? Had he fucking stolen them?
"Damn it. No."
Renata stormed across the center aisle of the building...then came to an abrupt halt as she reached the back of the place and her eyes settled on the stout bale of straw near the scarred wooden post.
Carefully folded atop it and placed neatly beside the pair of shoes she'd left behind last night as well was the silk-and-velvet wrapper that contained her treasured daggers. She picked it up, just to reassure herself that the fabric sheath wasn't empty. Its familiar weight settled into her palm and she couldn't hold back her smile.
Nikolai.