The Promise of the Moroi

Chapter Five: Then.

9 years ago…

Three months.  That’s how long it had taken for the honeymoon to be over.  He and Ivan had been visiting the young couple at their rented house--a shack compared with what Sergei had grown up in--when they had started arguing.  Svetlana had called him a damned fool, and Sergei had slapped her.  Ivan stood there, shocked to his core that any man would raise his hand to a Moroi royal, even if she were only royal by marriage.  Dimitri had started forward, but Svetlana moved first.  A perfect right hook slammed into Sergei’s nose, followed by one of the most vicious--and pitiful--fights Dimitri had ever witnessed.  Sergei would never live this down--if Svetlana let him live.

Sergei tried to block his tiny wife, she had countered and struck true every time.  It hadn’t taken long before Sergei was a bloody, bruised heap on the floor.  Dimitri was trying to decide if he should step in and try to separate Svetlana from her now-terrified husband, but instead of striking him again, she hissed in a voice that seemed to come straight from Hell itself: “If you ever strike me again, you had better make sure I never get up, because I will tear you apart and leave you to die slowly.  Do you understand me?”

Whie there were many words to describe Sergei, Dimitri had never thought that complete idiot quite fit.  As Sergei began nodding vigorously that he understood her, he figured he still couldn’t include that in a description of his, well, he supposed friend. 

“Good.”  Svetlana turned and saw the two men still in the room, frozen in place by the suddenness of the violence of he response.  “You want to add something?” she challenged them in her native English.  Ivan shook his head, stll dazed, but Dimitri pursed his lips as he studied the whimpering Sergei.

“I think you missed a spot,” he said, gesturing to the yet-undamaged groin that Sergei did not have to cup to stop the waves of agony that came from being racked. 

“I know.”  Her voice was smug.  Dimitri looked over at her and understood.  This, Sergei could eventually forgive--Dimitri would help him see the wisdom in doing so immediately, if not sooner--but agonizingly painful and swollen balls in addition to being beaten by his much smaller, presumably weaker little wife?  That would never be forgiven or forgotten.

With that, Svetlana headed toward the stairs.  Dimitri’s eyes followed her, noticing the heat of the fight still in her walk, in the sway of her hips, in the glance she threw back at him before she walked up the stairs.  Once she was out of sight, he knelt down next to Sergei and, instead of giving him a hand up as the other man expected, he explained to the young Moroi lord what would happen if he ever harmed a woman, especially his wife, again.  He was not graphic, but then, the best of the Communists had not had to be, and Dimitri’s teachers in the guardian program at school had been involved in some very unpleasant dealings over their careers.  Perhaps Sergei’s young bride would not understand the subtlety of his threats, but Sergei did, and that was all that mattered.  He left Ivan to help Sergei clean up with a single word of advice: Ice.

He took the stairs two at a time, looking for the room where Svetlana was…he didn’t know what.  Packing, perhaps, to return to America and her family, before petitioning for divorce?  Planning to kill her husband and hide the body, inheriting everything that was his?  Who knew what women thought?  He certainly didn’t. 

What he found, he had not expected at all.  Svetlana stood in the room she shared with her husband, staring at the bed.  When he entered the room, she turned to him and he saw the tears pooling in her eyes.

“Did I just ruin any hope of my marriage working, Dimitri?” she asked, her voice small and shaky, the adrenaline high of the fight having faded and the warrior-woman retreating back into a very young woman who was far from her family and her homeland. 

“No,” he replied, walking over to hold her.  His arms wrapped around her and he realized how much he had felt of her strength before, especially now that she was shaking with barely contained tears.  “No, Svetochka,” he murmured the intimate nickname for the first time, “if anything, you saved it.”  Long minutes later, he felt her shift in his arms, the tears that had threatened never falling.  When he looked down at her, he saw the soft heat in her eyes.

He did not question the wisdom of what he did next; he knew only that the fight, the emotion still in her needed an outlet.  Young and impulstive, his own control a thin veneer over his passionate nature, Dimitri leaned down and kissed her.  A single kiss became a long kiss, became a caress, became slow, careful lovemaking that defied logic and, perhaps, law.  It had seemed like forever, the three months since the union ritual and Dimitri’s night in their bed, and her sweetness now undid him in ways that the magic-ridden wildcat and eager bride hadn’t then. 

As he moved with her, he hoped he would one day find a woman so strong and certain of herself when danger threatened, so giving and sweet when the storms were over--a woman whose passion could match his own.  This night was only the first they spent together as Ivan helped Sergei recover from the beating of his life.  It was the first of many nights alone; the nights that included Sergei would come later.

The next evening--morning to Moroi--when he walked downstairs, Sergei’s face was bruised, but most of the swelling had gone down.  Ivan had indeed used a lot of ice.  The look of confusion on his friend’s face was all that kept him from punching him again.

Dimitri understood then the necessity for self-control, and the long, hard battle for it began.

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