A Guardian's Promise

Chapter 13 - Clues

"Wait pause!" I say, a little too loudly. Dimitri freezes the footage. "That's Lissa!"

Dimitri leans forward to get a better look. "So it is."

I squint my eyes, trying to make out the licence plate. "Hey, can anyone here make out what the licence plate is?"

A few more people crowd around, and Christian steps back to stand next to my father. The moroi couldn't really do anything useful here.

"I got it!" Guardian Sokolov says, waving a scrap of paper up above our heads. I take it off him and compare his observation notes to the clip. And he was correct.

"Thank you, Guardian Sokolov." Dimitri says with a tight-lipped smile. If you could even call it a smile. His lips were hard and looked like they were set with super-glue. I was one of the few lucky people who saw his real smile. I also knew how soft and passionate those lips of his could be... No Rose. You need to focus on this. I mentally scold myself.

I reluctantly pull my gaze away from his lips and focus on the task at hand. There would be plenty of time to enjoy those lips later. "Okay, someone get some leads on the licence plate!" I order, watching as a couple of guardians shake their heads and walk out. Obviously, some people just don't want to help a newly graduated female guardian—well fine. I have enough people here to get the job done. Their loss. Lissa would be incredibly grateful for her rescue and I would put in a good word to the allocations board on Lissa's behalf to all these people helping me—they deserved it.

I observe the guardians doing multiple things, all working around each other in that efficient way guardians did—just not as well as they normally would. Being a high-risk moroi, Lissa was being fretted about by all of us. I generally had a field job, so I didn't have the extra training some of the court guardians got when they started their jobs here, so it was quite fascinating to watch them pull apart the footage, slow it down and all that to get even the tiniest detail. Despite my lack of training in this area, I knew one thing—every detail was important.

I was enjoying being an observer and were about to go and ask some of them some questions on particulars when someone just had to come and ruin my fun. Wait. What am I saying? Lissa being missing was certainly not fun. But either way, as I said, he just had to come and ruin my fun.

Dimitri pushed through the crowd of obsequious guardians, and just from the look on his face, I knew he was going to say something I didn't want to hear. "Roza you need to go back to your apartment and get some sleep, please. You have faced more strigoi today then some of these guardians would see in their entire careers. You need to rest."

I roll my eyes. "And you fought none?" I say sarcastically. Dimitri gives me a don't even go there look, but I continue. "If I need sleep, then you do too. So, don't tell me what to do."

Dimitri takes a step closer. Dangerously close. Not attacking and killing dangerous, more like attacking and removing clothing, but nevertheless close. I had the slightest feeling he was doing it for effect. Make me acquiesce. "Rose this could take hours. Days even. I want to sleep too. If you can't do it more yourself, sleep for me?"

"Then come back with me if you need sleep." I say. My next words were definitely not safe to say in a building full of serious guardians, but I put on a seductive air and spoke. "You and I need more than sleep comrade."

I watched his eyes light up—and then he turned back into his deadpan guardian self. "You know I can't Rose."

I groan. "No, I don't know Dimitri. You have no more information to add than I do. They need you as much as they need me. Which clearly isn't much." I snap and turn on my heel and walk out before I could say something stupid. I was proud with my self-control tonight, but it was wavering.