LTSV - Harbingers of Change - 38 (Patreon)

The 'cocktails' were a kind of drink that Samira wouldn't have recognized, but reminded Mira a little bit of Kvass; a lightly fermented fruit beverage. This one tasted a bit like raspberries and was served like a spritz. It was low ABV if it had any alcohol in it at all and she relaxed further.

Her body still didn't like alcohol, but she was prepared to drink in this company and trust Adra to keep her from being forced to testing this body's limits.

Lev poured himself a small shot of vodka from the liquor cabinet at one point and asked if anyone else wanted some, but that was the extent of the drinking prior to their meal.  

The conversation had moved on from social media and minor financial manipulation to Lev's current annoyances with the shipping company he was running on behalf of the family. Mira was listening with sympathy, but not saying anything until a familiar name came up.

"There's rats in the warehouse," he groused. "Bellamy won't do anything about it or fix the holes in the walls they're getting in through so I gotta pay out of my own pocket for the exterminator."

"Bellamy?" she asked, surprised.

Lev nodded. "Yeah, it's your old man. We lease a bunch of warehouses from him, down by the port. He got them in a settlement from his first ex-wife or something so he doesn't keep them up, but the location is too good to give up so I've got to put up with it."

Mira frowned. It shouldn't have come as a surprise that Virgil Bellamy had an ex-wife. It wouldn't really come as a surprise if he had multiple ex-wives, but there was nothing in Samira's memory about Virgil having any wives other than Helena and they had been married long past her expiry date as a trophy wife so Mira had assumed that, despite their status as otherwise horrible human beings, that they genuinely liked one another. Samira had no memories of them fighting and they seemed united in their distaste for their middle child.

"Is there a problem, child?" Dmitri asked, immediately clocking Mira's frown.

"I hadn't realized he was married before Helena," Mira admitted. "That was never something they discussed with me."

Was that why Vesper had been absent from the Bellamy home so far? Was she Samira's half sibling?

"Lev, look into this," Dmitri directed his grandson. "Perhaps it will be helpful with the legal case."

"Sure, Ded. Mira, if it turns out you own the warehouses, I'd like to revisit the maintenance agreement when you get control of them," Lev chuckled.

"Of course," Mira promised, but the back of her mind was racing.

She hadn't considered the idea that Samira could have been a real estate heiress. Somehow, she'd assumed that her host had received her mysterious inheritance as a cash payment that her parents had then seized. Real estate, on the other hand, generated an income and she still didn't have any good answers about where Virgil Bellamy's money came from. Her investigation and Adra's investigation hadn't gotten that far. She also didn't have a good reason why this maternal grandmother would pass over Helena, her own daughter, in her will.

It was possible that Helena had her own inheritance and just wanted Samira's too, but she seemed dependant on Virgil so that didn't really track.

Zoya came in to announce dinner, which was a welcome distraction from questions Mira couldn't answer yet.

The meal was light; whole baked fish, kasha studded with mushrooms, onions, and peas with a medovik cake for dessert served with tiny cups of sweet coffee.

After the meal, Nikolai and Lev dragged Adra away to do something—presumably so Dmitri could give Mira the customary shovel talk. They went out onto the deck and Dmitri relit his cigar, standing politely downwind from her.

"Illya was always my most gentle grandchild," he started, seemingly apropos of nothing. "Even as a small child, he wanted to fix things rather than break them. I respected this about him. We Volkovs are not gentle people."

Mira listened quietly because she knew a speech when she heard one start.

"I do not know if he always thought so highly of the rest of us, but if he did not then he did not ever speak of it to me or to his brothers. Do you know that he was involved in a car accident some years ago?" Dmitri turned to face her. The light of the cigar cast orange highlights across the harsh planes of his face and Mira suspected she'd just gotten a look at what he'd been like as a young man, before age rounded off his edges.

"I know he was in a coma for a time, but not more than that."

Dmitri nodded. "My boy was not expected to wake, ever. I believed, for a while, that one of my old enemies had done this to him. No, it truly was an accident. The steering column in an oncoming car came apart while the driver was making a turn. My Illyusha was on the corner, waiting to cross the street. It was not the work of an enemy, but cruel bad luck." Dmitri took another puff on his cigar. "I was there when my boy woke and I was the first to realize that he did not know me."

Mira felt a stillness settle over her. "He knows you now."

Dmitri nodded. "Yes, we let him believe that we had not noticed. He seems to have recovered many of his memories, except those closest to his accident. The doctors tell me this is normal. If he had met you before the accident, I would have warned you to be careful with my boy's heart. He could be arrogant, but his feelings were always sincere."

"I would do that anyway," Mira said. "What would you like to ask me instead?"

"I said he was the most gentle of my grandsons, but he came out of the coma different. Then the Gate Crisis came and I saw a new dimension to him. There was a drone watching when he killed this wolf creature."

Dmitri pressed a hand against the dense fur of the coat he had not taken off this entire time, even as they ate.

"I think his memories are not fully returned to him," Dmitri added as an aside. "Or he would remember that I dislike the fur trade. It is different when the animal must die anyway, I suppose. Perhaps he remembered that I taught him that all parts of the creature must be used and never wasted."

"That sounds like him."

Mira didn't tell him that Adra probably hadn't thought that deeply about it. If you had to kill a monster then using all its parts was common sense in most of the worlds she had lived in. It was only in worlds like this one that they made it into a philosophical quandary.

"This coat is a lesson to me, in a way, that the gentleness I saw in my grandson has always been a choice he made. He can make a different choice if he deems it necessary. This brings me to my request." Dmitri slid a look in her direction and his gray eyes had a kind of luminescence to them in the dim light.

She could see why this had been a very frightening man, once upon a time.

"Leave Dietrich."

She blinked. "Beg pardon?"

Dmitri blew a narrow cloud of smoke into the air above his head. "I have known many men such as Dietrich in my day. I have met the young ladies they kept. I have seen far too many of those women die at their hands."

'Oh, I'm getting a talk about domestic violence,' Mira realized.

"There is a strange sort of delusion that we all have, men and women alike, about men like him," Dmitri continued. "We believe that their anger and violence is a separate thing from the man. We convince ourselves that it can be controlled, manipulated, and appeased. We delude ourselves that the man is not in control of it and he'll let us all believe that for a time. He fools his friends and coworkers as much as he fools his woman. Then there comes a day when he tires of the game and the woman dies. That is how the play is always meant to end. The man and his anger are the same. The uncontrollable thing was always under control. This Dietrich, when he breaks things, is it your belongings that get broken or his?"

"I'm no so easy to kill anymore," Mira said quietly. Her mind was back in that hospital room and those few, terrifying seconds between her waking up and Adra seizing control of Mason Dietrich's body. That hadn't been a murder attempt, but the Samira in the book didn't escape Mason until she got sent back to a 'convalescent home', i.e. rehab. Even then, the story didn't much care about her once she left the heroine's orbit.

Mason didn't survive the book, but Mira couldn't say with full confidence that Samira wouldn't have been forced onto the arm of someone worse as soon as she was released from the hospital.

Actually, she needed to find out if Samira had a will and, if so, who the beneficiary of her estate was.

"I imagine not," Dmitri agreed. "It is hard to unlearn fear, though. I worry that if you are hurt then my Illyusha will do something we will all come to regret. It would be best for all if that problem was solved before it comes to that. You don't need to do anything. I still have people for such things."

Mira reached out and patted his arm. "It's not that I haven't thought about that," she admitted. "Illya told me that he went on a campaign to convince my father he was the best possible spouse for me and my father still chose Mason over him when all Mason did was show up. I'm worried that my father will chose someone worse, with a shorter fuse, if something happens to his first choice son-in-law. Mason is manageable, at least in the short term, and the rest of my team won't leave me alone with him."

"Except at night," Dmitri pointed out.

"Except at night," Mira allowed. "I've talked with Illya about this matter. We are a team. We have agreed that Mason will be dealt with shortly before the guild sues to either break the protection order or assign me a new guardian. My father gave him limited rights to sign agreements on my behalf and he's easier to persuade than my father. Mason is a stakeholder in the guild, but his investment won't protect him from harassing one of the hunters. We're going to use his behavior to force him into a non-voting role and, if it comes to that, his shares will revert to the guild in the event of his death."

She paused and then added, just in case he wasn't convinced.

"In general, I think death causes more problems than it solves. I'd like to avoid that solution unless it becomes absolutely necessary."

Dmitri considered her for a while and tapped off his cigar. "I will trust you for now," he said after a while. "However, I will exercise my own best judgment if I have cause to think it has become 'absolutely necessary', since you seem to have no parents in your life worth mentioning to do it for you."

Mira tried to imagine a world where Virgil and Helena planned a murder to save her life and grimaced. "Sir, they would get caught immediately."

Dmitri smiled in a quick flash of strong white teeth. "Well, I can promise you that will not be the case in the event that I decide to move."

Later, once they were back in the car, Mira turned to Adra and said, "I like them."

He laughed as he pulled out of the drive and said, "I thought you might."

Note: I wonder how closely Mira and Dmitri's ideas of 'absolutely necessary' will align.