Page 58 of Vows of Blood
“Isabella?” he calls out. “Are you home?”
“I’m in the bedroom,” I say as I wipe my mouth and step into the bedroom. He walks through the door a second later… and I notice he looks like hell. His hair is mussed and falling into his eyes, and his complexion is pallid and a little green around the edges.
And he’s not meeting my eyes. Uh-oh.
“Sit down,” he says. “I need to talk to you about something.”
My heart leaps up and gets stuck in my throat. My first thought goes to my father. Was I too late? Did he blow me off after I left and now…?
“What happened?” I ask him.
“Isabella, sit down.”
“I’ll stand,” I say even though my knees are knocking. “Please just tell me.”
He sighs and presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Your father… he’s been shot.”
Just like that, my knees start to shake and threaten with buckling. I walk over to the bed and sit down before that happens. I can’t speak. My mouth is suddenly as dry as the desert and I can’t utter a single word.
“I don’t know if he’s all right,” he says. “He was alive when I last saw him, but?—”
It’s like a record scratch goes off in my head and pulls me out of my stupor. “What? When you last saw him? When did you see him?” He doesn’t say anything. “Alexei, what the hell is going on?”
He takes in a deep breath and says, “After speaking with my father, I went to warn him, Isabella, but by the time I got there, there were gunshots. I went into the house to see what happened and… I can tell you that he’s alive. Alive enough to yell at his captains.”
A wave of relieve comes over me. If my father was yelling, then he couldn’t have been hurt too badly. “Did you take him to the hospital?”
“I couldn’t get close to him. As soon as his people saw me, they opened fire on me. Naturally, they think I had something to do with it.”
My hand flies on its own to my forehead. “Oh, my God, you’re kidding me.”
“I wish I were.”
My heart is pounding through my shirt. Shit, shit,shit.If I’d known that he was going to try and warn him too…
“You should be happy to know,” he says, “that it looked like word got to him somehow. When I got there, he was having some of his bags packed…” He tilts his head at me, sapphire eyes suddenly alight. “Isabella, where did you go today?”
I freeze for a split second, then look away from him. This whole thing is imploding. There’s really no point in lying about it now. “I couldn’t just sit here, Alexei.”
“Fuck,” he says.
“I had to try, okay? If something had happened to him and I didn’t at least try?—”
“I told you to stay put and let me handle things.”
I shake my head at him as my eyes start to burn with tears. “There was no way I was going to leave that up to chance. I’m sorry.”
He sighs, closing his eyes and putting his hands on his hips like an exhausted parent. “Does anyone know you did this?”
“Anya. I kind of conned her into taking me.”
He stares at me carefully. “Anyone else? Could you have been seen?”
I shake my head.
His eyes run over my face as if he’s reading me, then, satisfied, he says, “Good. No one can know what you did or what I tried to do today.”
“Does anyone know you went?”
