Читать книгу The Siren's Touch - Amber Belldene - Страница 12

The lights went out with the popping sound of breaking glass. Something stabbed into Dmitri’s forearm, he wiped at it, glass grazing his palm. Dusk had arrived outside, leaving the room dark. Every light bulb in the room must have burst at the same time.

“Elena, are you okay?”

“Fine. A little irked about how much sweeping there is to do. I wonder if glass is in the cushions of the sofa—can’t get that out, you know.”

“Sonya?”

No response. Where was the pretty thing? And what the hell was she trying to do with that stupid stunt?

“Sonya. Where are you? It’s too dark. I can’t see you.”

Still nothing. Perhaps she was gone. The thought left him empty. He should be relieved she was no longer his problem, but he’d been seduced by the idea of helping her—by the idea of being the kind of man who would help her.

Elena banged around in the broom closet, calling out to him from across the room. “I don’t even have enough bulbs to replace all those lights. Do you think it’s safe to start, or will she get angry again?”

Is that what had happened?

“I can’t see her, and she’s not responding. Do you think she’s gone?”

His aunt’s head appeared like a darker shadow from within the closet. “Gone? I don’t think so.”

A quiet whimper came from the blackest corner of the room. It grew into a sob.

“Sonya?”

“It hurts. Dmitri, it hurts.”

Her plea stole his breath and squeezed his heart, eking out compassion he hadn’t known was there. “What hurts, ghost?”

“I can feel them. My family. They are somewhere else and I need to go. Dmitri, I need to go to them now. Or else, I will…fall apart.”

A small tremor shook the room in time with a loud sob.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Elena shouted from the closet, the beam of her flashlight flickering out the doorway. “Calm her down, Dmitri.”

“It’s okay,” he whispered, trying to sound like he believed it. “I promise I’ll help. I’ll find what you need—”

“Who.” In that word, Sonya’s voice became even more alluring than before. “You must find who did this to me. And he must pay. With blood. There is no other way.”

Good Lord. He would do anything she said as long as she kept talking to him. Her voice was all sex, and power, and need, and hunger, and woman. It made him hot, made him want. It made him into something noble and dedicated to justice, not the self-serving needs of Lisko Enterprises. It made him into the man he wanted to be.

“Yeah,” he croaked. “I’ll find him.” No matter how impossible it would be to discover who had committed a forty-five-year-old crime half a world away, he would do it for her. Just as soon as he took care of Makar. Maybe that’s why he could see her. He knew more than a little about vendettas.

Hell, he was the perfect man for the job.

Elena screwed a bulb into a lamp behind Dmitri, filling the room with soft golden light. Sonya became visible, but she was fainter, thinner, too sheer for his liking.

“Elena, she looks different—weaker.”

He closed the distance between himself and the ghost, squatting to look her in the eye. She’d wrapped her hands around her knees again, seeming to forget her modesty.

He pretended to forget too, and gentled his voice the way he imagined a man talked to a skittish horse. “What made you angry, girl?”

“There is no other way than blood.”

That time, her voice wrapped around his cock and stroked it. And wasn’t that just his luck. He had his pick of women—all the models and rich girls who showed up to party in Kiev’s nightclubs loved his bad-boy thing. But the girl who really turned him on was a fucking ghost, using her supernatural power to command his help. Story of his life.

He dropped onto his ass and leaned his head against a bookshelf. “Sonya, I’ll help you without the siren shit. Turn. It. Off.”

“I don’t know if I can.” She caught the tip of her shimmery white thumb between her pearly teeth.

“Please, figure it out. Because…” She seemed awfully innocent, but he needed her to understand. “Because it does things to me.”

He brushed the flat of his hand across his erection, and her obsidian eyes grew wide.

“It’s a distraction. An uncomfortable one.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try.” Was it possible her ghostly pale skin colored with a blush? Probably not, which meant he’d imagined it. Sucker.

He had to get away from her. Whatever she was, whatever she was doing to him, it was a major distraction from his mission. Once he took out Makar, she could stroke him with that voice all day long, make him do anything she wanted him to do.

As soon as he avenged his father, he could begin his new life, and helping her would be his number-one priority.

“Good girl. Now listen. I have to go out and take care of something, and when I get back, we’ll make a plan, all right?”

Her breaths sped up, her full breasts rising and falling more rapidly. “I’m scared.”

Good for her. He’d learned somewhere courage came from admitting fear. “That seems reasonable.”

“I guess it does.” She tilted her head, and her breathing slowed. “Will you tell Elena I’m sorry for breaking everything? Her lovely teacups and all the light bulbs. I didn’t mean to.”

“Yeah. I’ll tell her.”

“Do you really have to go?” Her voice wavered.

“I really do.” He’d waited a lifetime to find Makar, and he finally had a lead. He couldn’t waste this chance for revenge to comfort a frightened rusalka.

She set her jaw and shrugged, glancing around the room. “Okay. I guess it won’t kill me to wait.”

Was that a joke?

His lips quirked of their own accord and hers spread into a breathtaking smile. What a waste, to put a smile like that on a ghost.