Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

As a Moroi royal, Vasilisa Dragomir had a nasty habit of getting a little too wrapped up in herself.

It wasn't her fault, she didn't think. Their society had taught them that Moroi, especially royals, always came first. When they were children, this accepted selfishness hadn't really been at the forefront of everyone's minds, but it had made itself known as they'd all grown up and their destined paths became more divided. And Lissa had thought she'd been better about it since coming back to St. Vladimir's. But lately, she acknowledged she'd fallen back into those old bad habits.

Ever since she'd been rescued from the clutches of Victor Dashkov and spirit had been rediscovered as a new element, she'd been too wrapped up in her own life – her loving boyfriend, Christian, her element, her studies, her status as the last of the Dragomir line – to really pay attention to anything around her.

Especially her dhampir best friend.

Recently, Lissa knew she had been letting her relationship with Rose fall a little by the wayside. After meeting Adrian Ivashkov during their winter break at the ski lodge, Lissa had been incredibly excited to learn from the only other spirit user she knew. Instead of hanging out with Rose, more and more of Lissa's time was spent hanging out in a room in the Moroi student dorm lounge experimenting, comparing, and practicing her specialization (!) with Adrian. Being able to explore this unexplored element excited Lissa to no end, but it wasn't something she could share with her bond mate.

Besides, Lissa reasoned, it wasn't like Rose was sitting in her room alone every night, right? She, their friend Eddie Castile, and the entire senior novice class were preparing for their upcoming field experience. She figured Rose's absence in recent memory was because she was putting in more and more hours in the gym with her mentor Dimitri Belikov, who also happened to be Lissa's guardian. And apparently the laws of time had bent the knee to Rose Hathaway, since the dhampir already spent a ridiculous amount of time each day with the tall Russian man.

It wasn't until earlier that night when Adrian had asked where his "little dhampir" had gotten to that Lissa realized she had absolutely no clue where Rose could be. Thinking back to all of her interactions with her friend that day trying to figure out where she might be, Lissa slowly became disgusted that she'd allowed herself to become so far out of touch with her bond mate that even an answer to a simple question had eluded her.

Sleep evaded her that night as she tried to come up with things she could do to make up for her selfishness and willful ignorance of the other girl. Eventually, Lissa decided to suspend her Saturday night experimentations with Adrian to schedule a standing girls' night with Rose. She spent pretty much every single day with Dimitri, so she might enjoy a break from him (and Lissa could – maybe – get some all-important therapy girl talk going), and Lissa drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

At breakfast the next day, Lissa somewhat ignored the food on her tray as she waited for Rose to show up in the cafeteria so Lissa could tell her of their new standing girl-date. But as the minutes passed, Lissa had grown concerned by her friend's absence. In all the time she'd known Rose (13 years, almost), Lissa had never known the brunette to miss out on breakfast.

Suddenly, the door swung open. Lissa watched as a much more defined Rose jogged into the cafeteria and up to a lunch lady who, seemingly expectant of Rose's entrance, deposited four to-go breakfast wraps and two yogurt cartons in a black lunch box. Just as quickly she'd arrived, Rose turned around and jogged right back through the door.

Looking at the rest of their table, this didn't seem at all surprising to anyone else but her. Was this how it's been for the last month? They were approaching February, and Lissa honestly could not recall Rose sitting down and sharing the day's first meal with them since before winter break.

"Has she been doing that every morning?" Lissa looked at her friends, needing to ease some of her confusion.

Eddie, who sat across from her, looked up from his tray, a piece of bacon quickly slupring between his lips, and moved his eyes between Lissa and the swinging door before he nodded. He didn't seem to think it was odd she had asked this question and waited until he was done chewing and swallowing before he answered.

"Yeah, it's been that way since after the whole thing with the Badica family. She just darts in here, grabs food for her and Dimitri, and then leaves to go back to whatever training he has her doing before first class."

"And they just let her do that?"

Eddie nodded again, glancing across the table to look at Christian with what could only be described as a look. What in the ever-loving Vlad…?

"From what she told me, when I asked her after it happened the first couple of times, the Badica thing had really freaked her out and she wanted to step up her training. Her and Dimitri were already up and at it by 5 p.m. every morning, but they used to finish by breakfast. Now, they just don't even stop for that. One of them will run in for food and we don't see them again until first class. It's worse on the weekends…the lunch lady just hands her food for the whole day, and we don't see either of them until after dinner."

Lissa was floored.

What had started as remedial sessions intended for Rose to catch up to her peers so she could graduate on time had clearly turned into the two dhampir warriors becoming better guarding partners. Consequentially, Lissa didn't see the relationship between the two as mentor/mentee – instead, she saw it as a relationship of equals.

But in her bones, she felt something – and Lissa didn't know what, exactly it was – between the two had changed. The shift in her perception of their relationship from mentor/mentee to one of equals had happened after she had been kidnapped by Victor Dashkov, but after Spokane there was now a new sort of undercurrent to their relationship – one she couldn't quite pinpoint. Lissa tried to think back to their recent interactions for some clues but came up with nothing.

Lissa needed to arm herself with knowledge before she approached Rose. The increased amount of time between the two dhampir guardians could have morphed the relationship, which would explain the undercurrent. But morphed it into what?

Through the next week, Lissa watched her best friend and her assigned guardian with eagle eyes.

Sometimes, in the rare moments she saw Dimitri and Rose together (usually in the hallways, or during the classes her and Rose shared), Lissa noticed the lingering gazes, the way only Dimitri would be able to cheer Rose up just by walking into a room, the way his hand lingered on her spine if he needed to pass her in a doorway and how Rose would smile as her face turned pink. Lissa noticed Rose wasn't as impulsive – didn't let her emotions control her actions and her words as much as she had in the past.

But she never put it all together, denial firmly in place. They're becoming really good friends, she reasoned. When a person spent most of their time around another person, those people become close friends.

While the majority of the bullying had let up after Mason was killed and she'd received her molnija marks, occasionally someone – usually Jesse or Rafe – would say something to get a rise out of her. Instead of responding with something that would have otherwise gotten her in trouble, she just looked at them with a single raised eyebrow until they submitted into silence – something Lissa had seen Dimitri do on more than one occasion. And Lissa would notice Dimitri standing silently against the wall looking on, a sparkle of something behind his eyes, which were focused firmly on Rose.

It was this incident that had Lissa finally deciding to seek out and speak to Rose on this cool, Friday morning.

Through the streak-free glass pane of her dorm room window, the sun turned fiery with rage as it was forced to dip below the Montana horizon for another night. Lissa swung her fuzzy sock-clad feet onto the shag carpet next to her bed and grabbed the pair of warm grey sweatpants – stolen from Christian – that were flung over the back of her desk chair. Slipping a hoodie – also one of Christian's – over her head and stepping into her moccasins, Lissa tiptoed out of her room before quietly making her way down the hall and into the stairwell. Once she got outside of her building, however, she didn't know where she should go first to find her bond mate. Lissa checked the time on her cell phone and, noticing it was 6:50 p.m., decided to try the gym.

After a couple minutes of walking down a steep hill, Lissa finally saw the old gymnasium. It was colored in greys and whites with paint peeling in places it shouldn't and dirt everywhere. Small windows lined the top of the gym and, with every other window open, out came moldy, sweaty air she could smell from where she was standing. Lissa could not imagine anyone wanting to go near the building, let alone train in it for as much as Rose did.

Silently she crept to the door, not wanting to disturb any training going on inside. If Rose was there, Lissa would ask to speak to her; if not, Lissa would make her request known during class. As luck would have it, the door was cracked, and Lissa's curiosity got the better of her and peeped one eye through the open space.

It took every ounce of Lissa's limited experience with meditation to not allow the pure, unadulterated shock she felt coursing through her system pull her bond mate into her head while she watched Dimitri pinning Rose to the wall and kissing her as if his life depended on it.

His shirt was off, Lissa registered, and the band of his black athletic shorts had been pushed low on his hips by the length of bare leg Rose had wrapped around him. The hems of her multicolored compression shorts were raised even higher on her body, as one of Dimitri's big hands was running up and down her thigh – including a little under her shorts. Lissa could see Rose's chest heaving with exertion under her sports bra, and instead of stepping away to let her get air Dimitri just pressed closer and deepened the kiss. Which, in Lissa's opinion, had already belonged in a much more private setting than in a decrepit training gym on the outer edges of school grounds.

Lissa was distinctly uncomfortable, but it was one of those situations where it's so awkward that you know you have to look away, but you can't. One of Dimitri's hands – the one that wasn't currently groping Rose's ass and pressing her lower body into him – moved to Rose's hair before curling the long, luxurious locks around his fingers and gently pulling her head back so he could nip and suck his way down her neck and across her collarbone and back. Her hands, which had been locked around the back of Dimitri's neck, were now grabbing at his biceps, and running down his bare chest. He moved to press them even further into the wall, and the foot Rose had kept on the floor for balance moved to lock ankles with her other foot at his lower back. A slight thrust of Dimitri's hips had both of them sighing in happiness and had Lissa praying harder for her feet to move.

It seemed like God had heard her pleas, as one of the open windows suddenly – and loudly – snapped shut. The unexpected noise caused the lovers (because that's the only thing that made sense to Lissa) to snap back to reality and spring apart, looking every which way before figuring out it the noise had been caused by one of the windows and not by someone discovering them. They breathed deeply, calming themselves down, before laughing lowly.

"Well, I guess we won't try that move again for a while," Dimitri joked.

Rose smiled at him softly, something bright shining in her eyes. "Yeah, I guess not. Not here, anyway." A moment, and Dimitri's smile turned into a grimace of pain.

"Yeah," He turned toward a pile of discarded mats alongside the wall they had been using and sat down. Rose followed, sinking down next to him before rubbing circles into his back in comfort. "Not here."

Another moment.

"This sucks."

Rose always had such a basic way with words, but Dimitri let out a bark of laughter at them, so Lissa figured they summed up the entire situation pretty well. Not that Lissa knew anything at all about this situation, mind you.

"It really does," Dimitri replied. "I wish things could be different. I wish we didn't have to hide."

Rose hummed in agreement, continuing to rub soothing circles on Dimitri's back. So, these two were in some sort of relationship? When in the hell did that happen? "I know. I hate having to hide how I feel about you. I hate not being able to do something as simple as hold your hand in public."

"I'd prefer you to graduate before that happens."

Rose paused in her circles. Lissa felt the air shift to something decidedly un-romantic but just as tense, and she instantly took pity on Dimitri for what he had just brought down upon his head. But Rose didn't go nuclear like Lissa had been expecting – instead, she kneeled in front of Dimitri and, taking his head in her hands, forced him to look at her.

"Petrov told you that – technically – you don't work for the school. Instead, you work for the Moroi Council who is paying you to be at the school for Lissa, which means you're not actually employed by the school, which doesn't make you a teacher. You aren't paid extra for being my mentor, instead you volunteered – however unwillingly – and this isn't a requirement for me to graduate. You don't handle my grades, and you don't handle my discipline. I could walk away from the gym right now and that set of problems would be solved."

Dimitri made a noncommittal noise but didn't actively try to protest. Rose, as is her nature, pressed on.

"As for the age thing, we've been over this. Not that I'm saying the rest of our world won't care about my being 17 when this started, but the age of consent in Montana and in Pennsylvania is 16 and I'm less than two months away from being 18. If we were humans, you'd be at least two years out of college or in grad school and partying it up every weekend at the bars like a normal 24-year-old.

"We're not hiding, not exactly. Petrov knows, and since my mother legally gave me up as a ward of the school and Kirova appointed Petrov as my guardian, she technically has given us permission. Petrov never would have allowed all the extra hours we've been working together if she thought we'd be using them to hook up. She tests me on a weekly basis for improvement, and at this point we're not in a mentorship – we're both learning together how to be the best guardians we can be for Lissa."

The light was gone from the sky, and the fall night quickly chilled Lissa. But Lissa had already been chilled from the scene she'd witnessed and the words she'd heard. How in the literal hell had she missed this? But Rose still wasn't done and got up from the ground to straddle Dimitri on the mat. His strong arms automatically went around her to lock her in place, and he looked up into her chocolate-colored eyes as she softly caressed his jawline.

"We've been taught our whole lives 'they come first.' We've been raised to be selfless while they've been raised to be selfish. We both know we'll never get a shot at this after graduation, so right now is the only time we'll have to really be together. Don't waste it with guilt for a situation neither of us can control."

Dimitri looked at her for a moment, and then molded his lips with hers. Lissa's feet finally decided to move, and the blonde ran (or power-walked) all the way back to her room to reflect upon what she'd seen as she got ready for breakfast. She'd never before felt the kind of guilt she was currently feeling, and she had her own actions to blame.

The time to be selfish was over. She promised herself to make more of an effort with Rose from then on, but she also promised herself she wasn't going to be the one to make them give up what they had and was going to figure out a way for them to do their jobs and still be together.

Lissa refused to bring their bliss crashing down around their heads.

Chapter Text

For a moment, Natasha Ozera thought she turned a dark, Hulk-green with jealousy.

At least her skin would match her silk sheath dress, she thought wryly. Can't be a fashion reject when I'm already a societal reject.

She stood in the corner with a glass of red wine in her perfectly manicured hand and watched carefully as Dimitri Belikov followed Rose Hathaway around the hall. Not actually following her around the hall, mind you. That would be too obvious. No, Dimitri followed her around with his eyes which was arguably worse since he was supposed to be guarding this banquet hall filled to the brim with royal Moroi. Instead of doing his job, he was tracking the movements – especially those occurring at waist-level when her back was turned toward him – of the 17-year-old high school senior he was supposed to be mentoring. The action especially rankled her because Rose was wearing the blood-red, Asian-style dress Tasha herself had purchased for the young girl as a holiday present. The one that looked like it had been painted onto her curvy, yet muscular, body.

It wasn't obvious to anyone but her. As an outcast herself, Tasha understood the benefits of being invisible in a room full of people. No one talked to her unless they had to do so or she inserted herself into conversation, and people were more bothered by the fact that she even showed up to the event than they would have been if she hadn't. Dimitri was a dhampir and had it even worse since Moroi – especially the royals – considered them nothing more than muscular decoration. They weren't talked to, they were talked around, and she'd noticed more than one guardian's eyes glaze over briefly with boredom or wander around the hall in a more pedestrian manner than was required to effectively guard a room of this size and Moroi of this importance.

But no matter the obviousness of his action, it didn't change the fact that Tasha was mad because those eyes weren't tracking her every movement with lust-filled pupils. That the man Tasha had wanted since she was 25 and had been doing everything in her power to get instead wanted some other woman. And an underage one, at that.

Despite being an outcast, Tasha had been raised with all the privileges of being a royal Moroi. All she'd had to do was flick her eyes in a certain way, smile, and make a request and whatever she wanted appeared before her almost instantly. This had even extended to men. But, for some odd reason, Dimitri Belikov had been the one thing she'd never been able to receive.

Tasha took a sip from her wine – dry, but still a little sweet, with a pang of sour with which she identified all too well – and slowly walked from her corner along the brick wall. Like a predator, she kept one of her eyes trained on the tall Russian man standing in front of one of the columns lining the ballroom on the other side of the room and the other on her nephew's friend, who was standing almost equidistant from both her and Dimitri apparently having gotten sucked into a conversation with some younger Moroi politicians about Monica Conta's outrageous proposal earlier that day.

She could hear bits and pieces of the dialogue, and she was happy the younger generation was in line with her thinking rather than the older generation. She was also equally happy to see Dimitri nodding his head at particularly progressive points, just like he'd done when she had first met him six years ago when he'd been guarding Ivan Zeklos.

Despite Ivan (and Dimitri) being a newly minted graduate of St. Basil's Academy, he'd been at Court during the following warm, Pennsylvania summer on some political business. Growing up in the same social circles had made her and Ivan friends, and she remembered walking into the court bar they had scheduled to meet up in to catch up and being instantly attracted to Ivan's tall, muscular guardian.

Wasn't her fault, she explained to herself. She couldn't help she was attracted to powerful-looking men.

In her St. Vlad's days, Tasha had been somewhat notorious for preferring to "hang out" with the male novices than the male Moroi. Spending time with the dhampirs had also given her insight onto how they were treated in the vampire world, and she began to develop some more radical ideas of thinking than her Moroi friends. Why did the Moroi, who were gifted with literal magic, prefer to waste that magic on party tricks? The Moroi relied so much upon the dhampirs for survival against the Strigoi and preferred to use their magic to simply build wards and charm stakes rather than use it offensively to protect themselves. So, Tasha began learning how to defend herself, both physically and magically.

The Ozera line was known for its affinity for fire, and Tasha had spent many nights experimenting with her element. She taught herself how to create fires that don't burn but distract, how to throw the fireballs she could build in her palms at targets, and even learned how to conjoin it with other elements like water and air and earth to make diversions or traps during a fight. From Vinh Duy Khuc, Tasha learned the basics of fighting and using weapons in self-defense.

Although she'd allowed her practice to fall a little by the wayside after graduation, preferring to focus on her political ambitions and bring the Moroi court into the 21st century, her progressive thoughts had been proven correct. A decade after she graduated, her brother Lucas and sister-in-law Moira – who had willingly turned Strigoi the year before – came back to collect their son, Christian. After they'd killed Vinh, who had been their only guardian as the courts saw fit to punish the remaining Ozera family members for Lucas and Moira's choices by stripping them of their protection, Lucas and Moira had advanced on Tasha. She then used her elementary knowledge of physical and magical self defense to protect her nephew.

While she'd sustained scars, her actions had held off the elder Ozeras long enough for help to arrive and finish the job. She'd been a hero, and she thought her actions would have prompted immediate change in their culture. In that cafeteria, just a year after the attack with the scars of that night displayed proudly on her face, Ivan (and, if his slight nods had been any indication, Dimitri) had been the only one to see, understand, and agree with her vision.

Now Ivan was dead, Dimitri was being stifled by his obligations, and tonight she was willingly walking around the ballroom filled with (and drinking the expensive wine of) the people who continued to actively halt that kind of progression in their society. At 35 years old, Tasha had a list of regrets that painfully ate at her and a whole lot of anger at her situation.

Part of her bitterness, she knew, was being alone. Not that she needed to get married and have children at all, but loving Vinh and raising Christian had instilled in her a desire to eventually settle and have a family. After the attack, no Moroi man was knocking on her door and where the Moroi went, the dhampir men were made to follow. And after meeting Dimitri, who was so much like Vinh, she'd wanted no other man – Moroi, dhampir, or human – but him.

In the weeks following Ivan's return to court, the three of them had been thick as thieves. Tasha had inserted herself into Ivan's social schedule, knowing Dimitri would be there to do his duty. It kind of wasn't fair to him because he couldn't really participate in the social scenes as a guardian when he was on duty, but after Ivan received another guardian Dimitri had some more nights off to relax. They got to know each other, and the 29-year-old Moroi had gotten in deep with him.

Once she had passed the point of no return, however, her love for him took somewhat of an ugly turn. Ivan wouldn't be at court much longer, as it was now almost October and he had some pressing business to attend to in Siberia, which meant Dimitri's time with her was coming to an end. For an almost-19 year old male and a well-built guardian, especially one who was charged with such a wealthy and attractive young lord, Dimitri garnered a lot of female attention. And Tasha did everything she could to quell that growing female attention.

She hung onto his arm and began touching him a little more when they were out socially. She used half-truths and inside understandings to twist the general perception of their relationship. When the rumors of a possible relationship between the two sprouted, Tasha did nothing to stop them and instead added more fuel. But through it all, she was absolutely confused about how little sway she had over him. Like, she had used almost every trick in her book to get him to be attracted to her but there was no sign of reciprocation. For someone who was used to getting anything she wanted when she wanted it, men included, his resistance only made her that much more determined to succeed.

When it came time for him to depart, she got his contact information and they agreed to stay in touch. Over the next three years, his and Ivan's schedules had only permitted them to meet in person twice and Dimitri's apparent indifference to technology outside of what was needed for his job led them to exchanging a handful of emails and texts per year. She became more and more ostracized from court and got busy making sure Christian was taken care of to notice their growing distance. But she always remained hopeful.

They'd reconnected after Ivan's death, but Dimitri was in no state to think about anything romantic with anyone. His schedule as a Court guardian then kept him chained to a desk for a year before rumors of the missing Dragomir princess' location had surfaced. Then, Queen Tatiana had personally chained him as Lissa's guardian and shipped him off to recover both his charge and the rogue novice who'd taken her. Tasha fumed that he'd slipped through her fingers once again, but then Christian told her he'd begun dating the princess and her hopes were renewed once more.

The attack on the Badica family had spurred Tasha into action. While she didn't necessarily fear for her own safety, she began to feel uneasy about being out in the world alone as a royal Moroi with Strigoi actively hunting down and eradicating the different clans. Although the courts had stripped her of the privilege of assigning the family guardians, officials had never prevented the Ozera family from requesting them, nor guardians requesting to serve members of the Ozera family. A plan began to form in her mind as she packed up her suitcases, and as she drove the miles to St. Vladimir's Academy, she began to feel a flame of determination in her chest.

Headmistress Kirova, though a little put out by Tasha's sudden appearance at the Academy, allowed her to stay in one of the old cabin outposts on the outer-most edge of the school grounds before hitting the ward line. Tasha, though feeling the snub at the location of the cabin, soon realized the privacy she would have – privacy she would need – to succeed in her plan. The next step was using Christian to get to Lissa who she would then use Lissa to get to Dimitri.

What she hadn't counted on was Rosemarie Hathaway.

Beautifully exotic (a curvy rarity even among dhampirs) and the daughter of renowned guardian Janine Hathaway, 17-year-old Rose was who Tasha could have been in another life. Although she was rash and impulsive at times, from what Christian said later Rose was an incredibly loyal persona and fiercely protective of those she cared about. This was all great and fine, but Rose's transition from a person of admiration to an obstacle Tasha needed to overcome came about quickly. Really, almost as soon as Tasha was informed by her nephew's girlfriend that the curvy dhampir teenager was receiving one-one-one training from Dimitri himself.

Tasha needed to know more about this threat to her happy ending.

At fifteen years old, Tasha discovered, Rose broken Lissa out of St. Vladimir's Academy due to threats coming from within the academy's walls. Somehow, the two girls had survived in the mortal world without any feeders, money, or plan for almost two years before someone had gotten lucky enough to spot them on a college campus in Portland. Despite very little training, Rose had managed to keep them alive while dodging guardians and psi-hounds (or so Rose said) before being dragged back to Montana. Although she wasn't expelled (although it was a very close call, so Tasha had heard), Rose was put on probation and Dimitri had apparently accidentally volunteered himself to help train Rose so she could graduate on time and become his guarding partner.

Her history as a firecracker, her obvious intelligence, her dedication to her best friend who wasn't even yet her official charge, her disappearance and return, plus the mystical bond the two girls shared would have been enough to light a jealous fire under any woman. But that, combined with her hourglass figure, slightly- tanned skin, long, silky and luxurious dark brown hair and obvious (but not bulging) muscle, made her even more desirable to any male with a pulse and seeing eyes.

Dimitri, Tasha could see, was no exception.

The way he was looking at her, eyes unconsciously roaming over Rose's figure as he talked with an unusually (for him) tender and affectionate expression on his typical stoic face alerted Tasha to the fact that there was something going on under the surface between the two. Something almost certainly sexual. Tasha knew from personal experience it wasn't that much of a leap to go from something sexual to something romantic…especially with the ungodly amount of time the two seemed to be spending with each other.

Tasha vividly remembered a time when Dimitri, who'd been mentored himself, had explicitly stated he would never mentor a student because he wanted to be 100 percent focused on his duty. Plus, he said he didn't have the patience to deal with the attitudes of teenagers. But Tasha knew even if a person did not have the patience to teach Rose because of the rebellious attitude, the reward of getting close to that body of hers was too much to pass up.

That was all taken from first glance in the woods of St. Vladimir's. As time went on, Tasha firmly denied every observation she made.

She knew Dimitri was too honorable to ever let anything happen between him and someone he was mentoring, not just from the teacher-student perception, but also because the two were slated to become guarding partners for the last Dragomir. Her slowly increasing jealousy reinforced this explanation, convincing Tasha that Dimitri was just being a man and would eventually get tired of the child whose looks would inevitably fade with her profession. She convinced herself he would get tired of the immaturity and the passing infatuation would fade and he would move on to someone who wouldn't disintegrate.

Hopefully to a Moroi woman, like Tasha. This reasoning made dealing with Rose's constant presence a thousand times easier. Tasha was even able to overcome it enough to give the young girl a gift – one that would hopefully help her attract the attention of some young Moroi male determined to woo her into a relationship. Adrian Ivashkov came to mind.

It was only physical attraction, Tasha soothed herself. Nothing more than physical attraction.

Then the winter trip to the lodge retreat came.

Tasha was taken aback by how often they trained. Early morning, late night, caches of time between scheduled social events, and even when they were bored. But whether it be a small conditioning session or a full-blown conditioning and sparring session, Tasha could not – would not – believe that Dimitri would want to spend any amount of time with that whiny, immature child. Tasha had heard around court from the guardians who watched them train together that the girl was going to be an amazing guardian and they would be the deadliest guardian-partner-duo a Moroi would ever have assigned to them.

Who really cares? Tasha thought. Rose did not need to train while she was not on academy grounds. In Tasha's opinion, Dimitri needed to stop training the teenager and spend more time relaxing and having fun with an adult like Tasha. She needed time and opportunity to keep her plan alive, and from their sparse interactions it seemed like Dimitri had not yet made the intellectual jump from seeing Tasha as a friend to seeing her as a potential romantic partner. It wasn't for lack of trying on Tasha's part; in fact, Tasha tried very hard to get him to see her as anything other than a friend. She'd worn tighter clothes while walking around the areas of court she knew he frequented, and she'd even put on athletic gear and trained in her own corner of the gym when she knew he was in there alone to wow him with her athletic prowess.

She'd even (sort of) challenged Rose to a fight to prove her dominance over the other girl, but that had backfired immediately when Rose had handily handed Tasha her ass on a silver platter. Tasha avoided the public for a couple days to nurse both her wounds and her pride.

But, despite her thinly-veiled attempts at seducing Dimitri's attention away from Rose, observations began to trickle into her brain she couldn't rationalize into submission.

She noticed how Rose, despite all the flirting, really never went out or spent time alone with any of her male friends or her persistent Moroi admirer, Adrian Ivashkov, other than on the slopes or in the hot tub. Even then, Lissa was always present. The only male she spent hours on end with was Dimitri. Around him, Rose was never not smiling and happy. Even if she was down, she would perk up as soon as Dimitri walked into the room.

For his part, Dimitri did do social things with Tasha, but they were always with a group of off-duty guardians. He preferred to play pool and hangout in the gym or in the lounge than go out to bars and restaurants, citing his need to conserve money and his unwillingness to "waste her money on him." He could spend hours reading westerns, and Tasha hated reading with such a passion that she would rather sit alone in her room and mope. But as soon as he would see Rose, he would set his book down and walk off to join her en route to the cafeteria or wherever she was headed. Tasha didn't understand mentor/mentee relationship they shared, nor did she understand what the training they did entailed, specifically. But it never failed to make her blood boil when they left for / emerged together from the gym, the library, the cafeteria, or the onsite medical clinic.

Tasha also noticed the looks they shared when they thought no one else was looking. They were soft, devoted, and loving – all of which were the kinds of looks she and Vinh shared before he was brutally killed by her brother and his wife. But she also took stock of the looks they gave members of the opposite sex. Dimitri constantly looked like he wanted to break the faces of either Adrian or one of Rose's male friends, Mason, and he would narrow his eyes dangerously at any male who looked twice at Rose in workout clothes. Rose also never failed to give a female trying to get Dimitri's attention a glare promising a slow, painful death if she didn't back off right then.

The more she noticed, the more she couldn't believe no one else was noticing. But all that meant was Tasha needed to make him the offer before it was too late.

She texted him she wanted to meet at a little Court café for lunch the next day. A brief struggle to set a time – he was taking his turn guarding the lodge in the morning, and then had a double session scheduled with Rose starting in the middle of the afternoon (ugh) – before they agreed, and Tasha spent the rest of the night deciding on her outfit and practicing her speech in the mirror. Arriving at "The Grind" the next day and sitting at a more intimate table in the corner, she sat and waited. It wasn't took long before the object of her affections arrived, still in his guardian clothes from earlier and smelling like he just threw on some light cologne. Her heart fluttered as he sat down and they ordered coffee and some lunch.

They exchanged pleasantries, and then when their drinks and food were delivered Tasha jumped right in.

"So, Dimitri," she chuckled nervously. He paused, his paper to-go cup poised at his lips and one perfect eyebrow raised in a question. "I've been thinking a lot lately about the future. My future, specifically. Raising Christian has given me a whole new perspective on what I want my future to look like, and that future involves children. I've always liked you as a friend –" insert eyeroll at massive understatement here "—and I know you want a family as well. I'm a royal Moroi, and while I'm not allowed to be assigned a guardian, I can request one as long as that guardian also requests me."

Dimitri froze, eyes wide and panicky, but Tasha pretended not to notice and kept going. "What I'm offering you is the chance to be my guardian. We'd live together and work on progressing Moroi society, and while don't have to do anything right away, my hope is to give us both the family we want to build."

Dimitri just stared at her in shock. And stared at her. And stared.

Tasha drummed her nails on the table in nerves. "Thoughts?"

Dimitri shook himself back into action. His eyes looked sad. "Tasha, I'm sure any man would jump at the chance to take you up on your offer of a family. But why me?"

Here was her chance. Maybe he'll see how good they could be together if she just explained. "Because I think we'd be good together. Not just as co-parents, or a guardian-charge, but, like, together. Romantically. I like you, have for years, and I think we'd have a wonderful, solid relationship. We have the same thoughts about our world's progress, we both like to work out, we have fun together…" She trailed off, not knowing what else to add and feeling the awkwardness of the situation.

And he looked like she'd put him between a rock and a hard place.

"Tasha –" Nope.

"At least take some time and think about it. I know you'd be giving up the charge of a lifetime, but you'd gain so much more with me. Just think about it." He nodded before finishing his coffee and excusing himself politely before disappearing from the café.

That was yesterday afternoon, and Tasha hadn't seen nor heard from him until tonight's banquet.

He looked so delicious standing there in his guardian dress uniform, but the lust she felt for him in that moment was tempered by his silence. That, and the fact his eyes kept themselves trained on Rose's dress-clad ass. Anger and jealousy quickly welled up inside of Tasha – who the hell did this teenager think she was, taking male attention away from Tasha? - and she pulled out her cell phone. Quickly texting Lord Szlesky, Tasha exaggerated that Janine's daughter had crashed a Moroi banquet and was entertaining the attentions of a couple royal Moroi men in a sleazy dress and could he please send Janine to come and get her daughter and save her from embarrassing herself further?

Minutes later, Janine Hathaway stormed the banquet hall and pulled her daughter out into the hallway. The banquet guests could hear the argument from inside, which began with a "…just because YOU weren't invited…" from Rose and ended with "…dressing like a cheap whore…" from Janine. Tasha felt a happiness warm her body, and before she lost her nerve she slithered up next to Dimitri.

"Quite a shame, really, that Rose had be pulled out…how embarrassing for her. I guess Adrian's really disappointed he didn't get to finish their conversation, so to speak, but I saw him leave right after her, so he might have a chance to make his case for her to become his guardian after she graduates after all."

She looked at Dimitri, who was seething. Tasha needed to drive this nail home and break whatever hold Rose had over her Russian. "But it's probably for the best they left early. She gets an escort back to her room by a wealthy Moroi in need of a guardian – the Queen's favorite nephew, you know, and he gets whatever he wants – and you can finish up here and escort me back to mine."

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, the pupils of which had become black. With lust? Yes! Tasha, who'd been standing at Dimitri's left elbow, turned to leave, but made sure her chest brushed his bicep as she did so. She paused and raised herself up on her toes so she could whisper in his ear.

"I still need an answer, you know." Then she walked away, hips swaying from side to side.

She hoped he was watching.

Chapter Text

Pop!

The cork of Adrian Ivashkov's fifth – ? – bottle of wine flew out of the glass neck and landed somewhere in the ether that doubled as his room in the guest house at St. Vladimir's Academy. Where it went after flying through the stale air, Adrian wasn't going to guess and nor did he care to try. He was too busy trying to drown his emotional pain in booze.

Glugglugglugglug

The sweet smell of the white wine trickled out of the bottle and into a crystal glass with a long stem that was perfect, in Adrian's opinion, for holding with a closed fist. It didn't matter how much pain he felt…drinking wine straight from the bottle was for peasants. And unlike his dhampir competition, Adrian Ivashkov – nephew to the Queen of the Moroi world and a young, handsome, wealthy royal – was no peasant.

Wait. That wasn't fair to Dimitri Belikov.

Peasants knew when to give up.

Adrian carefully fell into a comfy armchair in the corner of the room with only a drop or two of slosh from his glass. He set the blue bottle down on floor – like that wasn't a recipe for disaster – and drank a generous sip of the sweet alcoholic nectar before leaning his head back on the headrest and closing his eyes. Colors swam in circles and bled into each other like a watercolor Picasso painting behind his eyelids in reds, browns, and various shades of silver and gold, and the ache in Adrian's heart returned with a sharp stab. He couldn't even close his eyes without being reminded of her, of Rose Hathaway, and for someone who always got what he wanted, being denied both getting her and forgetting her was hard to bear.

Adrian had always known he was different than his classmates, and it wasn't just because he was an Ivashkov. He never got into lasting trouble, always somehow managing to talk his way out of it. He never struggled for friends or for girls and flourished in social scenarios. He was a young, good-looking man with money and connections, and he was never afraid to use at least one of those to his advantage. Now, how much of his good fortune had been spirit and how much of that had been suave, he will never know (and he kind of doesn't want to), but the results had given him expectations and he was never disappointed.

When he met Rose at the ski lodge, he'd already known her by reputation. But the talk of her beauty – though creepy coming from middle-aged men – was one of those things one needed to see to believe. Adrian had taken one look at her and decided he needed to have her. And not entirely in a sexual way, either. He knew she wasn't going to become just another possession to him, and he knew she wasn't going to let herself be someone's possession either. With the way her life was going, her glowing golden star shooting across the proverbial galaxy of opportunities, a man would get burned trying to contain it or grab a little piece of it. No, a man either needed to match her intensity and speed and direction or be left floating in space in her wake just watching her go by.

And Adrian was confident he could be the man who traveled the galaxy with her.

He tried to be, at least. Oh, he tried. He gave up the women, he gave up the drugs. He couldn't give up the alcohol, as he considered it a necessity for dealing with the effects of having spirit as an element (lucky him), nor could he give up the smoking, but in his defense, he was actively trying to cut back. He gave her gifts, trying to show her he could buy her the world and she would never want for anything, and he flirted and joked around with her to show her he could be both her lover and her best friend.

Adrian thought he was getting through. Yeah, he had to work a little harder than he usually did to penetrate her defenses, but she was worth it. But that was before he realized he wasn't anywhere close to the door. In fact, once he saw her and Dimitri together, coming out of the gym with sweat dripping down their bodies and with sweet, somewhat dopey smiles on their faces as they looked at each other, Adrian knew he hadn't even gotten close enough to chip.

Just remembering the scene caused him to throw back another generous "sip" of wine.

He'd been a little stunned by what he saw both in the physical world and in the spiritual one. In the tangible world, Rose had politely introduced the two men – one as a new friend, and the other as her future guarding partner (not as her mentor; apparently, she had demonstratively avoided using the word after bringing Lissa back from Victor Dashkov's clutches) – and both men had narrowed their eyes after recognizing the other as competition. Adrian had taken Belikov's hand and shook it like a gentleman (no way in hell was he winning a squeeze-off against a 6-foot-7-inch dhampir killing machine like Belikov; he would be stupid to even initiate it), and a corner of his mouth turned up in a knowing smirk as Belikov had almost-imperceptibly inched closer to Rose, turning his body so that he could put his arms around her and carry her away at a moment's notice.

In the intangible world, one he saw as clearly as he could see the colors swirling behind his eyes, Adrian saw their shining auras turn golden in color and meld with each other before giving off a silvery glow – kind of like Claire Danes' character, Yvaine, in the movie "Stardust." Adrian knew what that meant, but he sure as hell wished he'd never seen it. But instead of lamenting the fact Rose would never belong with him in the way she belonged with Belikov, Adrian decided to go full force into trying to win her heart.

Never let it be said he isn't an extreme optimist with no work ethic.

After doing some research on Belikov, Adrian changed his modus operandi. Instead of showering her with gifts, Adrian began showering Rose with kindness – yes, broken up with the odd gift or two. He'd given her a catchy, cutesy nickname that only he would ever use. When he found out how much Rose spent with the older guardian every day, Adrian made it his mission to insert himself into all the other aspects of her life. He went on the slopes with her and her friends. He held things like a hot tub party and a spa day both of which were invite-only and made sure to bar Belikov from attending. Adrian tried to carve out his own place in her life, and it seemed to work – especially with Tasha Ozera distracting Belikov and trying to secure him for herself (lolzzz).

But then Spokane happened, and Adrian's confidence in his success was nonexistent. Rose clung onto Belikov for dear life – looking back, Adrian should have given up right then and there when he saw the naked love on both of their faces but, being the stubborn fool he was, he thought he still had a shot. Instead, he once again changed tactics.

Lissa was mightily put out by her sudden demotion in the list of important people in Rose's life, and Adrian decided if he couldn't get to Rose, he could get to Lissa who would get to Rose. Didn't hurt that Lissa was the only other known spirit user in the Moroi community. Making a few calls, Adrian had returned to St. Vladimir's with the rest of the high schoolers and swung a nice apartment on campus where he drank until he passed out, planned until his brain hurt, and made his heart feel full of hope.

While he backed off and allowed Rose to heal from the traumas of Spokane, Adrian worked on improving his skills in spirit to try to be the man who could take care of her one day. When the trial happened, Adrian used his influence and status (and yes, a little compulsion never hurt anyone) to get her, Lissa and Christian to testify in Dashkov's trial and the hug and sincere "thank you" she bestowed upon him made his heart burst with warmth. And when they pulled back onto the tarmac at St. Vlad's, Adrian realized he'd gone and fallen in love. Or, at least, acknowledged he was in love with a girl who could possibly never return his affections the way he hoped she would.

He felt a painful jolt of electricity in his chest and completely drained the glass before unsteadily pouring himself another, stopping just a pinky nail length before the wine was level with the glass' rim.

Damn alcohol needed to knock him out fast.

He'd allowed himself to get in too deep, too fast, and he gotten his heart broken because of his own stupidity. Only three days ago, Rose had shown up at his door, eyes glassy with unshed tears and deep, dark bags under her eyes. Her normally vivacious chestnut-streaked-with-gold-and-auburn hair hung around her like a greasy, wet burlap sack. She was crying over the older dhampir, but she needed him, Adrian, she said, because she needed to get away. He assumed she needed to deal with her grief off-campus at a spa somewhere, and so he'd made her promise to give him a chance upon her return.

When she agreed, he'd had upwards of 500,000 wired to the nearest bank for her to use.

And then, with a swish of her dark, silky locks, Rosemarie Hathaway had walked out of his door and onto a plane to Russia.

Not even two weeks ago, Belikov – the dumbass – had gotten turned into a Strigoi. A pack had broken the school's wards and attacked the campus. Rose and, surprisingly, Christian Ozera, had worked together with the guardians on campus to drive the undead force away, but not before those undead monsters had gotten a hold of some Moroi students and teachers as well as a couple novices and carried them away to some caves located five miles away. The guardians had gone on a raid, the first one since Spokane (although, that should probably be classified as more of a rescue mission), and they had almost been successful. But the remaining Strigoi had laid a trap and had gotten the literal jump on the unsuspecting guardians who remained in the cave. Guardians Celeste and Yuri had been killed almost immediately – brutally, from what Adrian could gather from the bodies brought back to campus – but Dimitri, reacting almost immediately to what was happening, had thrown Rose out of the caves.

(he literally picked her up and tossed her through the mouth of the cave into the safety of the sunlight).

In the precious moments it took to save Rose, Dimitri was attacked and turned. Honestly, Adrian didn't know if Belikov had actually done his student (girlfriend?) any favors by saving her. At the rate she'd been going since she realized Belikov had lost his soul, his little dhampir looked ready to jump outside the wards and let the nearest Strigoi take her. The only thing keeping holding her back seemed to be Lissa, but even Adrian could see now that even Lissa wasn't enough to keep Rose from dropping out of St. Vladimir's to go track down her lover-turned-Strigoi and "free" him.

Adrian couldn't even be mad at the deception because he'd chosen to believe he could sway Rose's feelings away from Dimitri instead of the reality of the situation. He'd been hurt because of his own stupid decisions, and he only had himself to blame for how he was feeling right now. However, Vlad only knows, if Rose walked back through the door in that instant ready to give him a chance, Adrian would still readily accept her with open arms.

But until she came back, because Adrian knew in his bones she would return, he would keep their secret.

If only to spare himself a little more pain from the look he knew he would see in the depths of Rose's gorgeous eyes.

Pop!

Glugglugglugglugglugglug

Chapter Text

For the record, Stan Alto didn’t actually hate Rose Hathaway.

Did he like her? Hell no. Did he think she was reckless? Hell yes. But did he hate her? No.

Despite the way he came across sometimes, Stan cared about the novices. He hated the way they never got the chance to lead their own lives, instead having to cater to the whims of the Moroi and needlessly sacrifice themselves for theirs, but he wanted them to have a fighting chance. Stan made sure his students were as prepared as they could be before they got out into the real world, and the real world was a harsh and unfeeling place. Maybe his methods and demeanor, in that respect, also came across as harsh and unfeeling, but he didn’t particularly care because his way – most of the time – didn’t lead to his students’ early deaths.

And, from the time she became a ward of the Academy at four years of age, Rose had been one of the students he felt might actually benefit from harsher tactics.

Rose was wild, untamed, and seemed to prefer making jokes and flirting with boys than caring about the grade she got on a bodyguard theory exam. In her physical classes, Rose had always been naturally gifted but she’d been content to coast on her laurels instead of working to rise to the top. Stan knew she had potential to be the best guardian in her class – maybe, even, the best guardian to ever come out of St. Vladimir’s – and it frustrated him to no end she chose to slack off.

To a certain extent, Stan was correct. His harsher methods, harsher with her than with anyone else in the school, were perhaps the only reason she’d been passing before she’d left with Princess Vasilisa. She worked harder just to spite him and make him eat his words, and in doing so her true potential shined through in good marks and in sparring wins.

But even he thought he’d gone too far earlier, when he’d completely humiliated her in class in front of her classmates and other school guardians – including her appointed mentor, Dimitri Belikov.

At the time, Stan had thought it was justified. Rose had taken the last of the Dragomir’s out of the safety of the school and into the world. Although she had somehow survived for two years and kept Vasilisa alive, the utter stupidity with which she’d acted didn’t seem to penetrate her skull. In class, Stan had seen a potential opportunity to hammer that point home and had taken it without really thinking about the consequences of what he’d done until Belikov angrily confronted him in the guardians’ dorms later that evening.

In the almost two years Belikov had been at the school, Stan – nor any of the other guardians – had seen him react so viscerally or emotionally to much of anything. The 24-year-old, though the youngest on campus, handled life with the clear-headedness of a man decades his elder – decades even, to Stan’s embarrassment, to Stan’s elder. So, when Belikov had stormed into the guardian commons – body dripping with sweat from his training session with Rose and anger set in his features – and got right in Stan’s face, every single guardian in vicinity went deathly silent. But, despite briefly fearing for his life (holy shit, is this what Strigoi faced when they battled him?), Stan’s mind began churning with questions.

“What in the hell was that earlier today, Alto?” Belikov’s voice was a study in barely constrained fury.

Stan’s lips pressed together tightly, weighing his words, before he took a calming breath. “I had to get through to her somehow. What she did was stupid, reckless, and could have resulted in both of their deaths. And all she seems to care about now that she’s been brought back to the Academy is doing it again.”

Dimitri was breathing heavily, and Stan could tell he was fighting to stay in control. Interesting. The other guardians were not even trying to hide their curiosity and excitement.

“I agree she needed to hear what you said,” Dimitri responded. “However, my issue isn’t with what you did; it’s how you did it. Rose has faced nothing but derision, judgement, and scolding since her return, and all of this in the face of trying to catch up on at least two years’ worth of schooling just to be competitive with her classmates. She’s already been humiliated enough for a lifetime, and she knows she put the Princess in danger when she took her out of the Academy and is working hard to make up for that. Why did you feel the need to give her a lesson, which could have been delivered privately, in public?”

Stan bristled a bit at the hidden accusation that he wanted to see Rose suffer. He raised Rose from the time she was four years old. If Alberta considered herself her mother figure, Stan was her father figure; and sometimes fathers gave tough love. He was terrified when Rose left St. Vladimir’s, and not just because she’d taken the Princess with her. In the past, Stan had used public demonstrations like that to get through to Rose, and no one had stood up to him for her about it much less confronted him directly about it.

He didn’t have to justify himself to anyone, much less a dhampir a little over half his junior, about why he’d done what he did the way he did it. But still, Stan knew he had been out of line. Staring into Belikov’s eyes so the other man knew he meant business, Stan thought he saw something flicker in their depths.

“You’re right,” Stan conceded. “I was out of line doing that to Rose in front of everyone. It won’t happen again.”

Dimitri searched Stan’s face for sarcasm, and then nodded when he found none. “Good.” Then, ignoring the awestruck faces of the school guardians around him, Dimitri turned on his heel and walked up to his room.

As the guardians broke into conversation about the confrontation, Stan couldn’t help but wonder why such a usually stoic guardian would have such a strong reaction to Rose being humiliated. Especially since said guardian had only been at the school for a little over a year now and hadn’t known Rose before she’d disappeared. Maybe Stan’s methods were a little zealous and could be seen by someone who was looking with newer eyes as cruel, but there was something else at play here.

And Stan was going to figure out what it was.

~*~

“But Comrade, I need food!”

The sudden, loud exclamation from outside the cafeteria drew the attention of a decent portion of the student population – namely, those who were too busy eating breakfast to talk to their friends – and almost all of the guardians who were either stationed or sitting at tables near the doors nearly jumped up with their stakes at the ready. But Stan, one of the few who didn’t pull morning guard duty that week and actually had a chance to sit down and eat breakfast, simply groaned deeply in the back of his throat, and took a large forkful of eggs to keep himself from blurting out the comments that immediately streaked across his mind.

It's too early for this shit , Stan thought, already anticipating the scene to which he would soon bear witness.

Since the incident in the guardian’s dorms, Stan Alto had made it a point to avoid dealings with Rose lest he further incur the wrath of Dimitri Belikov. But avoiding infuriating himself by the hellion novice didn’t mean he’d stopped paying attention to her. Nor, in fact, did it also mean he stopped trying to figure out the cause of his earlier instincts that told him he needed to pay attention to the vehement way Belikov stood up for a girl he’d only just met.

On the contrary, him backing off Rose allowed him to observe her without interruption or scrutiny. And he honestly didn’t know what to do about what he discovered.

There’s a reason Stan always proselytized to the novices about keeping their eyes sharp and listening to their instincts. Guardians always needed to be on the lookout for anything out-of-the-ordinary, because catching something amiss could possibly save not only their charge’s life, but their life as well. Stan hadn’t lived to be 59 years old – ancient, by dhampir standards – without learning how to see patterns and listen to the tingling in his gut telling him something wasn’t quite right.

And he knew something wasn’t quite right with the mentorship between Dimitri and Rose.

When he’d sat down and tried to pinpoint it after the confrontation, he decided the issue didn’t lie with mentorship itself. In fact, the rapid progress Rose was making in her novice training (which, considering she missed a little under two years of critical physical training, was nothing short of miraculous) and the progress she was making in her book-related studies (again, such a marked improvement he couldn’t help but comment on it to Alberta) proved the mentorship between the two was positive and beneficial.

No, Stan thought. There was something else.

And then he remembered that little flicker of something when Belikov had stood up for Rose in the guardian commons. So, he watched them. Carefully. And he began noticing things.

He noticed Rose was decidedly less unruly during class and in the halls and actually was working hard to understand the material and apply it to her training. Yes, the wildly inappropriate comments were still made, but they were made just one or twice a class period instead of every other minute. Stan noticed Rose was a lot more focused in the gym than she had ever been before, and when he saw her peeking out of the corner of her eye to gauge Belikov’s reaction (and subsequently either preening at his nod or frowning at his head shake), Stan noticed a flicker of something in her eyes. The same flicker he saw whenever one of the other novices asked her about her remedial lessons with Belikov.

The same flicker he had seen in Belikov’s eyes that night after Stan had humiliated Rose.

Cold suddenly spread throughout his body, and Stan felt his heart drop through to his gut as his brain put the pieces together.

In hindsight, Stan probably could have caught on sooner. When he’d arrived at the Academy a year ago, Belikov was sullen and moody, very stoic, and kept to himself. But, since he’d brought Rose and Princess Vasilisa back to St. Vladimir’s, Belikov had somewhat began to loosen up a bit. Instead of sitting in a corner and reading to himself when they had free time in the guardian dorms, Belikov would participate in conversations with their coworkers and invite people to play pool – something which increased in frequency over the course of the two or so months since they brought back Rose and Princess Vasilisa. Inevitably, someone would ask him about Rose and her progress, and Belikov – though outwardly would have a professional and cool demeanor to St. Vladimir’s most untamed student – would speak of her progress with the pride and affection one might speak of a girlfriend, not a student. And since Lissa had discovered the dead fox in her dorm room, Belikov and Rose had almost doubled the amount of time they spent together training, and Stan had noticed the looks become heavier with more barely disguised emotion: affection, pride, and love.

Honestly, it was a miracle no one else had noticed what was going on. But it wasn’t like their outward relationship shifted – more like they were just starting to realize what was happening between them and trying to deny it. And when Stan noticed what was building between the two, he found himself in a dilemma: should he say something, or should he keep quiet?

As a teacher, Stan knew he had a duty to say something to Alberta (who was, only by a handful of months, his superior). Although Belikov, technically, wasn’t a school employee – he was paid by the Court’s Council to be Vasilisa’s guardian – and although he willingly (albeit somewhat reticently) agreed to mentor Rose, what Stan believed their relationship was developing into would violate the ethical responsibilities to which a mentor-mentee relationship needed to adhere. If left unchecked, and their feelings came to a head, it could potentially burst open a bevy of legalities for which the school could potentially be liable not only because Rose was still a student, but she was a ward of the Academy.

But as a fellow guardian…? Stan knew all too well the kind of lonely life awaited both Belikov and Rose. Although Belikov was still relatively young, he’d be guarding the last Moroi of a Royal line. And, if the rumors he’d been hearing from his contacts at Court were correct, Queen Tatiana was already seriously considering the last Dragomir as her successor. With the constant threat and target on her back, Dimitri wouldn’t have time for any sort of meaningful relationship. Not that dhampir males had meaningful, lasting relationships in the first place outside of academies like St. Vladimir’s, but the life of a guardian – especially a Royal guardian – was short, unhappy, and mostly devoid of connection. Already he’d noticed the change in Belikov from a serious man who only cared about his work to a man in his mid-twenties who knew how to balance fun and responsibility, and Rose was apparently responsible for that change.

And Rose…Stan had never seen Rose like this before. Obviously, their connection was enabling Rose to become the guardian Stan always knew she could be. And, as someone who considered himself her pseudo-father, Stan thought Rose honestly looked happier than he’d seen her – even before she’d disappeared. And Dimitri Belikov was a huge part of that.

Stan would be doing his job by alerting someone to what was brewing between the duo, but – if they were separated – would he be able to handle being the person responsible for destroying whatever potential happiness the two had created for themselves?

The opening of heavy oaken doors brought Stan out of his thoughts and back to the St. Vlad’s cafeteria, through which Belikov was currently striding with Rose Hathaway clinging to his back like a spider monkey. Rose’s muscular arms circled around his neck while her long, wavy hair hung down her back, face flushed with exertion. Belikov’s hands grasped the bottoms of her thighs, holding her securely to his back as she couldn’t hook her ankles across his sweat-drenched, t-shirt covered stomach due to the obvious angry swelling Stan could see plaguing her uncovered left ankle. Her workout outfit, consisting of a brightly colored, patterned sports bra peeking out from underneath an extremely cropped gray t-shirt with a line of Cyrillic on the back and black spandex shorts, was drawing a lot of attention from the male student population, while Belikov’s standard outfit was drawing a decent amount of attention from the female student population – including some of the female guardians in the cafeteria. But the pair seemed completely oblivious to the sudden interest of the student population and the low hum of rumors starting as they made their way toward the food.

"Comrade," Rose begged, trying to adjust herself on Dimitri's back as she observed what meal he was crafting in a plastic takeout container. "Seriously. Please. I NEED chocolate donuts to survive. Literally… I will die."

Dimitri, whose hair was out of its usual ponytail and shiny with sweat, laughed a wide-mouthed, big-bellied laugh at her begging and simply continuing piling fruits and other healthy breakfast food into the box. He could probably feel Rose’s anger, which she was trying to channel into the back of his head in the form of a glare.

“Rose, you need to eat healthy food,” Dimitri lightly scolded. “Chocolate donuts are fine…in moderation. But you need to dominate your diet with healthy food that’s going to help you improve your physical conditioning – including your reflexes.”

He pointedly glanced at her swollen, red ankle and Rose huffed in frustration. “Olendzki will fix me right up, Comrade. Besides, I’m hurt because of your training. The least you can do to make up for causing me pain is to give me a chocolate donut.”

Belikov looked at her wryly for a moment, holding her stare. Capitulating, Belikov took a napkin and gingerly picked up a chocolate donut before placing it carefully in a small paper takeout bag.

“For good behavior.” Belikov smirked. With a quick wordless gesticulation of his head toward the injury, Belikov secured his grip on Rose’s right leg and gently placed the icepack he shortly received from one of the cafeteria workers on Rose’s injured ankle with his left hand before securing her left leg on his hip with his left hand and grabbing the food and shifting it out of her reach with his right. Rose pouted at the donut being held out of her reach, but ultimately quieted down in appeasement as Belikov walked the length of the room – Rose clinging to his back – and out of the cafeteria toward the medical center.

Immediately, conversation broke up about the scene everyone had just witnessed – even amongst some of the guardians. No one was talking about any potential affair or more-than-just-professional relationship between the two, just general shock of seeing the usually stoic Belikov show some emotion and lust-filled comments from the hormone-driven students – thank goodness for willful ignorance. But Stan, who hadn’t stopped eating even to watch the interaction, finally decided on a course of action.

Although he would talk about what was happening behind closed doors with Alberta, he would deny and discourage others from realizing the truth. The people in front of him had been willfully ignorant this long, and they would be willfully ignorant until the truth punched them in the face with a well-executed right hook.

Whether Stan liked it or not, Rose and Belikov were falling in love with each other and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it. He would, more or less, keep their secret intact. Even if they didn’t realize they had a secret that needed to be kept in the first place.

Chapter Text

If someone had asked Janine Hathaway if she believed her daughter, Rose, would graduate from St. Vladimir’s Academy and be assigned to guard Princess Vasilisa Dragomir two years, Janine would have laughed in their face.

Harsh? Yes, but so was their world.

In this world of magic, undeath, immortality, and evil, where Janine’s entire career relied upon her being able to protect the life of her charge even at the cost of her own, there was no time or space for cuddles and handholding. Nor were there prestigious guarding opportunities for novices who slacked off and needed public dressings-down to take their studies seriously or acted like consequences were nonexistent. And no matter how legendary Janine’s own reputation might be, no matter how naturally talented and filled with potential her daughter might be, the post-graduation world would do Rose no favors.

At the rate she’d been going, Rose would have left St. Vladimir’s completely unprepared to face the world. And being unprepared in their line of work could mean death.

It was part of the reason Janine had given up Rose to the Academy. Growing up in a small Scottish village in Glasgow in the 70s, Janine was taught a dhampir’s duty in their society was to the Moroi. Everything – including family – was put aside for the betterment and safety of the Moroi. Janine believed in that duty wholeheartedly and trained hard to make sure she could fulfil that duty to the best of her ability, and when she graduated from St. Christopher’s, she was one of the best novices across the schools.

But her first Moroi post-graduation, relative of the new queen, Tatiana Ivashkov, had treated her like his slave. She’d waited on him hand and foot and went with him wherever he went (and he went a lot of places, including Russia). She withstood the abuse with silence – they come first – but then he’d slapped her hard across the face one night while at Court when she forgot to put ice in his bourbon. Hard enough to send even her flying across the room, and hard enough to leave marks on her face and split her lip. She was only a year out of high school, and he was her responsibility. Besides, he was Royal. She was powerless.

As she crossed the courtyard to Court’s medical bay, she’d bumped into another Moroi male and had instantly coiled back in fear. But instead of berating her, the unknown (and flamboyantly dressed) Moroi had caught her and steadied her back on her feet. When he saw her face, his features darkened in anger.

“Who did that to you?” She’d shaken her head, not willing to risk incurring more of her Lord’s wrath or Court’s ridicule. The man nodded. “Alright, then. What’s your name?”

She looked in his eyes. The care she saw in the chocolate depths made her blink back tears and melted her heart. “Janine Hathaway.”

His bow-shaped lips smiled. “Well, Janine Hathaway. I’ll let you go on your way.”

The next morning, she found out she’d been reassigned to her current Szelsky lord. And three months of whirlwind romance later, Janine was unprepared to face their world when she discovered she was pregnant with Ibrahim Mazur’s child. Although he wanted to bring their growing family together, his job and Janine’s dedication to protecting Moroi determined the paths they would have to take as lovers. And Janine’s inability to do her job, coupled with the dangers it brought to a child, also meant putting Rosemarie aside.

Janine had also not been ready to be a mother. At 20 years old, she wanted to be protecting her charge and fighting Strigoi, not fighting to stay conscious because she spent the whole night trying to calm down her newborn. It had been easy to drop Rose off at the Academy for weeks at a time before fully turning her over to the school just shy of her fourth birthday. Although Janine had wanted the best for her daughter, she knew “the best” wasn’t going to be with her because Rose needed things Janine simply wasn’t equipped to provide at the time.

While Rose had always seemingly been a wild child, which made sense considering her parents, things took a sharp turn for the worse after the Dragomir family had almost been wiped out in that car crash. Excessive partying, alleged promiscuity, and a seeming lack of care for her training put Rose on the fast track to nothing, and Janine had allowed her frustration at squandering her chances with Rose to turn into anger at Rose wasting her talent and neglecting her duty.

But now, sitting with the other guardians at the lodge and waiting for the green light to retrieve a group of St. Vlad’s students – including her daughter – Janine was somewhat comforted by the knowledge Rose was with the group. Because she had found them before they’d been kidnapped, Janine knew the group’s chances of survival increased exponentially.

They’d seen the security footage from inside the mall. Rose, with Christian Ozera in tow, had waltzed up to the deflated group of wayward students eating lunch. After yelling at them, she’d tried to herd them toward the mall’s exit before someone – Mason Ashford, they believed – convinced her to go down into the tunnels. The group had disappeared through an access door in the back of the mall and into a black zone before re-emerging and looking decidedly more panicked than before. But Rose, though visibly freaked out by whatever she’d seen down there, had kept her head, and had rushed the group out of the back entrance of the building as it was the easiest path toward sunlight. But, from the outside security cameras, the adult dhampir guardians had watched as the student group was intercepted by a group of humans just before they’d made it to the front of the building. There was a brief fight, but once one of the humans had grabbed Mia, Rose had signaled for Mason and Eddie Castile to stop which allowed the remaining humans to subdue and force the group into a van with a covered license plate before driving off to a secondary location.

Although she was horrified by what she’d seen, Janine had gotten the chance to see – firsthand – how her daughter had matured as both a guardian and as a person. And, from what she understood, the majority of that transformation was due to the man sitting next to her.

Even in Nepal, where she guarded her Szelsky lord, Janine had known about Dimitri Belikov. Although he was only 24, Belikov had one hell of a reputation as a fierce guardian – a prodigy in the field renowned for his determination, leadership, professionalism, and level head in the face of chaos. She’d heard of his skill in combat, as stories of him dealing death to Strigoi like a card dealer at a Vegas casino dealt cards to a table of players between the time Ivan Zeklos was killed and he was relocated to Court (and even after he came to Court and before he was appointed as guardian to the last Dragomir) filtered through the guardian ranks.

And when Janine had heard he’d taken charge of her own daughter’s training, after he’d also found her daughter and the Princess after a year of searching, she’d nearly wept with relief. If anyone could save Rose from the destructive path – the path which would inevitably get her killed – then it could be Dimitri Belikov.

After Rose had been brought back to campus (and Janine had sent that stupid email), Janine had started to hear rumors of Rose’s transformation as a guardian under Belikov’s watch. Apparently Belikov had also recognized the raw talent present in her daughter’s abilities and was working to cultivate it just as his own mentor, Galina Salesnikova, had cultivated Belikov’s raw, wild talent into something deadly and precise. She’d heard from Alberta how Rose had gained discipline and maturity, and how that resulted in Rose falling seamlessly into working with Belikov as his partner as they tracked down and rescued the captured Vasilisa Dragomir. Janine had needed to see it for herself, so she finally used some of her vacation time – built up over the years – and traveled to St. Vladimir’s.

Big mistake on her part. Janine should have known Rose would be angry at her. How could she not be? Janine was angry at herself. She’d been out of Rose’s life for years, assuming Rose would be fine with not seeing her and simply receiving and annual birthday after she was unofficially adopted by the Dragomir family. But Rose hadn’t escaped being ‘Janine Hathaway’s daughter.’ And when Rose saw her, it was like all the anger and resentment she held just unleashed in verbal and physical sparring. Janine, also quick to anger, responded without thinking.

Thank goodness for Dimitri Belikov, who’d kept his head and had managed to physically separate the two Hathaway women and cool the situation before someone got staked.

But the Dimitri Belikov sitting next to her waiting in the depths of the ski lodge was not the level-headed guardian she’d heard stories of from her coworkers, nor was he the fearless so-called “Russian God” who charged headfirst into battle against the undead. Sitting here on a bench wearing tactical gear, his hands were shaking – from exhaustion or the stress of the situation, Janine didn’t know – and his eyes darted about the room like a caged, desperate animal looking to be loosed upon the world.

Each time someone came through the door, he jumped up at the ready only to be told a decision hadn’t yet been made. Each time he sat back down, Belikov grew more and more agitated and the look in his eyes was one that promised hurt.

The situation was ludicrous, Janine thought. Five students – three of which were dhampir novices, and two of which were Moroi – were in the hands of Strigoi, but because the elitest, racist assholes who made all the decisions didn’t care about the dhampirs or the non-royal Moroi – didn’t even care about the Royal Moroi included in the group taken hostage simply because he was an Ozera – they were most likely weighing the pros and cons of greenlighting an operation that could also risk depleting the number of seasoned guardians to rescue a group of senior students who willingly left the property on a fool’s errand.

If Princess Vasilisa had been among the group, Janine knew the Council would have OKed the rescue operation when they’d first realized the kids were missing hours ago. The phrase drilled into every dhampir head from the moment of birth, “they come first,” did not just apply to Royal Moroi.

Another sudden movement out of the corner of her eye brought Janine out of her thoughts. Belikov had once again jumped up when a guardian entered the room, but instead of sitting down again he began pacing. Janine, suddenly feeling her irritation at the entire situation well up, couldn’t stand to be next to him anymore. It made her feel guilty, like she should be more agitated they were just sitting here waiting for things to happen from above. Instead of sitting next to Belikov’s nervous energy, Janine stood up and went over to Alberta Petrov, who was standing by the phone in the middle of the desk inside their makeshift war room and staring at it intently, seemingly willing a call from the higher ups to manifest itself.

As Janine approached Alberta, she saw the other woman’s nose wrinkle in annoyance – a break in the calm veneer she sported in the face of all the chaos. Janine could only guess she was the cause of the older woman’s annoyance, but still stopped next to the captain of the St. Vladimir guardians.

“I can’t take anymore of this waiting,” Janine stated, breaking the tension. Alberta just bobbed her eyebrows in agreeance, choosing to be silent. She still kept her eyes on the phone, but Janine could see a crinkle of anger form at the corner of Alberta’s eyes that revealed her inner anger.

Janine signed. She was stressed, scared for her daughter and her daughter’s friends, and angry at the Council. She didn’t need this bullshit, especially not from Alberta, to bubble at the moment. They needed to be focused on saving the kids right now. Everything else could come later.

“Listen,” Janine began, voice quiet by heavy with seriousness. “I know we have issues, but right now is not the time to let them get the better of us. We have to work together to get those kids back, and we need to be a team. We can deal with everything…else…later.”

A pause. Then, Alberta breathed in heavily and nodded. “You’re right. Truce for now.”

Janine felt some of the tension flow out of her body. It would return later, she knew, bringing even more guilt into her soul, but for now she could put it aside and focus on what they needed to do when they got approval. “Do you think they’re OK?”

Alberta hesitated, trying to separate hope from reality. “I don’t know. Rose, Mason, and Eddie are the top novices in their class. Christian Ozera is not afraid to use his magic, and – from what I’ve heard – that Mia Rinaldi is a survivor. But as long as the Strigoi hold the two Moroi over their heads, the novices won’t act.”

Janine nodded. It was a realistic answer.

Out of the corner of her eye, Janine watched – once again – as Belikov alternated between pacing frantically on the tiled floor in the small hallway and sitting on the bench, elbows on his thighs, and his forehead resting on his clasped hands while his left leg bounced up and down. Janine looked at Alberta, who was also watching the display with a look on her face Janine could only identify as exasperation.

“What’s going on with him? From the stories I’ve heard of how he operates during these things, this isn’t like him,” Janine asked Alberta, a little concerned about Belikov’s clear agitation. Alberta only sighed and pursed her lips, screwing them up in a way Janine only knew to mean she was hiding something.

“It isn’t like him,” Alberta confirmed.

A beat. “Can we rely on him to help us find Rose and the others?”

Alberta twisted her lips into a wry smile. “Oh, trust me. He won’t stop until they’re safe.”

Right then, a guardian – must have been a recent graduate, judging by the panicked cadence of his voice – ran into the room.

“We’re good to go.”

~*~

The plane lifted off the runway toward St. Vladimir’s, but the change in elevation had nothing to do with the sinking feeling in the pit of Janine’s stomach. Instead, the feeling – plaguing her stomach for the last almost 48 hours now – had everything to do with the two dhampirs sitting together a few rows in front of her.

Over the last two days, she’d operated more or less on autopilot as her brain tried to process the events in Spokane.

After a long car ride to the mall, the team tried to retrace the steps of the group of teenagers. They’d found the wall with the – there was no other way to put this – kill list of the Royal Moroi families, and then they’d headed out to the back of the mall where they saw the tire marks from the car when it peeled off with the students. A tip had been called in from Adrian Ivashkov, who had apparently telepathically contacted Rose, and he verbally walked them through the route the humans had taken in their vehicle using landmarks Rose had made sure to take notice of when she replayed her memory of the ride. But the trail ended at a suburban neighborhood. Apparently, when the humans realized Rose had been tracking their route since the mall, they swiftly blindfolded her for the rest of the way.

The small contingent of guardians had arrived at the neighborhood in two separate vans and decided to search both on foot and with the vans, prioritizing blue houses. Janine had gone with Dimitri and Alberta on foot, the van slowly following behind them. They hadn’t found the van, knowing it must have been parked in a garage, so they had no choice but to move through the neighborhood like wraiths trying to find hints of the kidnapped teenagers. With every passing moment, dread curdled in Janine’s stomach and her fear of finding the group – her daughter – dead increased.

But if Janine and Alberta were scared, Belikov was downright terrified. Janine could see his brain working overtime to dissect even the most minimal clues to discern where the group was being kept. She saw him running, almost flying, through the neighborhood on foot and melting back into the trees when he was done scouring the location. She was working on overdrive herself, but Belikov was on another level.

And then, someone radioed they’d spotted teenagers running out of a house at the end of the block.

Like a flash, Belikov was off – using his long legs to cross the distance in record time. By the time Janine caught up – holy shit, she needed to run more – and the rest of the guardians had converged on the house, all was silent. The Moroi girl, Mia, was crying silently underneath the shade of the house’s porch awning while Christian, clearly struggling with even the early-morning sun, was supporting an incredibly dazed Eddie Castile, who had blood dripping down his neck from a bite. Mason and Rose were unaccounted for, and as a small contingent of guardians pulled the cars around to help the three teenagers, the rest of the guardians looked at the house with terror.

Janine remembered entering the house behind Belikov, who’d gone chalk white with fear at what they’d find inside, and then stopping still at the sight in front of them. Rose, covered in water, dust, and scratches from both the battle and the glass littering the floor, was cradling Mason Ashford’s body in her arms and crooning softly to it as though he were simply asleep. From her position by the door, Janine could see his neck twisted at an unnatural angle and her heart stopped. Then Rose, sensing the crowd of guardians, went into attack mode and brandished an old sword at them.

“Stay back!” She growled, glaring at them with feral eyes as she covered Mason’s dead body protectively. “Stay away!”

Janine had tried to move forward, but a sharp sound from Rose had her backing away. All of Janine’s instincts were screaming to protect herself ­from her daughter at her behavior, and Janine was at a loss for what to do. Then, Belikov stepped forward. She wanted to grab his arm and hold him back, but Rose stared at him as he approached. The entire room was tense.

“Rose,” Belikov caressed her name softly. Rose let out a small squeak and tensed. Belikov stopped his approach, and Janine could see how he caught Rose’s eyes. “Roza, it’s OK. You can drop the sword now, we’re here. It’s OK.

Janine kept quiet. Rose’s arm started to tremble, as if the weight of the sword was too much for her as the fight visibly left her body. “I need to protect him. He needs me to protect him.” Tears started falling down her cheeks.

Belikov nodded slowly, boots crunching broken glass as he advanced slowly with his hands in front of him in a placating position. “I know, Roza, I know. And you did a beautiful job. You protected him. But now we’re here to help you protect him.”

A clang of metal later and Belikov had scooped Rose into his arms, holding her as she cried with Mason’s body cooling on her knees. Once Rose had been disarmed, the other guardians snapped back into action. But Janine stayed still, her attention  still focused on the way Belikov was holding Rose – no, the way he was looking at Rose.

He was looking at her in the same way Ibrahim used to look at her. Specifically, that night she first met him when he knew by the marks on her face that he needed to protect her despite never knowing her before. She was stunned to see the nakedly display of love and affection on Belikov’s face as Rose cried into his chest. Janine could see Belikov was in love with her daughter.

And judging by the way Rose clung to Belikov, Janine deduced her daughter reciprocated Belikov's feelings.

Through the whole process of cataloguing the scene (two beheaded Strigoi, aquarium water all over the floor, humans tied up in the basement, and signs of a pretty fierce battle), packing up Mason’s body, taking witness statements, and calling the Alchemists to help with the Strigoi and smooth things over with the neighbors, and then in the days until they boarded the plane bound for St. Vladimir’s, Janine kept watching Rose and Belikov’s interactions. Honestly, things were starting to make sense – how his cool professionalism had shifted to visible agitation after finding out Rose was among the missing teenagers, how he nearly tore apart the neighborhood searching for her, and then how he was the only one to get through to her in while she was held in the throes of grief and fear.

Alberta’s reaction back in the Lodge’s war room also made sense. Alberta, the woman who’d raised Rose and had been a mother to Rose when Janine couldn’t, had apparently known about Rose’s…involvement…with the young guardian and about the depth of the young guardian’s feelings for her young charge.

But Janine didn’t know what to do.

She wanted to intervene and stop whatever this was in its tracks. She felt protective of her daughter, though she knew she didn’t deserve to feel that way, and felt a responsibility to warn Rose not to pursue whatever it was Janine was seeing developing between the two dhampirs.

The age difference – specifically, Rose’s status as a “still a minor” – and their status as student/mentor notwithstanding, Janine was against it because she knew all too well of the stigmas associated with relationships between guardians and Moroi, and it would only be worse between two dhampirs. And with both supposedly going to protect Princess Vasilisa after graduation, it would be next to impossible. Their Moroi charge had to be protected above all else, and if they were together, it would be hard for them not to want to throw themselves in front of each other before they threw themselves in front of the Princess.

As they flew back to Court, Janine started to get up and move toward the couple huddled together in the middle of the plane. But Alberta suddenly stepped in her path, forcing Janine back into her seat as the older woman swiftly sat next to her.

“Alberta, I need to talk to her –”

Alberta’s look of disdain completely silenced Janine. “No. They don’t need you drawing attention to them, like how you drew attention to Rose at the Conta’s banquet. Right now, they need each other. He’s going to help her through this, and she needs him. She doesn’t need your lectures or your help, so you’re going to leave them alone.”

Janine was flabbergasted. “Who in the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m the woman who sang Rose to sleep every night for three years after you dropped her off in the Academy’s care. I’m the woman who helped Rose through puberty, who taught her how to tie her shoelaces and her ABCs, and I’m the woman who’s been helping Rose through the hell she’s been through since her return, not the woman who sends her two sentences via email after two years of being off the grid and another three years of radio silence before that.” Janine was silent at Alberta’s violent whispers. “I’m the woman who mothered your daughter when you didn’t. And I’m going to support them, because whether or not I agree with it is irrelevant. They’re happy, and whatever happiness I can let them have – within reason, of course – before our harsh world takes it away, I’m going to let them have it.”

Janine turned away from Alberta’s face and looked at the seat in front of her. The pale beige color of the leather was boring, but it was neutral enough to stare at as she collected her thoughts.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” Janine asked, her voice breaking in helplessness. “How do I help her through this?” Neither woman knew if Janine was referring to the events in Spokane or the illicit relationship.

“Stop trying to be her mother. Start trying to be her friend.” Janine nodded solemnly, and Alberta got up and moved to the empty row directly across from Rose and Belikov.

Alberta was right. Her daughter didn’t need Janine to be a mother anymore; that ship had long-since sailed. All Janine could try to now be was Rose’s friend.

Well, she though as she watched Rose burrow into Belikov’s side, I could start by keeping their secret.

Chapter Text

The last thing Mason Ashford saw before he died was Rose Hathaway.

It was fitting, he thought as he stood next to Rose as she slept in her bed at St. Vladimir’s Academy and watched her uneasy sleep. Mason had spent most of his life looking at his female best friend, so it made sense her face was the last thing his living eyes saw before that male Strigoi – Isaiah, he thinks the name was – broke his neck and ended his life.

Joke’s on Isaiah though, Mason chuckled to himself. At least I’m still here.

In life, Mason hadn’t been religious whatsoever. He wanted to worship Rose Hathaway, of course, but God? Nah. He only believed in what he could do for himself, not what some “all-powerful” being hidden in the clouds was going to have him do. As a dhampir, Mason’s life was already out of his control; he didn’t want some person he couldn’t see control his life either. But then he’d died and, after three days in some weird void, he’d found himself standing next to Rose as she was unpacking in her room at school. His limbs were light, and when he looked down, he found out they were white and smokey.

Holy shit. Was he a ghost? Wicked.

Maybe there was something to this “God’ thing after all.

But he also thought it could be some cruel trick of the universe punishing him for running recklessly into danger and convincing his friends to do the same.

Rose stirred in her sleep and screwed her face up in terror at whatever she was seeing in the depths of her subconscious. Most likely, she was reliving the battle in the Spokane house – reliving his death. He wanted to reach out and touch her, reassure her he was right there next to her, that he was OK now, but something held him back. Something prevented him from connecting with her.

Not yet, the whispers explained. Not until it’s time.

Mason became annoyed at the disembodied voices speaking in his ear. He had spent years waiting for his time.

Most of his short life had been spent waiting for the time Rose would look at him like she would a boyfriend or a potential romantic partner. When they were children, Mason had always felt pulled to her and was always willing to go along with her crazy schemes with Eddie Castile, the third point in their friendship triangle. As they’d started attaching ‘1’s in front of their ages, Mason started to realize his love for Rose was different than Eddie’s love for Rose. Eddie loved hanging out with Rose like he did, but he'd eventually go off and hang out with Shane Reyes and Meredith or some of the other young novices. Mason, though friends with the others, had only ever really wanted to be around Rose. Her eyes, her hair, and her absolute love for life drew Mason in like a moth to a flame, and his moth was absolutely willing to fly straight into her flame if she ever asked him to do so. But when they’d entered the high school part of the Academy, and it seemed like she’d gone to bed a plank one night and woke up looking like an hourglass – a rarity, even among dhampir girls – other guys noticed.

Specifically, that asshole Royal Jesse Zeklos.

Mason had watched silently (and, sometimes, not so silently) as Rose was led around by dipshits like Zeklos and other Royal Moroi who wanted nothing more than to score her. And he watched as she’d responded with flirtation and seduction (or whatever passed for seduction at 14 years old). Then he’d had to listen to the rumors about her exploits with guys (who weren’t him) and he started throwing himself into his training to avoid beating up the Moroi he was – eventually – supposed to protect.

When the accident happened, however, Mason stopped trying to be with her and instead just tried to be there for her. But Rose was different. As in, constantly starting fights (more so than usual), blowing off her schoolwork and her training, and partying more and more. Mason didn’t know how to connect with her, how to get through to her. And just when he thought he’d figured it out, she disappeared and took Princess Vasilisa Dragomir with her.

For two years, Mason had to figure out life without Rose. He trained hard and rose steadily through the novice ranks, he studied hard and did well in school, he started hooking up with Meredith, and he spent more time with Eddie who also seemed to be lost without their third point on the friendship triangle. But they were dealing; they were OK.

And then Rose had been brought back to St. Vladimir’s. And Mason realized just how much he wanted to be Rose’s boyfriend and how much he wanted to see that shining out of her gorgeous chocolate eyes when she looked at him.

But he had only ever seen friendship. It was OK, he told himself. One day she’ll look at me like Sonya Karp looked at Mikhail Tanner when they thought no one else was watching. He just had to keep at it.

He couldn’t spend as much as he wanted to with her because she was on constant lockdown. Rose spent her days either doing homework in her room or training in the gym with Dimitri Belikov (he was still super fucking jealous about that). He knew she was walking on a narrow tightrope with the school’s administration due to her taking Lissa out of the Academy, but he also thought they were being too harsh in their punishments.

They didn’t know Rose as well as he did, he conceded, but it should have been obvious to anyone who met her Rose would never do something as rash and risky as that without a very good reason. Headmistress Kirova had been waiting for an excuse to expel Rose for years, and now she was taking the opportunity to exact petty revenge on Rose and Mason had been kind of disgusted. He had a pretty good idea of how she kept Lissa alive, if the longing looks she gave Lissa’s feeder during her friend’s feeding time were any indication, and he thought that kind of dedication should have been rewarded.

But no one asked his opinion. So, Mason was left to support her from the shadows.

Much like he was right now.

Hours after he’d spontaneously appeared in Rose’s bedroom, Mason was watching Rose as she slept. Creepy? Eh, maybe, but what else was he going to do. This was something he’d dreamed about in life – albeit, in very different circumstances.

In the darkness of her small bedroom, the light from the sun from the small crack in her curtains cast a halo around her head and highlighted the red tints in her hair he loved to search for. Apricot sunrays glinted off the tears spilling down her face, and he noticed she clutched a roll of blue hand wraps – his blue hand wraps, the ones he’d given her before they’d left the Academy for the Lodge – in her left fist. Mason felt something in him tighten – he couldn’t feel his heart anymore, since he didn’t have one, so maybe it was a phantom pain – and when Rose suddenly woke up from her nightmare and started sobbing over those hand wraps, he had never been angrier about being forced, once again, to the sidelines.

But just as he got ready to try to break through whatever forcefield was holding him back, Mason heard a knock at Rose’s bedroom door. Her head raised and she wiped at her eyes before answering, her voice wracked with grief.

“Who’s there?”

A beat. “It’s me.”

Mason could hear the faint Russian accent in the deep voice, made even deeper by sleep deprivation and the whisper volume at which he needed to speak considering the location and the hour at which he was here. He knew that voice, knew who it belonged to, and despite the throbbing in the back of his skull that told him he knew why Dimitri Belikov was outside knocking on Rose’s door late at night, Mason didn’t want to admit what was happening.

Rose pulled herself out of bed, leaving the blue wraps on her pillow, and her oversized red t-shirt brushed against the middle of her thighs as her cabin-socked feet lightly padded across the tile floor to the door. Fiddling with the locks, Rose opened the door wide enough for Belikov to slip unnoticed into her room. While Rose re-locked the door, Belikov slid off his duster. Folding it neatly, he laid it over the back of her wooden desk chair and toed off his black sneakers before storing them under her desk, leaving him in a casual outfit of dark jeans, a grey cotton V-neck, and a pair of black socks. When she turned around, leaning up against the wood of the door to stare at him fully, Belikov only hesitated a moment before crossing the room in a handful of strides and sweeping her up into his arms.

Rose hadn’t considered Mason as a potential romantic partner because she already had one. And she never looked at Mason with love in her eyes – and not the kind of love one reserves for a friend – because she was already looking at someone else like that. Mason could only stare helplessly as he saw the look – the sparkle – he’d always wanted to see directed his way, be directed toward another.

The girl he loved was in love with the man he idolized. Not even death could stop Mason’s heart from shattering as his worst fears were confirmed.

The man in question was currently running his hands gently up and down Rose’s back as he held her tightly, allowing her to cry on his shoulder before silently guiding her back to her bed. Rose crawled into the waiting warmth of her soft-looking duvet (Lissa’s responsibility, no doubt), and Belikov shucked off his jeans and his socks, setting his alarm before folding himself into the small space in the bed next to her. Rose then moved so she was almost laying on top of him – tossing her left arm across his chest and throwing her left leg across his lower stomach while curling her right arm under his left shoulder – and his arms wrapped around her back to hold her securely to his body.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” Rose sniffled.

Belikov just stroked her hair. “Of course, milaya. I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

Belikov gently moved her up on his chest a bit more, so her head was resting on his collar bone and pulled the blankets over their bodies. Rose snuggled deeper into his side. Silence reigned for a few moments, and then Belikov spoke with soft tones.

“What you’re going through right now – the grief, the anger, the guilt – is completely natural. You went through something horrible, something not even I can understand fully, and you’re going to process that however you need to process. But I want you to know I am here for you – in whatever capacity you need me to there for you.”

Another sniffle from Rose and her arm tightened across his body, trying to get closer to his warmth. “I just need you like this. I just need you to hold me like this.”

Belikov dropped a kiss to her hair – the hair Mason had spent hours searching for dreamed about running his fingers through – and Rose turned her head up to receive a sweet kiss from her mentor (boyfriend?) before they moved further under the covers.

Silence for a bit, and Mason was about to move closer to study the pair before he heard a whisper. And not a whisper from one of the voices holding him back from challenging Belikov to a duel of honor over Rose (he thinks being a ghost will actually give him the win). No, it was a whisper from his girl.

His Rose.

“I love you, Dimitri.”

A pause. “I love you too, Roza.” And then they drifted off asleep.

Mason shouldn’t have been surprised. Not really. He knew something was happening between them, but it was something he kept pushing to the back of his mind and ignoring. He’d seen the looks between them, and he’d seen how they always gravitated toward each other when the other was nearby. He’d seen how they trained together, how they moved as if they were dancing…or doing something Mason couldn’t stand to have the imagery of in his mind…and not just sparring. Mason had been at the Academy when Belikov arrived on scene, and it seemed like the hard, stoic guardian who’d arrived had – for lack of a better term – blossomed after Rose had, literally (if the stories of the retrieval mission were believed), jumped into his life.  Likewise, Rose became more grounded, more cautious, and more likely to try to wait and analyze a situation before reacting to it. It was so mature – so like Belikov – but Mason hadn’t wanted to notice it.

And his insistence upon ignorance had led to this moment.

Well, maybe not exactly to him being dead. That part was his fault. He thought. Maybe. But somewhere deep inside of Mason, he knew he had gone out to search for the Strigoi due to a weird mix of revenge and wanting to prove himself the “alpha male” who deserved Rose’s affection. His uncle, who’d also been a guardian, had been killed along with Arthur Schoenburg in the massacre that took the entire Drozdov line. The entire time Mason had been at the Lodge, he’d been harboring increasing anger and resentment for the Council, which declined to even try and go take out the responsible next and who allowed the ignorant and self-important Royal Moroi to use the lives of dhampirs as they saw fit.

Whether or not they died, the Moroi couldn’t care less – they only cared about themselves, and it showed during that final meeting where Camille Conta had been advocating sending children to war and Tasha Ozera then lighting someone’s jacket on fire to prove a point. And Mason, still grieving for the loss of his uncle…well, all Mason had wanted to do was go find them and kill Strigoi. But he’d been tempered by the fact Rose was finally showing some interest in him.

The spark of love still wasn’t in her eyes, but he figured it would come with time. She was spending more time with him, right? Although she would disappear from early morning until late afternoon to train with Belikov, Rose would then seek him out to hang out with him, play pool with him, get food with him, go skiing with him and stay by his side at Adrian Ivashkov’s pool party. She’d even, at one point, looked like she might want to kiss him. For someone who’d singularly wanted her attention, Mason was in heaven. Finally…it was his time. And, honestly, that hope was enough to temper the instinct to pull a frat boy move and leave the safety of the Lodge and go hunt down the Strigoi who killed his uncle.

But then he’d heard the way Rose and Dimitri had interacted on the roof after her time at the Voda banquet. At that point, Mason’s frustration and anger at their society – everything that had been building since his uncle was killed and every reaction since then had to do with protecting the Moroi at the expense of the dhampirs – just bubbled up as his hopes at finally having a chance with the girl he’d been in love with since he was a small child went up in flames. He’d gotten angry – at their world for not going out to eradicate the threat, at Belikov for stealing the girl he’d loved first, at Rose for not wanting him, but then at himself because he didn’t do anything about it sooner.

So, instead, he’d fought with Rose and when she accidentally blurted out where the guardians thought the Strigoi nest was located, Mason had – swept up in a moment of teenage boy idiocy – decided he was going to do what the other guardians, including Belikov, were not. He’d needed Mia, with whom he’d commiserated about the attack after the meeting, to compulse the guard into letting them go and then had run into Eddie on the way out and convinced him to join the ranks of the raiding party. If Mason had been thinking clearly, he would have done none of this. He knows that now. At the time, he’d needed to prove himself and allowed his emotions to get the better of him.

And it cost him his life.

Well, not really. He would have been fine if he’d stayed outside with Christian, Mia, and Eddie. But Rose had willingly sacrificed herself to distract the Strigoi and the remaining humans while they made their escape, and Mason felt guilty about leaving her when she was only in the situation because she needed to get him and the others back to safety. He went back to help her, to apologize in the way he knew best, and he’d died and caused her this pain because he’d been irrational with anger and jealousy. And he loved her and, if she died, he knew he wouldn't ever be able to forgive himself.

Sitting in the relative darkness of her room, watching as she slept more easily with Belikov in her bed than she had without the Russian, Mason knew his unintentional sacrifice had saved her life. But his guilt at the situation remained, and Mason had read “A Christmas Carol” – that guilt must be chaining him to her until the moment he can assuage that guilt. Whenever that may be.

Unconsciously, Rose’s left hand snaked its way across the empty mattress on Belikov’s right side to grasp the roll of hand wraps. Although Mason “felt” his stomach clench, he was reassured she cared for him so much. It may not have been in the way he wanted, but he’d take it.

The last thing Mason Ashford had seen before he died was Rose Hathaway. It was fitting she would also be the last thing he would see – be tethered to on Earth – before salvation. Maybe his salvation would be doing the thing he'd always done - helping her from the shadows.

He knew when he finished whatever job he was supposed to do here, he would move on to whatever the hell was next. Either way, Mason wasn’t going to waste a moment of looking at her face.

Chapter Text

Victor Dashkov knew what he did was wrong.

He knew it, but he also didn’t care. Even sitting in his cell in Tarasov, with bright midday sunlight pouring into the small space and irritating his skin to the point where he wanted to scratch it all off and leave it in a pile on the floor, Victor wouldn’t have changed a thing about what led to him being trapped in the high-security Moroi prison.

Well, except for how he dealt with Rose Hathaway.

He’d underestimated (only slightly, he thought) how powerful he’d made the lust charm on the necklace and if he could go back and do it over again, Victor would have put a hell of a lot more power into the charm to make sure her and her “mentor” – Dimitri Belikov – wouldn’t have had the mental capacity to care about anything but each other. He’d also underestimated how deep the bond between Rose and Vasilisa Dragomir ran – how well it had developed in their two years on the run. He’d honestly thought Rose could just sense what the Dragomir princess could feel, not actually get drawn into her thoughts and see the world – literally – through her eyes.

It had been highly uncharacteristic of him to make so many errors in judgement, to act based on assumptions and not discerned fact, and those errors had costed him. His freedom, primarily, but also his legacy and the respect of his family’s name.

But time had been running out, and Victor had been a very desperate man.

As the Alaskan sunlight made ants crawl painfully beneath his skin and the drip drip drip of the leaky pipe outside the bars of his cell window rang like a metronome in his skull, Victor wanted to bang his head against the fortified wall. He should be sitting on Tatiana’s Vlad-damned throne, not sitting in a jail cell. He should be making laws and changing Moroi society for the better and bringing it out of the fucking Dark Ages, not choosing peasant meals from the disgustingly limited options which his guards brought him twice a day. He should have his own – separate – personal pool of feeders, not receiving microwaved bagged blood three times a day.

Though a prisoner, Victor Dashkov was Royal. He was the PRINCE of his Royal line. That should still mean something, even within the heavily fortified walls which held some of the vampire world’s most dangerous people.

Maybe he should have shown remorse for what he’d done – not mean it, mind you, but at least make it seem that way. Instead, Victor – thinking himself somewhat invincible (they weren’t really going to put him in prison, right?) – had declared he wasn’t sorry in the slightest.

Even though he really wasn’t.

Sitting in front of Royal Moroi society in that dusty, stifling courtroom, Victor couldn’t understand why people were upset about what had transpired. Sure, Vasilisa had gotten hurt, but if she had simply agreed to heal him he wouldn’t have had to force her with torture. If Christian Ozera had just let his guards take the Princess and hadn’t tried to stop them, or better yet, hadn’t felt the need to follow her to their “secret” love nest above the church, then he wouldn’t have been knocked out. And for that matter, what kind of impulsive teenage moron stows away in a guardian van and then decides to try to fight off four psi-hounds? Christian, truly, brought his injuries upon himself.

And then Rose and Belikov...Well, Victor really thought they should have thanked him for the lust charm, not angry about it. Yes, there was the whole “dubious consent” thing because both of them were not in their right minds, but it would have happened sooner or later. And at least Victor made them both realize their feelings for each other and showed them those feelings couldn’t be ignored.

If Victor hadn’t been so rushed with his plans and had gone with his first instinct to err on the side of caution and overpower the charm on that gorgeous necklace, and had taken some more time to understand the depth of the bond, he might have gotten away with it. If it hadn’t been for that damn, meddling novice and her stupid guardian lover, Victor wouldn’t be here in Tarasov trying to avoid the constant Alaskan sun. He’d be leading the Moroi Court in Pennsylvania into the 21^st century.

Yes, he was very – how had Natalie put it once – “salty” about his predicament.

Natasha Ozera was correct: the Moroi, for too long, had relied solely upon their dhampir guardians for protection and had reduced their magic to simple party tricks. They’d lived their lives in luxury – especially the Royals – and had grown elitest and lazy. They were too comfortable at the top with their wealth and power and got off on subjugating the dhampir population – even though the dhampirs almost single-handedly kept their sorry-excuses-for-Moroi asses alive. With the way things were going, the Royals were going to get desperate to hold onto power by turning the dhampirs into slaves and Strigoi cannon fodder and build elite compounds while leaving the non-royals out in the cold and guardian-less, very vulnerable to Strigoi attacks.

Victor had foreseen this long ago.

He was smart, graduated with multiple honors, and rose quickly through the ranks of his family to helm the vast Dashkov industries and mold them into global successes. He saw – where maybe others either did not or ignored – how the Royals had become incrementally relaxed with their power and how they began passing laws to maintain that power even as the non-Royal numbers grew and the dhampir numbers dwindled. He’d spent years trying to quietly convince his fellow Royals to think about the consequences of their actions, to take active roles in their own protection, to get non-royal support by making the guardian application requests open to everyone, destigmatizing dhampir-Moroi relationships and allow guardian numbers to increase. Making people happy, not hateful, was the way to gain their loyalty – not by using fear tactics, intimidation, and subjugation. Victor had tried his best to advocate for progress without ostracizing the Moroi who were more likely to vote on policies that maintained hegemony in the power structure of their society – middle of the road politics, if you will. Little by little, he’d tried to ease his fellow Royals into moving forward adapting to the societal progression, but more and more they voted to keep things the same as Strigoi attacks increased and their fear took hold.

With his global business dealings, Victor was seeing the effects of this lack of adaptation and push to hold onto power and tradition and hegemony: the dhampirs and the non-Royal Moroi were growing restless and angry. They felt their rights were being taken away from them and they were being reduced in their society to make way for the wealthy and powerful elites. They decided to turn their backs on society altogether and make their way in the world alone. While Victor couldn’t blame them one bit, it also proved to be a problem as the ruling class became more comfortable in pushing their skewed agenda due to lack of pushback.

Academies like St. Vladimir’s drilled it into the kids’ heads from the time they were small that the Moroi – especially the Royals – were to be protected, and the dhampirs were to give up their lives to do so. It was kind of a sick thing to teach a kid, to be honest, and more and more dhampirs were starting to realize that. They were sick of being thought of as little more than cannon fodder and wall art for temperamental overgrown children, and so some of the dhampirs – especially the overseas ones – dropped out of academies to avoid graduation and assignment or dhampirs were retiring earlier and earlier and taking on human jobs and starting families.

People wanted rights – wanted freedom to live their own lives the way they saw fit – and they wanted respect and to be treated like they matter. And, if the small snippets of gossip from the guards were true, the Royals were primed to start passing legislation that would treat an entire race as little more an livestock.

Victor benefitted greatly from this system, it’s true, but even he thought that was quite barbaric. And when his wife, the mother of his only child and a fire-user, was murdered by Strigoi because she couldn’t defend herself after her guardians – good, capable men, all of them – fell, he became angry at the society that failed to equip her with the skills she would have needed to potentially save herself. He would have changed all of that – would have ushered in a new world order, one where Moroi were still ruling but dhampirs would have been able to help shape their world into a better one. And Victor was almost ready to do so – had he not been diagnosed with Sandovsky’s Syndrome, one of the worst chronic illnesses a Moroi could get. Tatiana, fearing he would not reign long due to the rapid degeneration the disease was known for, had therefore declined to name him as heir apparent.

The disappointed quickly gave way to anger, and anger gave way to grim determination to get the crown no matter what. Which is why, when he suspected Vasilisa of possessing the same gifts as his half-brother, Robert Doru, Victor began planning.

Desperation will make many a man do things he never previously thought he was capable of doing, and Victor found out he was most definitely willing to hold a young girl hostage and make her heal him for as long as she could if it meant he would get his crown. The reason he’d wanted the princess and not his half-brother? The scope of her abilities and the existence of her bond with Rose.

When Robert began manifesting unusual elemental magic in their early teens, Victor began researching. Through old texts and stories, and then looking around the world for Moroi who also manifested the same characteristics in their magics as an adult, Victor began putting together a comprehensive picture of what element his brother could wield. Each user, though gifted in a wide range of attributes like compulsion, healing, dream-walking, mind-reading, and empathy, was stronger in one. Robert’s gifts, Victor soon discovered, lay more in the dream-walking side of things, so asking him for healing was not going to work. And, there was the madness that threatened Robert’s mind, a madness that could have been mitigated had Robert not lost his bondmate – a dhampir guardian named Alden, who Robert had said helped him manage the “darkness” of spirit.

He’d gone through his list of spirit users; one he’d privately maintained in case he’d needed to ask for their help (like he was trying to do). And, out of all the spirit users he’d discovered, no one could heal quite like Vasilisa Dragomir.

He’d read reports of the accident. He’d visited the spot where it happened. Vasilisa was the only one who would have reasonable survived the crash, smushed between Rose and Andre in the center point of the SUV transporting the Dragomir family and their dhampir ward. Victor had also read a list of the injuries Andre had sustained, and even Vasilisa had suffered from cuts and scrapes and a large bruise where the seatbelt had caught her as the car went rolling. But Rose? She was completely free of injury and had no memory of the accident as it was happening or how she’d gotten out of the car.

The signs, if someone was looking for them, were there. While Rose’s surprising lack of injuries were abnormal and no one could figure that out, the depression Vasilisa seemed to fall into after the accident and Rose’s increased “zest for life” – temperamental and reckless behavior, rampant rule-breaking, increased need for, how did he put this, male company – and how both Vasilisa and Rose became even closer after the accident could all be explained away by the mental effects of losing all three Dragomirs horrifically, violently, and suddenly. Victor watched the pair and, with Robert’s help, identified the signs of a bond. That bond, paired with the accident report and the princess’ lack of specialization, gave Victor a pretty good idea of her abilities.

All Victor then had to do was confirm his suspicions.

For legal reasons, Victor couldn’t just kill someone and see if she brought them back. So, he recruited Natalie into helping him by compulsing her to capture and kill animals she could find within the wards of St. Vladimir’s, deliver them to Vasilisa, and then stay and watch to see if she brought them back. Natalie had started with the raven. When that proved to be successful, and confirmed Victor’s theory, others soon followed. And then both girls disappeared.

The anger he’d felt in the moment he’d found out they were gone…he’d never felt anything like it. He’d worked so hard, and all his work went up in smoke and in his rage, he’d commanded a small pack of psi-hounds to track them down and bring them back. But when the psi-hounds hadn’t returned, Victor’s flaring anger turned into molten lava – moving steadily and determined to destroy everything in its path.

When he’d heard Ivan Zeklos had died and his guardian had been remanded back to Court, Victor had pulled some strings within the Council and had him assigned to the Princess so Belikov could also lead the taskforce to find bring her back. They’d made repeated contact over the year-long investigation, and through that time Victor had gotten a pretty good read on the man and gained his trust as he worked out how to neutralize the man when the time came.

When Belikov met Rose, however, the plan began to take shape.

From the moment Belikov had spoken up for Rose, a wild girl he’d only met hours before, and then fought with Headmistress Kirova to keep her at St. Vladimir’s Academy, Victor knew something was afoot. In all of Victor’s dealings with the man, both during his days as primary guardian for the young Zeklos lord and then during the year he’d spent tracking down Rose and Vasilisa, he’d never known Belikov to go up against authority like that. The man seemed like a virulent rule-follower, and it would have taken some sort of big feeling to stand up for someone on the verge of expulsion – especially for why Rose was being expelled – and Victor, who’d already been deep in planning the kidnapping, was put on alert for a way to also deter Rose from responding immediately once Belikov brought the bond to light.

In the two months or so he’d spent planning the kidnapping to coincide with the Equinox Dance (ideal because almost every school guardian would be occupied with making sure teenagers didn’t spike the punch, cause ruckus with parties, or sneak off together), Victor – in addition to watching Vasilisa for more signs of her ability – had made Rose and Belikov a top priority. He’d had Spiridon follow them to their extra trainings, he’d had Natalie watch them during class time, and once in a while he’d eavesdrop on guardian conversations about the pair during meals. Looking back, Victor decided it wasn’t his fault he hadn’t made the charm powerful enough – he knew there were feelings, deep feelings, but he miscalculated the charm’s ability to completely override Belikov’s self-control.

It was powerful enough to delay the school guardians by an hour or two. But if Belikov hadn’t been so damn self-controlled, he’d have spent the entire night fucking Rose into his mattress in a lust-induced haze. It wouldn’t have mattered if Vasilisa hadn’t agreed to heal him immediately, nor would it have mattered it had taken his personal guardians so damn long to get to the secondary location with the Dragomir heir. Belikov’s self-control was too great to prevent complete success, and he’d managed to somehow break the lust charm to help Rose thwart Victor’s plans at his house in the woods.

Victor even managed to be thwarted during his escape from the school cells! All because Belikov had decided to be noble and self-sacrificing and had lied to Rose about why the lust charm worked. If Belikov had told her the truth, she wouldn’t have felt the need to confront Victor – which he knew had drawn Belikov’s interest – and Natalie would have finished her off and allowed him to escape through the wards and into the car he’d made sure was waiting in the forest.

He'd tried to get back at them, using his knowledge of the lust charm in court by exposing them for the entire Royal Council to hear. Although he was lying through his teeth, Belikov’s reputation was too impeccable for anyone to second-guess his story about the “attack charm.” The only two people who’d be able to say what really happened were Rose herself, who didn’t want to get Dimitri or herself in trouble, and Victor, who they wouldn’t believe no matter what he said. Also, the necklace, but Dimitri had broken the one-time only charm when he took it off Rose’s neck.

Looking back knowing the things he did now, Victor didn’t know if he really could have changed any of his plans. If Rose could really see through Vasilisa’s eyes, be in her head, and still be able to see and hear everything, Victor would have kidnapped her too. He couldn’t kill her – the bond was needed to siphon the bad energy off of the princess and Victor could have probably figured out a way to prolong Rose’s life. Not her sanity, mind you. The darkness probably would have broken her mind at some point, but as long as her heart was still beating the darkness would keep flowing. Besides, in addition to her usefulness as a vampiric sponge, Rose had grown into quite an attractive young woman.

And Victor had always liked collecting pretty things.

As Victor sat in his drafty cell in the depths of the Alaskan wilderness, with nothing to keep him company but his thoughts, he was struck by a sudden feeling he wasn’t going to be in that cell much longer. One way or another, he was going to get out of there and be free once more. When the time came, he needed to be ready.

He was coming for that throne. And this time, nothing would stop him.

Chapter Text

Alberta Petrov’s heart dropped through the floor as she approached the school gym.

It was early, only about two hours before the cafeteria opened for breakfast, and there was a little chill in the air as the sun cast an eerie pre-dawn peachy glow over barren grounds of St. Vladimir’s Academy. Despite the hour, Alberta made her way to the decrepit training gym in which she continued Rose Hathaway’s extra tutoring sessions. Although she was a good 10 yards away from the building, the captain of the school guard could still hear the angry sounds of someone working the punching bag to within an inch of its life as she got closer. She hesitated in front of the entrance, knowing what she’d find – what she found every morning since Rose had returned to St. Vladimir’s from her…sabbatical – but breathed in and mentally steeled herself before pushing open the heavy doors.

The scene before her was nothing new, but it broke Alberta’s heart all the same.

Rose, her surrogate daughter, was attacking the training dummy with a feral fierceness that made Alberta pity the next Strigoi she’d face off. Rose must have just moved off the punching bag, not out of any preference for beating the training dummy to a pulp, but because she’d punched a hole in it. Sand now coated the floor underneath the bag, spreading out like a grainy puddle, but Rose – still lost in whatever world she was really seeing – was continuing to pulverize the humanoid training dummy. Her hands were wrapped in black tape fraying at the knuckles as sweat ran down her face in waves. It made sense – Rose was wrapped up in the thick, oversized hoodie she wore in nearly every moment of downtime. But if there was already a hole in the punching bag and the dummy’s chest looked like it was going to literally cave in, then Rose must have been here for hours working out whatever prevented her from getting some much-needed rest.

If the dark – nearly black – circles under her eyes, pallid skin, and dull, flat hair were anything to go by, Rose hadn’t spent much time since the school was attacked asleep. And it was slowly killing her.

Leaning against the door frame and watching her favorite student ramped up her assault as Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” began playing from the old radio in the corner by the mats, Alberta wanted to cry. The Rose who’d attended St. Vladimir’s before the Strigoi invaded was not the same Rose after the attack.

And Alberta knew much, if not all, of Rose’s struggles in last six weeks had to do with Dimitri Belikov.

To pretty much the entire student body, and most of the guardians, Rose had lost her mentor when he was forcibly turned into a Strigoi. She’d lost someone she’d grown incredibly close to in a short amount of time – someone with whom she’d spent around 40-plus hours a week training and talking, someone who had advocated for her when she needed it most and had helped her blossom both physically and mentally into the guardian (and person) she was meant to be. It was completely natural, they thought, and acceptable for someone as young as she to be so affected by Belikov’s turning – especially so soon after an unprecedented attack by Strigoi on Academy grounds – she needed to leave the Academy for a bit to grieve. And her attitude upon her return was also completely natural, because she was under a lot of stress as she prepared for the Trials – the final test of guardian aptitude and the test that would decide both her ability to graduate and whether or not she’d be assigned to Vasilisa Dragomir.

No one, save for Alberta, Stan Alto, and – maybe – Yuri Agafonov knew about the true nature of their relationship. She honestly didn’t even think Rose’s friends knew. At least, knew for sure. They probably had their suspicions – how could they not? – but if the Princess had known, she wouldn’t have thrown such a temper tantrum when Rose began to withdraw into herself and away from others. Right?

Regardless, Alberta’s heart broke for the woman she considered her daughter. Not only was Rose dealing with the trials of first love, but she was also dealing with the harsh realities of their world when her love was so cruelly taken from her. Rose was a strong person; she couldn’t have survived this long if she wasn’t. But Alberta thought something had irreparably died in Rose when Dimitri was taken by that monster.

And Alberta, who’d raised Rose since she was a young toddler, had been at a loss for what to do.

Janine Hathaway having a child had been shocking. The elder Hathaway was so dedicated to her role of guardian and, despite the abusive nature of her first assignment, it was odd to think about the highly responsible Scottish dhampir getting pregnant in the first place, much less going through with it. No one (save for Janine, her partner, and potentially Lord Szelsky) knew the identify of Rose’s father, and it was painfully obvious he wasn’t involved whatsoever in Rose’s life because Janine – after she had given birth – had spent only a week or so on leave before returning to work as a guardian. Baby in tow. It wasn’t like she could have done anything else with the infant Rose, but Janine, whose charge spent the majority of his year in Nepal but traveled around the winter holidays, knew it unsafe to cart a baby around the globe doing a dangerous job had decided the Academy was a good place to drop her daughter off during the three or so months she was on the move with her charge.

While Alberta didn’t fault the younger woman for her decision, because it was the smart thing to do for all involved, the amount of time Janine began leaving Rose with St. Vladimir’s incrementally increased the older Rose got. Although the school had a nursery on campus for teachers, the school wasn’t a daycare, and It was when Janine managed to leave her three-year-old daughter in Montana for nearly nine months she was told by school officials she could not leave her daughter there for more than the allotted three months for working guardian mothers. But hours shy of Rose’s fourth birthday, Janine had managed to turn over her daughter to the Academy for good and signed away her parental rights and making St. Vladimir’s Rose’s parent.

In cases such as Rose’s (because Rose was not the first dhampir turned over to an Academy as a ward, but she was the first at St. Vladimir’s, beating Eddie Castile by two years), the ward would be remanded into the custody of the current headmistress or headmaster. Ellen Kirova, though an educator (barely) also had a dislike for children – it really mystified Alberta as to why she became a headmistress – and had told Alberta she would be taking over Rose’s care. Well, maybe “told” wasn’t the right word; “informed” would be the more correct one. Alberta, who’d been brought up as an only child herself, had been truly terrified at the prospect of raising a small child while working as the head of the school guard and had called her mother – a German human by the name of Carolina Weber who’d allegedly met her Moroi father (an unknown-to-Alberta Russian man with the surname ‘Petrov’) at a café in Munich while he was on business – to ask for advice.

“Just love her,” Carolina had said, her accented voice thick with emotion after Alberta had explained the distressing situation. “Just love her and do the best you can for her. You will know what to do.”

So, Alberta loved Rose. And her mother was right – Alberta did know what to do.

Alberta taught the little girl her ABCs, how to tie her shoes, how to comb her hair and brush her teeth, sang away her nightmares with lullabies, helped her with homework, showed her happy musicals like “Annie” and “The Sound of Music,” taught her kindness and selflessness, and tried to do all of the things that not only Carolina had done for Alberta, but also what Janine couldn’t do for Rose.

Although Rose had befriended Vasilisa Dragomir early, Vasilisa’s parents Eric and Rhea didn’t completely understand their daughter’s best friend’s situation until the girls were in middle school. Even then, they had only taken Rose off campus a handful of times – a few times for a vacation the summer before the girls began high school, and the second time for the shopping trip that led to their deaths.

Before that, all Rose’s summers and holidays were spent on-campus with Alberta, Eddie Castile, and the school guardians. Whatever clothes or supplies Rose needed were obtained by using a stipend provided to the school by the Guardian Council (and then Lissa’s parents died, and Lissa began buying Rose clothes online with her inheritance). But it was Alberta took her shopping for her first bras and bought Rose her first period products – and then taught her how to use them. Alberta was there for it all, including the rollercoaster – the tears, anger, resentment, attitude, rebellion -- that was puberty.

She was also there for the boys.

Rose, so unlike her mother, had always been a social butterfly. She needed to be around people, flourished in crowds, and people were drawn to her energy from the time she arrived at the Academy. When Alberta was given the task of raising Rose, her concerns for the child at the time did not involve males. Although she’d had a few flings herself throughout the course of her career with a variety of individuals (she was only in her mid-fifties and she was still a spry person who had needs), some long-term casual “whenever we were in the same place” relationships and some for just a single night, Alberta hadn’t seemed to realize Rose could eventually want the same thing with someone else.

Or maybe Alberta just prayed to every god she knew – and then some she didn’t – that Rose wouldn’t figure out her effect on the male population and how to use it.

When they had been kids, it was kind of cute to see Rose and Vasilisa running from one side of the playground to the other while a string of little boys – both dhampir and Moroi – would follow Rose like the vampiric, child-friendly version of the Pied Piper story. But when the girls hit middle school and she noticed the innocent nature of that turn into something else, Alberta had once again placed a call to her mother for advice. Receiving the extremely unhelpful answer of, “I don’t know, because I never had to worry about that with you,” Alberta had talked to the school nurse, Izolda Olendzki, and together they had sat down Rose and talked to her about the “birds and the bees.” Rose, too busy reveling in her growing friendship with Lissa and the Dragomir family, her burgeoning talent for combat, and her general disdain for the rest of book-based academia, hadn’t particularly cared about her male peers outside of outshining them. Rose had her two best male friends, Eddie and Mason Ashford, and her best girl friend Lissa, and she could kick the butts of everyone in gym class, so why was she supposed to care about how boys were reacting to her again?

But then, right before Lissa’s family had died, freshman Rose – still in her age-appropriate Equinox dance dress and black kitten heels Alberta and Rose had picked out together in Missoula last week using the meager funds from the stipend – had walked into Alberta’s office after the dance ended and plopped down on the couch.

“So, Andy Taurus asked me if I wanted to sit with him at lunch on Monday.” Rose’s face was just in absolute shock, as if she couldn’t process why a popular, wealthy, older Moroi boy wanted to sit with her at lunch in front of the school much less acknowledged her existence. She looked at Alberta with big eyes, the chocolate irises glazed like a donut with total confusion and panic at the notion of the first attractive male outside of her social circle making overt advances. “He’s a sophomore, Birdie. He said he broke up with Jenny Lazar last week because he wanted to ask me to the dance, but then never got the chance so he wanted to know if I would have lunch with him at school. What do I do?”

Alberta felt her heart drop through her stomach, at a complete loss for words. This was the day she’d dreaded happening, and she thought she’d be prepared for this conversation. But with Rose sitting there in her dress, a navy blue halter with silver sparkles climbing up like ivy from a silver belt that moved into a midnight tulle bottom half, her dark hair piled on top of her head in loose curls and minimal makeup enhancing her features, Alberta was at a complete loss. What did she say to the girl she’d been raising – full-time, at least, since the girl was four years old – about dealing with male interest? How did she balance wanting Rose to have the best life had to offer and wanting her to stay far away from an entitled Moroi boy like Andy Taurus who was most likely looking for something from a younger dhampir girl she wasn’t ready to give?

Alberta, instead of warning Rose about boys like Andy Taurus, decided to play it safe. Biggest mistake of her life. Because asking Rose what she wanted to do (sit with him, of course) and telling Rose in return to take it VERY slow with a boy like that (without getting into detail about why the girl needed to be on her guard)…well, maybe if Alberta had come right out and said the boy was a no-good royal who only wanted Rose for one thing she was nowhere near ready for, Alberta wouldn’t be watching Rose beat a training dummy into a pulp wearing her dead mentor’s hoodie today.

It was highly possible be the situation between Rose and Dimitri Belikov would have happened regardless, but it seemed like Alberta didn’t learn from her incorrect way of handling the situation with the Taurus boy when she found out about the burgeoning feelings between Rose and her mentor.

Just like when Rose had approached Alberta about sitting with the Taurus boy at lunch one day in the fall of her freshman year, Alberta had been at a loss for words when Stan Alto – of all people – had come to her one day in the fall of Rose’s senior year. Although he was impressed with Rose’s rapid improvement and refinement in her classes, Alto was very much concerned about the development of Rose and Dimitri’s mentorship into something not-so-scholarly. Instead, of reacting with a pragmatic, somewhat aggressive plan, Alberta had simply closed her eyes, sighed deeply, walked over to her “special cabinet” and poured both herself and Stan a generous amount of cognac before settling down in a plush armchair next to the roaring fire – the same chair Rose had sat in just three years earlier wide-eyed and curious about her discovery of boys.

“So, you’re seeing it, too?” Alberta had asked Stan after twenty minutes of silence had passed.

Stan slowly nodded his head. “Yeah. I thought it was weird when Belikov – normally so passive – confronted me like he did about my…teaching methods…after Rose was brought back to the Academy.” Stan did look ashamed as he remembered the memory of humiliating Rose during class that day (Alberta had also torn a strip off him verbally before beating him bloody in the gym later during guardian training hours). “I watched them, together and separate, and pieced it together. Fucking incredible.” He took a deep sip of the alcohol, smacking his lips after he was done.

Alberta, feeling as nonplussed as he looked, stared silently at the flames roaring in the fireplace as she held her highball glass securely in her hand.

She’d noticed the change in behavior, and while she knew Belikov and Rose had been spending more time together training, she hadn’t imagined a new element to their dynamic had been subtly brewing beneath the surface. Then again, she was busy dealing with her job as captain of the school guards – coordinating guardian efforts to cover two campuses which contained a small population of almost 3,000 between the students, teachers, and staff with not enough guardians to cover them all efficiently – and acting as administrator of all of the novices and evaluator of their curriculum. Recently, brutally massacred animals had been popping up in Vasilisa Dragomir’s bedroom – the private, heavily-secured space of a Moroi from a nearly-extinct royal line.

A romance brewing between a 24-year-old guardian and her 17-year-old ward was not on her list of “shit I need to worry about.”

But the more she thought about it, it made sense – Dimitri Belikov, usually so passive and deferential to authority, toed the line to insubordination when Rose had been dragged back to the academy. After the adjustment period, Rose – who had brushed off almost every single authority figure since she was small – had begun working with Dimitri to improve. While that could be brushed off as Rose’s newfound respect for the man she’d previously called her “Russian jailer” and Dimitri’s refusal to fail at the task of training someone who was a favorite to become his guarding partner, add in the fact they were both attractive individuals in their own right, single, and relatively close in age and spending all that time together in close quarters, it made sense crushes had developed.

Alberta sighed and turned to face Stan. “Well, do we stop it?”

Stan huffed and took another sip. “I honestly don’t know if we can at this point. He – at least – seems to be a little too far gone. But he won’t do anything about it. He’s too honorable and by-the-book. Belikov won’t do anything that could possibly compromise her or his duty.”

A moment. “But still,” Alberta said, “we should at least talk to him about it.”

And talk to him about it Alberta did, especially after the highly-charged confrontation with. It was awkward, rife with thinly veiled threats on Alberta’s end, and ended with both of them red as tomatoes and not making eye contact. But she thought he understood where Alberta was coming from, and she saw how the relationship between the two became more distant – physically and emotionally. But she still saw the looks in their eyes, lovelorn, become increasingly ringed with sadness, and she felt even guiltier about being the cause of their distress. She knew Dimitri – who really was by-the-book – would be holding them back because of their conversation and the rules already surrounding them.

In her defense, Alberta thought it was puppy love mixed with a dash of exciting due to the relationship’s forbidden nature. Rose had enjoyed flouting the rules – always knowing where to toe the line – just for the sheer joy of it, while Dimitri – a rule follower now, though she heard it hadn’t always been that way – probably enjoyed being a smidge selfish after years of dedication to the Moroi. Alberta believed it was just a phase and would eventually blow over in the face of all of the challenges associated with graduation and the real world looming over them. Rose wasn’t mature enough to maintain a real relationship, and Dimitri’s career was just beginning.

So, the semester went on.

Alberta’s days were spent dealing with the fallout of Mason Ashford’s death, ramping up security in response to rising external threats, filling out progress reports for Rose and the other senior novices for the guardian council for the upcoming Trials, and then setting the rotation of guardian “attacks” for Field Experience. Much of what she did regarding the relationship between her ward and the guardian became less “I’m watching you like a hawk” and more “I’ll know if anything happens, because I’ll know by looking at you,” and Alberta put her trust in Dimitri’s honor and dedication to rules to stop anything untoward from happening while she handled her ever-increasing responsibilities.

But after the attack on St. Vladimir’s and after Dimitri was “lost” in the caves, Rose’s sharp spiral into a zombie-like state of shocked sadness made Alberta realize just how wrong she was about the seriousness of the feelings brewing between them.

For almost three weeks, Rose simply existed. She slept half the day away and, when she did manage to emerge from her room – which was only for hours at a time, generally only for meals (of which she only nibbled) or services – her hair was knotted, dull, and deflated. The dark circles under her eyes grew larger and more pronounced with every passing day, and her naturally tanned face became almost a sickly pale from the lack of sunlight and nutrition. For someone usually so full of fire, it was as if someone had snuffed her out. Alberta had initially attributed this to lingering trauma of the attack and seeing her fellow guardians struck down and she was partially correct. The lack of familiar faces and familiar banter echoing across the grounds and in the common areas made St. Vlad’s become this strange ghost world – a shadow of what it was before the attack – and the students who were still on campus were all withdrawn and on edge.

Although Alberta didn’t put it together initially, being so swamped with paperwork, death notifications, student transfers, coordinating with the Council for more guardians for those who remained, and setting up therapy for the students, when she walked into the gym one morning to find Rose cradling a huge black hoodie with Cyrillic writing on the back and crying into the fabric, the realization hit Alberta like a wrecking ball. It was Dimitri.

Rose was mourning Dimitri.

While she hadn’t seen them on the battlefield the campus had become while fighting the Strigoi, Alberta had heard snippets. Rose, apparently, had teamed up with Christian Ozera and used his firepower to cut down a ton of Strigoi – almost singlehandedly defending the elementary school and turning the tide of the initial battle in the school’s favor. Then, Rose and Dimitri had fought together like demons in the caves when the guardians and the senior novices had gone on their rescue mission. But, at the last minute, an ambush by Strigoi at the entrance of the caves caused Dimitri to save Rose – he literally picked up Rose and tossed her out into the safety of the daylight – and, in the process, sacrifice himself. Despite Rose’s physical struggles and verbal protests to get back into the caves to save him, two male guardians locked her in a hold and pulled her back to the Academy as she watched the Strigoi pounce on her mentor. Somehow, later that night, she got found out Dimitri hadn’t been killed but instead had been turned.

Being turned was a fate worse than death for a dhampir, and a nightmare scenario for the Moroi world. Guardians-turned-Strigoi were some of the biggest threats to the safety of Moroi since they were already combat-ready and possessed intimate knowledge of security operations, but Strigoi Dimitri – with his impressive-even-for-guardian-standards skill set, resume, and combat abilities, plus his intelligence – would be practically unstoppable. Being Strigoi amplified everything physical about the individual -strength, speed – but also, as Alberta had been discovering through some of her own personal investigations, the emotional.

When Natalie Dashkov had turned but had repeatedly stated she loved her father and did it to help him, Alberta began looking into Strigoi cases to figure out if some Strigoi were acting out of emotional attachment for someone not already turned. She found a lot of these cases. Most were cases where Strigoi had either gone back to collect their loved ones for the purposes of keeping them close or turning them – like the Ozera parents had done with Christian – or had turned to help a family member – like Natalie. As she watched Rose cry over Dimitri’s discarded hoodie almost two weeks after the attack, Alberta realized not only the depth of feeling between the two was not as superficial as she previously believed, but also that turning Rose would now be a top priority for Strigoi Dimitri – if not priority No. 1.

When Rose showed up in front of Kirova's office after her 18th birthday, discharge papers in hand, Alberta - thinking something like this could happen, remembering Stan's report back in the fall - intercepted her charge before Rose could make it official. It was lucky she did, because what Rose had been planning was - at best - a poorly constructed plan thought up by a grief-stricken teenager completely disregarding their individual safety. At worst, it was intentionally suicidal. Regardless, Alberta pulled Rose inter her office and - after a tear-filled conversation - got her to agree to an alternative solution: more individual trainings to help her graduate on time and become a full guardian. Once she was graduated, Rose could then take a temporary leave of absence over the summer to do whatever she needed to do to get closure. Alberta's idea would hopefully put enough distance between this emotional reaction and buy some time to convince Rose to not go after Dimitri.

While that plan would most likely fail, it would be easier for Rose to go off if she was already graduated / promised. While Albera didn't know how to help Rose deal with boys / romantic entanglements, she could help prepare Rose for the trials ahead.

As helpless as Alberta had felt since the attack, she finally felt a sense of purpose. Keeping Rose safe – continuing her training to make sure she could protect herself when Dimitri eventually came for her – would be something Alberta would do.

Chapter Text

“To Dimitri!”

Olena Belikova raised her glass of vodka high in the air, and the crowd of neighbors, coworkers, guardians, and family tightly packed into her house and back lawn mimicked her with the drunken gusto a group can only achieve at a celebration or a wake.

“To Dimitri!”

Unfortunately for Olena, this was not a celebration – this was a wake for her only son. And that realization, which had been making its sudden appearance on and off throughout the last month or so, sobered her and sucked out all the enjoyment she would have otherwise had at being at a gathering of people she hadn’t gotten a chance to see in a long time. A brief moment of silence as the crowd threw back their drinks, and then the requisite coughing crackled through the air as the liquor blazed a trail of fire down the throats of some of the individuals unused to the afterburn of real Russian vodka.

Namely, Rose Hathaway.

Olena smiled as she glanced at the dhampir beauty sitting on the outskirts of the crowd and watched sadly as the honeyed highlights of Rose’s long, full, chestnut hair glinted in the sunset as she tossed back her shot of vodka and immediately started coughing, dainty, yet dangerous hands coming up to cover her mouth.

The girl wore no makeup. She had on a pair of worn, ripped blue jeans, and battered, second-hand Converse, and was swimming in what Olena believed to be one of Dimitri’s old hoodies, one with his name on the back he’d received as part of his schooling at St. Basil’s Academy. It was mid-summer in Baia, and although the temperature had dropped down to the mid-sixties as it got later in the day, she knew Rose must still be sweating a bit in the bulky fabric. But she admired the girl – no, woman – for sticking it out and memorializing her son the way he should be memorialized.

Olena wasn’t a fool, no matter how much Rose emphasized the mentorship part of her and Dimitri’s relationship in the states. Olena had known something was up when Dimka had called her soon after he’d found her and the princess in that foggy college town and dragged them kicking and screaming back to St. Vladimir’s. She could hear the desperation in her only son’s voice as he spoke only of Rose – this headstrong, but promising, yet also uncontrollable girl – while keeping his assignation to the last Dragomir princess as almost an afterthought. In the past, Dimitri would have been crowing about his prestigious assignment, excited about the future possibilities if he could stay with the young royal.

Instead, Dimitri spoke only of Rose.

And Olena knew, in the way all mothers know, that Dimitri had found his partner. In this case, it was quite literally the dhampir with which he was supposed to partner to guard Vasilisa after they graduated this past spring. The irony was beautiful while it lasted.

* ~ *

Baia is not the remote wasteland everyone seems to think towns are outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg and Omsk, cities where the lights never turned off and only got brighter as the sunlight dimmed and a different sort of atmosphere took over the streets. But it is a bit more rural in that people don’t just drive through it on their way to someplace else. One would actually have to have Baia as their destination to get to this town, which made it ideal for ex-guardian dhampir and their children to congregate as a community.

Blood-whore communes, they were called. There was truth to that, but for almost all the women who lived in this community it wasn’t a choice. Most women, like Olena, had had abusive male Moroi partners who took blood and sex – sometimes by force – and left the women to deal with the regret, shame, and children that came as consequences. Some worked hard, honest jobs during the day…but occasionally would venture into town because they needed a little something extra to keep the lights on.

And then there were the women – and men – so hooked on the bite they made stereotypes of the rest. Olena and the others tried to help these people, but sometimes the individual had to want to be saved. These were the stories that bled out into their world at large, and so people painted all these communities with a single brush and taught their children that willingly walking into a dhampir commune and shrugging off their guardian duties was the peak of shame.

So, when Rose was brought into the community by one of Zmey’s nice town cars and delivered to Olena’s doorstep looking haggard and forlorn, Olena had immediately assumed Rose was going through things that wouldn’t mesh with the risky life a guardian led. Less than an hour later, it turned out, Rose wasn’t on Olena Belikova’s doorstep because a Moroi had sweet-talked her into sex and left her pregnant and alone. Rose was here, cuddling her son’s prized silver stake, to do what no one else had bothered to do and inform her that her only son – her pride, joy, and protector – had become the very thing he’d been trained to kill.

It hadn’t taken too much longer after that for the news to make its way around the town.

Rose had, apparently, made an impression upon both a young Alchemist named Sydney Sage and Zmey, and so the town – full of women who liked to gossip – had quickly found out Rose’s purpose when word started creeping in about the battle at St. Vladimir’s. The only reason Rose Hathaway, a hero of the battle and best friend and guardian to the Last Dragomir, had to be in their sleepy little town without Dimitri Belikov as because something bad had happened to Dimitri. And, based on the news they could gather, dying would have been a much preferred fate than being turned into a Strigoi.

Regardless, the community supported its own. Almost exactly a month later, arms filled to the brim with food and bags filled to bursting with Russian vodka, the town made its way into Olena Belikova’s house to celebrate Dimitri’s heroics and mourn his fate. And when Rose showed up wearing his hoodie, shadowed eyes flecked with red, and cuddling his prized silver stake, no one at the party treated her like they would if she had simply been his former student.

Instead, they followed Olena’s lead and treated her like his widow.

Somewhere between her crying, Karolina and Sonya’s bawling, Yeva’s silence, bringing home Viktoria from St. Basil’s and then her crying, Olena found time to observe Rose closely. After informing Olena of her son’s fate, Rose had been directed to bunk in his old room and then moved herself into the background of the environment at large, helping the Belikova clan grieve the loss of their family member from the shadows. She cleaned, helped make the meals, played with Paul for hours, kept Zoey occupied, went and got groceries, and trained in the old gym space Dimitri built for himself in the outside barn to use during breaks in the early hours of the morning and in the late hours of the evening.

Once or twice, when Olena’s nightmares of what she imagined her son’s final moments to be had startled her awake in the middle of the night, she happened to glance out the window only to observe Rose walking the cobbled streets of Baia, stake out, on the lookout for danger.

Looking for Dimitri, the little voice inside Olena’s head clarified.

But Olena knew her son too well – the insanely dangerous, nightmarish animal he’d become would hightail it back to Russia where it was familiar and comfortable, but he would never come near the town where his only remaining family lived to ensure their safety. Strigoi, Olena believed, were just hedonistic humans without a moral code turned up to the highest setting. They did what they want and took what they want, which made them extremely dangerous creatures, but deep down there was still something in them that wanted to be comforted by the familiar, wanted to belong, and cared just enough about certain things to dictate their actions.

Olena and her daughters had asked for details, of course, after the crying finally stopped. Rose had been the last person to see him as human, and Olena, Karo, Sonya, and Vika had all wanted to know what happened in Dimitri’s final moments. But Rose refused to talk about it.

Instead, Rose had focused on his actions during the battle – described how he’d saved countless students and teachers and guardians, how they’d worked together, fighting back-to-back like true guardian partners and – along with Christian Ozera – cutting down any Strigoi in their path until the Strigoi themselves were running back to their hideout in the woods in fear for their un-lives. Olena and her daughters – and Yeva, sitting in the large family room – listened, desperate for the details, but also watching how Rose’s eyes lit up with when she talked about him and how her voice took on a breathy, wonderous quality as she described the way her son pulled the vulnerable out of harm’s way before taking on Death itself.

Olena expected there to be a bit of hero-worship coming from her son’s pupil, but she didn’t expect to see the pure love shining brightly from Rose’s eyes as she talked of Dimitri’s passion for his work and how much people admired him at the school and at Court. Then again, Olena thought, she should not have been surprised. The clues were there the entire time, but Olena couldn’t put them together in her grief.

Rose had done a masterful job of hiding her feelings – up until that point.

She’d faded into the scenery, allowing the family time together to wallow while keeping herself busy with menial tasks where she didn’t have to interact meaningfully with anyone except little Paul. She’d made her home in Dimitri’s room, and on more than one occasion when Olena had peeked her head in to check on their guest, had spotted Rose curled up against a pillow and covered in nothing but socks and an oversized hoodie with her legs tangled up in the comforter. When Olena had caught a whiff of Dimitri’s cologne one morning while folding wash, she’d whirled around with hope rising in her chest only to burst into tears all over again when she realized it was just Rose who had scurried past the door on her way to get coffee. Olena realized Rose must have sprayed something she’d found in the bathroom on either his clothes or his bed (or both) to grieve him in her own way.

Coming to the realization Rose was in love with Olena’s son triggered something in Olena’s memory, and a hundred different conversations with Dimitri over the course of the last 10 or so months through text, email, and call suddenly took on different meaning.

In the span of a month and a half, or maybe a little less, Dimitri had gone from complaining about being saddled with this headstrong, reckless girl to becoming one of her biggest supporters, defending her actions to his mother and being both awed by and afraid of this girl, who had somehow gotten under his skin in a way no one ever had been able to do before. He’d talked about how he wanted to train her the way he’d been trained so he knew she was going to keep herself safe (oh yeah, he’d added as an afterthought, and keep Vasilisa safe, too), and how he was proud she was really caring about her studies – even in the classes that didn’t involve combat training or guarding theory.

Sometime after the winter break, toward the spring months, Dimitri started laying groundwork for a meeting. They’d be about to get off the phone, and Dimitri would ask if Vika would have to go to summer training – again – and if they thought she’d be OK with another person staying in her room for a couple of weeks. He’d wanted to bring “his Roza” home so she could meet his family and see his hometown. Olena knew something must have changed in their relationship for Dimitri to even consider bringing a woman home, much less a dhampir…much less one who is still in high school! Olena had many misgivings about that, especially the whole ‘keeping it a secret part’ though she understood, but Yeva – in her own way – had told her there would be no one else for either of them and they had to get over it and move on from there.

So Olena had, despite her own misgivings, begun working to accept her son’s chosen partner. By the time summer hit, Olena was even getting excited by the prospect. When she opened the door to find Rose, she had been over the moon, but that was before she realized this was not the meeting she had envisioned.

At all.

* ~ *

“Roza should speak!”

Olena was jolted out of her memories by the sudden yell and craned her neck to find the culprit but gave up relatively quickly to refocus on Rose. The girl was uncharacteristically silent, looking out into the crowd with a somewhat confused look on her face before shaking her head in a silent decline.

Well. That wouldn’t do.

“Please Rose,” Olena pleaded. She needed to hear for herself how the woman felt about her son.

Rose, unable to deny Olena anything at the moment, hesitated before acquiescing. Rose took a hefty gulp of her vodka, shuddering minimally and hesitated briefly before drawing in a breath.

“For the longest time,” Rose began, laughing a bit, “I hated him.”

A pause. The silence in the crowd was deafening.

“That huge brick wall of a man tracked me down, humiliated me, dragged me back to that hellhole of a school, and tortured me until I couldn’t feel my teeth. He was stubborn, mysterious, and his Zen life lessons made me want to punch holes in cement. He infuriated me to no end, and there were days where I wished he hadn’t stepped inside St. Vlad’s at all.” Another pause, this time to take a small sip from her glass while she contemplated her next words. “And then, I realized he was saving my life.”

Her lips quirked into a small smile, as her chocolate eyes became glassy with tears and she enraptured the gathering with her words.

“The person who is standing here, in this wonderful town in front of all of you beautiful people wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Dimitri Belikov – either because she would have been brutally killed by a newly-turned Strigoi or she would have failed out of school and been exiled. Within just hours of meeting me, actually knocking me flat on my ass, he stood up for me against my headmistress. Something no one else had really done for me before. He put in hours of his own time before and after classes and in between guarding Lissa and the school to train me – to teach me, really – how to use my head and how to keep myself and my loved ones alive.”

Olena’s tears were falling with abandon now, and she could see from a quick glance around the crowd no one else looked much different. But Rose wasn’t done yet. She straightened from her position leaning against the fence and addressed everyone with gusto.

“I had my own petty high school dramas with friends and teachers…and the student body at large…and it couldn’t have been easy to go what he was going through after Ivan and then suddenly have to be responsible for another high-profile charge and the success of someone like me. But he never let his frustrations get in the way of trying to be the best possible person he could be for Lissa, for the school, and for me. He would sit and listen to my problems and give what I called his ‘Zen life lessons,’ he would help me with my homework if he could, and he would stand up for me when one of the teachers was being particularly unfair, but also take time to make me see reason as well. And even though he had saved me countless other times, it’s because of Dimitri’s kindness that I was able to save my friends and myself when we were held hostage by Strigoi in Spokane and again when I had to fight for the lives of my friends and myself when Strigoi invaded campus. And if that wasn’t enough, Dimitri spent the few crucial seconds he could have used to get out of the caves and save himself by tossing me out into the sunlight as the Strigoi surprised us from the shadows.”

Rose’s tears were falling freely now and creating big, fat lines down her olive-toned face. She knocked back the rest of her glass with a shudder, and then looked around again. “Dimitri meant so many different things to me, but before anything he was my best friend. He saved me so many times and continues to save me even though he’s gone. I miss him every day…and someday, I hope to get the chance to repay the favor by saving him.”

Olena dropped her glass in her haste to get to Rose, tears also falling down her eyes. She made her way to Rose in a couple seconds and enveloped the crying girl into a deep embrace.

If things had been different, Olena would have been over the moon to welcome this girl into the family as Dimitri’s wife. But, for now, as the two women clung to each other in their grief, Olena would embrace Rose Hathaway as her son’s widow.