Chapter 16: Ding Dong Dinner is Served
The blacked-out town car idled at the curb, a shark waiting in the shadow of his building’s awning. The night air was a slap of cold diesel and wet concrete after the sealed, rarified atmosphere of the penthouse. Sloane shivered, pulling her leather jacket tighter. It felt different now, wearing her own clothes. They smelled like her life—like pine-scented cleaner from the bar and cheap detergent—and they hung on a body that thrummed with a foreign, potent energy.
Luka’s palm settled between her shoulder blades, a point of cool, steady pressure. It wasn’t a romantic gesture. It was logistical. Territorial. A constant touchstone as he scanned the street, his gaze parsing the darkness with a speed and depth she couldn’t comprehend. He looked utterly ordinary in a dark wool coat and jeans, and that was somehow more terrifying than his usual aristocratic finery.
“In,” he said, his voice low. Not a request.
She slid across the smooth leather seat. The interior was silent, a vacuum sealed against the city’s roar. Luka followed, filling the space beside her. The door thudded shut with a finality that echoed in her bones.
“Where to, sir?” The driver’s voice was filtered through a glass partition. The man didn’t turn.
“The usual circuit, Marek. Then we switch.” Luka didn’t look at Sloane. He was watching the world bleed past the tinted window, a tableau of light and movement she knew he saw in layers she couldn’t. “We’ll lose any possible tails before we head north.”
“North where?” Sloane asked. Her voice sounded too loud in the hushed cabin.
“A place.” He finally glanced at her. The green of his eyes was almost black in the low light. “Somewhere Voronin’s influence is ash and old memory.”
They drove for what felt like hours, a labyrinthine route through Brooklyn and Queens. The tension in Luka’s posture never eased. His fingers, resting on his thigh, twitched occasionally as if plucking at invisible strings. She felt a corresponding buzz in her own blood, a silent alarm she was now wired into.
“You can feel it, can’t you?” she said, not looking at him. “When someone’s watching.”
“It’s less a feeling and more a taste,” he murmured, his attention still outside. “Like ozone before lightning. Or blood in water.”
“Romantic.”
A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “It’s biology. Yours is just… louder to me now. A constant dial tone. If anyone else’s frequency gets too close, I’ll know.”
The admission should have felt claustrophobic. Instead, it felt like a bizarre kind of armor. She settled back, watching unfamiliar neighborhoods blur past. After a while, the car slid into a nondescript parking garage beneath a dated office building. It smelled of damp and motor oil.
“Change of vehicle,” Luka said, exiting fluidly. He came around, opened her door, his hand finding the small of her back again as he guided her toward a matte-grey SUV. It was boxy, anonymous, built for terrain, not style.
“Yours?” she asked, climbing into the passenger seat. The interior was clean but held the faint, cold scent of vinyl and old snow.
“One of them.” He started the engine, a low, efficient growl. “Cars are like coats. You own several for different kinds of weather.” He pulled out of the garage, turning onto a service road that fed onto a wide, dark highway ribboning north. The city’s glow receded in the rearview, swallowed by the pine-lined darkness of the state thruway.
The silence in the SUV was different. More intimate. It was just the hum of the engine, the hiss of asphalt under tires, and the space between them.
“So, seventy years,” Sloane said, breaking the quiet. She kept her eyes on the road. “Since you last… did the claiming thing.”
His hands tightened minutely on the steering wheel. “Yes.”
“You don’t talk about it.”
“There’s nothing to say that isn’t a warning.”
“I’m a big girl. I can handle warnings.”
He was silent for a mile. The exit signs glowed green and vanished. “His name was Elias. A poet, or so he fancied himself. He wanted the agony, the romance, the eternal sonnet. He mistook the claiming for a declaration of love. It’s not. It’s a declaration of appetite. When I could not, or would not, deliver the fairytale, his devotion curdled. He tried to sell information about my holdings to a rival in Montreal. He believed it would force my hand.” Luka’s voice was flat, a recitation of facts. “I found him in a hotel room with a human he’d… overindulged on. He was weeping, covered in her blood, quoting Petrarch.”
Sloane watched his profile, the hard line of his jaw. “What did you do?”
“What was necessary.” The finality in his tone closed the subject. He flicked his gaze to her, then back to the road. “I am not a good man, Sloane. I am a survivor. The things I do to ensure that are not pretty. Elias was a lapse in judgement. A moment of forgetting what I am.”
She thought of the brutal efficiency with which he’d dealt with Voronin’s men in the gallery. The cold precision. “And I’m not a lapse?”
“You,” he said, the word leaving him like a sigh, “are a calculated detonation. I saw the shrapnel coming. I stepped into the blast zone anyway.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. She looked at her hands in her lap. The silence stretched, comfortable this time.
“Tell me something real,” he said after a while. His voice was softer. “Not about last night. Not about Voronin. Something from before.”
The request surprised her. “Like what?”
“Anything. A memory that sticks. Good or bad.”
She was quiet, watching the broken yellow line hypnotically pull them forward. The hum of the car was like white noise, loosening things inside her. “When I was nine,” she began, the words feeling strange in her mouth, “my sister and I built a fort in the living room. Blankets over chairs. We had flashlights. My parents were fighting in their bedroom, screaming. You could hear it through the walls.” She took a breath. “So we turned our flashlights on, and we made shadow puppets on the inside of the blanket walls. Dogs. Birds. We made up a whole silent play. We drowned them out.”
Luka didn’t offer pity. He didn’t look at her. He just drove. “What happened to her? Your sister.”
“She grew up. Moved to Ohio. Has two kids and a minivan. We don’t talk.” Sloane shrugged, a brittle movement. “The fort was the last good thing we built together.”
He nodded slowly, as if filing the information away. “We all have our forts,” he said, his voice barely a murmur. “Some are just more permanent than others.”
He took an exit, then another, the roads growing narrower, darker, canopied by dense, overhanging trees. They were deep into nothing now. Finally, he slowed, turning onto a gravel track that was little more than a suggestion in the undergrowth. Branches scraped the sides of the SUV. After a quarter mile, a structure materialized in the headlights.
It wasn’t a cabin. It was a brutalist concrete box, low and angular, built into the side of a rocky slope. It looked like a forgotten military bunker.
“Home sweet home,” Sloane muttered.
“Safety rarely has charming aesthetics,” Luka said, killing the engine. The sudden silence was profound, a weight of pure, country darkness pressing in. “This place is warded. Lines of salt and silver in the foundations, certain… inscriptions. To others of my kind, it feels like a void. A blank spot on the map. They’ll look right over it.”
He got out, coming around to her side. This time, his hand didn’t guide her. He simply offered it. She took it, his cool fingers closing around hers. The contact was steadying.
They crunched across the gravel to a heavy steel door. Luka pressed his palm against a nondescript panel. A lock clunked open with a solid, mechanical sound. He pushed the door inward.
The air inside was cold, still, and smelled of concrete and dried herbs. He flicked a switch. Subtle, recessed lights glowed to life, revealing a single, large room. It was spare, almost austere. A modern kitchenette along one wall, a living area with a low leather sofa, a door that presumably led to a bathroom. The far wall was entirely glass, overlooking a steep, wooded ravine and a sliver of star-strewn sky.
“It’s not the penthouse,” he said, watching her take it in.
“It has a better view.” She walked to the glass, placing her hand against it. Her reflection was ghostly, superimposed over the abyss below. She could feel the immense, silent power of the place, a humming stillness that seemed to absorb sound and worry. She turned to face him. He was still by the door, a silhouette against the outside dark. “How long do we stay?”
“As long as we need to.” He shrugged off his coat, hanging it on a hook. The casual domesticity of the gesture was strangely intimate. “Until Voronin’s interest wanes, or until he makes a mistake that allows me to end him. Whichever comes first.”
“And we just… what? Hide?”
“We wait,” he corrected, moving toward her. He stopped a few feet away, his gaze tracking over her face in the dim light. “There is a difference. Hiding implies fear. Waiting implies readiness.” He reached out, his knuckles brushing a strand of hair from her cheek. The touch was electrifying in the stillness. “Use this time. Ask your questions. Test your theories. Learn what it means to have my blood in your veins. When we leave here, you will need to know.”
His thumb stroked the line of her jaw, then drifted down, resting lightly on the pulse in her throat. It beat steadily against his cool skin. His eyes held hers, and in their depths, she saw the centuries of patience, the predator’s calm, and something new—a focus that was entirely, unequivocally for her.
A soft chime broke the moment, digital and alien in the concrete space. Luka’s head snapped toward a small, black device on the kitchen counter. A single, red dot pulsed on a minimalist screen map. It was just south of their turnoff from the main road.
He was across the room in a blur of motion, his body between her and the door, all leashed violence. His voice was a low rasp.
“It seems our waiting period just got shorter.”