She bit her tongue. Bit it hard, the pain chasing through her nerve endings and alchemizing into something close to pleasure. When her mouth opened under his, it was flooded with welling blood.
He groaned at the taste of it, red eyes going wide with surprise and something like fear. His hands gripped her arms as he pushed her body back against the brick of the wall, holding her in place. He’d been careful before, but he wasn’t being careful now as he licked her mouth; and it amazed her as much as it terrified her. He kissed her ferociously, savagely, their lips sliding together with bruising fervor. The pain in her tongue became a distant throbbing. Her fingers dug into the muscles of his back, their bodies pressed so close that he must have felt every hitch in her breath, every shuddering beat of her heart. And as scared of him as she had been, right then she was more frightened of herself.
Gavriel reeled back from her, lips ruddy. He wiped his mouth against the back of his hand, her blood smearing over his skin. Gazing at her for a long moment with something like horror, as though he was seeing her for the first time, he spoke. “You are more dangerous than daybreak.”
Before Tana could reply, he stepped into the lengthening shadows of morning and was gone.
CHAPTER 18
I want to be all used up when I die.
—George Bernard Shaw
When Gavriel was young, Russia was nearing the end of her Golden Age. Revolution was coming, but the aristocracy pretended otherwise, swilling Champagne and speaking in perfectly accented French in their gilt parlors. The books of the day gloried in the nobility of suicide, willful decay, and romantic melancholy.
At twenty, Gavriel, called Gavriil then, had inherited his grandfather’s voluptuous mouth and flashing eyes, but he didn’t seem to be living down to that inheritance. He was the middle child, with a little sister called Katya, sparkling and sharp as a diamond in the Imperial Crown, and an older brother named Aleksander, who was constantly in debt to decadence. Aleksander was a drunk, a gambler, and a womanizer; each a costly habit on its own. Combined, they threatened to bankrupt the family.
Their father, the vikont, was three years in the grave when their mother begged Gavriel to talk with his brother and coax him to be more reasonable in his debauches. But it was impossible to convince Aleksander of anything that inconvenienced him now that he’d inherited the title and all the land that came with it.
“You are the good brother,” Aleksander would say. “There need only be one of those in a family, don’t you think? Two is indecent.”
“I will switch places with you if you like, Sasha,” said Gavriel. “Irresponsibility is a younger son’s portion.”
Aleksander would hear none of it. And, in truth, Gavriel was too distracted to make much argument. He had fallen in love with a girl named Roza, met through a friend’s sister. Roza had amber eyes and a mass of hair the dark blond of buckwheat honey. When she’d glanced shyly in his direction that first time, a half smile on her mouth, he found that he could barely catch his breath.
Later, he couldn’t quite remember what they’d spoken of—only that he’d been desperate to charm her. Incredibly, he seemed to have succeeded. She agreed to let him pay court to her. Her father, the stolid owner of a factory, had more than one daughter to settle and seemed to find Gavriel’s title and connections enough to make up for the paucity of his finances.
Love took Gavriel as nothing had before. He was drunk with it. He wrote Roza long letters in which he shamelessly stole lines from Tyutchev to describe her eyes. He cajoled his mother into letting him give her a sapphire ring that could have been sold instead. He took a new interest in his clothes, suddenly aware of every worn cuff and hem on his coats.
The longer it went on, the less Aleksander found it amusing. “You’re making a fool of yourself over a merchant’s daughter,” he would say before Gavriel stalked from the table. “It’s one thing to marry her for her money, but you do her too much honor by this display.”
Maybe that was what prompted Aleksander. Perhaps he wanted his responsible, careful, dull younger brother back. Or maybe he merely thought that since Gavriel couldn’t see what a fool he was making of himself, Aleksander would make a bigger fool of him—big enough to make him see.
Whatever the reason, Aleksander set out to and succeeded in seducing and debauching Roza. She wept as she explained, sitting on a silk-covered couch and begging Gavriel not to be angry, that she and his brother had never meant to fall in love.
Gavriel sat stock-still. Inside him roiled such turmoil that he feared that should he move, he would smash every piece of furniture in the room, crack every pane of every window, until there was nothing but shining splinters where the parlor had been.