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Opening a drawer hidden within another, he withdrew a book and put it on the desk. The crinkled-foil titleSpells to Locate the Lostseemed to jump from the cover to choke her. Connections raced in her mind.
“You,” she stammered. “You were the boy in Moscow.” Her thoughts slammed into a mental pile-up, crowding for space that she didn’t have to give them. She’d wondered some days if she had imagined that afternoon in the park, a delusion to save her tortured soul from slipping into insanity.
“And you were the girl who ran.” His voice went rough, raw with emotions she couldn’t read. Before she could find the words for any one of a million questions, he shut down again. His mental shields went up, and he acted as if he hadn’t shaken her to her core. “Let’s see what food’s left in the kitchen,” he said.
When he snagged her sandwich on the way out, she followed. Whatever their shared past and weaving in and out of each other’s lives meant to him, she would figure it out. She’d studied people for years. He couldn’t hide from her forever.
She busied herself making notes about the next steps in her research while he rummaged through the fridge and pantry. But her mind spiraled around the fact that the boy she had a crush on had grown into the man she couldn’t stop thinking about.
The object of her obsession interrupted her thoughts. “Stir fry okay?” He unhooked his cufflinks and dropped them with a clink into a ceramic dish above the sink that she’d assumed had been for rings. That tiny fracture in his polished and pressed neatness that was so very Alexei had her staring, waiting to see what he might do next.
She couldn’t look away when he rolled up his sleeves, revealing strong forearms. Her mouth went dry. “Huh?”
He grinned at her, the smile reaching his eyes with a wicked gleam as he washed his hands. “Chicken stir fry? Perhaps flambé since this is supposed to be an earn-your-forgiveness dinner.”
The comforting sounds of the running water and his voice soothed until she glanced at his knuckles, the red scrapes and dark bruises stark against the white towel he held. “What happened to your hands?”
“I found an Order operative and asked him a few questions about their plans.”
“With your fists?”
“Is that a problem?” he asked.
“For your health it is.”
“I’m supposed to be making up to you, not the other way around.”
Her powers flared, and she reached for him. “Give me.”
Despite her pulsing magic through their joined hands, he watched her as though she might disappear any instant. “The light from your powers? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
So he wanted to pretend he hadn’t dropped a memory bombshell in her lap? Okay, she could play that game for now and talk about her magic. “No kidding.” She couldn’t hide the sarcasm, not after spending so much time with his sister and her mate—the snark queens. “I’ve spent most of my time in your library researching the symbols under my skin. Nita helped with a few books from the shop, but we didn’t find a match. Ancient Sumerian cuneiform from five thousand years ago came closest. I thought maybe it’d be an ancestral clue, but none of your magic texts talk about these.” She let her powers blink brighter a few seconds before releasing his now-healed hands.
“Thank you.” He flexed his fingers. “I feel better than I have in days.” Staring at her, his gaze turned thoughtful. “You can heal yourself, right?”
“Yes. Except where the shackles burned my skin on my ankles, I don’t have other scars after what Noxx did to me for years. At least not physical ones. I’ve been working with a therapist on the other.”
“That’s good.”
She didn’t want to hear niceties. Not from Alexei who went from cold to molten hot with nothing in between. From him, pleasant politeness sounded like judgment. Or worse—pity. Changing the subject, she said, “I asked Alys about getting a job, and she suggested I could train to work as a research assistant given how much I like your library.”
He talked over the steady thump of a knife against veggies. “With your magic, you’ll be a rich woman when you decide where you want to use those healing powers.”
“I hadn’t considered that.” She thought about who might be desperate enough to hire a woman with no supernatural pedigree and no formal education. Silence stretched between them, interrupted by the fan over the stove and the sizzle of food in the pan. The savory scents made her glad she hadn’t eaten earlier.
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Any luck finding information about your family?”
“With the symbols being a bust? No. My brother’s contacts have tried to help, but when the most powerful voodoo priestess in the world and the faerie Queen of Banshees don’t have any information…or at least none that they’ll share…I’ve run out of ideas other than letting the witches use my magic to scry for others like me.”
“Alys said you’d asked for locator spells for the witches’ lost artefact and a dragon wing in hopes of finding the Order.” He sounded grumpy again. “I didn’t know, or I might not have turned the only operative I found over to the witches.” The way he said the last word made it sound like a horrible slur.
“How was I supposed to know what you were doing? You said we would work together.”
“We did. Sort of.” He had his back to her while he cooked, and she wished she could see his expression. No way could he have delivered that whopper of a lie with a straight face. “You used magic to search for the Order, and I went looking for them in my own way.”
“That’s theoppositeof working together.”
He didn’t answer, not that she’d expected him to. Instead, he lit the pan on fire, a flash of heat rushing over her skin that had her magic leaping in response. How had he managed the blaze without getting burned or showing the slightest flinch? He stirred with a spatula until the flames went out and served two helpings. Setting a plate in front of her, he said, “Eat up.”
