Page 83 of To Catch A Rogue

She glanced back over her bare shoulder, her dark lashes shuttering her eyes. "My name was Irina Konstantinovna Grigorieva."

He'd seen the file on Obsidian, and the family tree of the last members of the Grigoriev House.

Dmitri. Nikolai. Yekaterina. Irina. Evgeni.

They were Konstantin Grigoriev's children.

His breath caught. "Holy shit. You'reRussian?"

Not only that, she was of the Blood.

Nobody at the Warren spoke of Lark's past. She'd arrived in Tin Man's arms when she was a young girl, and the mute man had never breathed a word of it.

There was some mention of Tin Man working in the mines somewhere, a suspicion probably earned by the wheeze of his iron lungs. Lark was either a niece or his daughter, though both of them refused to say anything on the topic when it was mentioned, and after a while it wasn't important.

Nobody knew where Lark truly came from, but that didn't matter anymore. Lark belonged to Tin Man. She was one of Blade's. She wasfamily. That was all anyone needed to know.

And she'd never once breathed a word of her past.

Lark tugged her nightgown back into place and drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her shins and resting her chin on top of her knees. "You wanted to know what I was hiding. I was hiding everything. My name is Irina," she repeated, squeezing her eyes shut as if just saying it again overwhelmed her. "My birthday isn't in September. It's in May. You think I'm ten months younger than you, but the truth is, I'm almost two years older. We hid everything. My age, my gender, my birthdate, my name. I was small enough to pull it off, and English wasn't my first language, so it made me seem a little less precocious."

"You'reolderthan me?"

She opened her eyes. "Does it matter?"

"No. I just...." His head spun. "How on earth did you bite your tongue when I spent years lording my age over you as the closing matter in all our arguments?"

"I had to," she whispered.

And suddenly reality penetrated. This wasn't the sort of secret one kept for fun. It had real consequences. "Tell me everything."

"Tin Man's real name was Yuri Saginov," she whispered. "He was a nobleman's fourth son, and became part of the failed revolution that rose against the Blood twenty years ago.

"They cut out his tongue as punishment, the way they did to all the others within the revolution. Those that weren't in charge, at least. They took one person out of every ten of the revolutionaries, tortured them and cut their tongues out, and then crucified the rest. The Blood wanted them to be a reminder of the price of failure. Afterwards, Yuri was gifted to my father as a serf.

"He created the Brotherhood of the Silent," she said, her spine bowed, as if she could barely stand to speak of this. "The Blood tried to take their voices to make them powerless, but Tin Man learned how to speak with his hands so they could still communicate. He gave them hope, and rumors started whispering through the Blood that the revolution was rising again."

"Holy shit," he repeated.

"He rescued me. I woke one night to find the palace burning," she said softly. "I thought it was the Brotherhood coming for us—they were the bogeyman every little Russian aristocrat believed in—but it was worse. It was Sergey." Her breath shuddered through her. "Katya was nine, and I was almost seven, and Zhenya.... He was just a baby."

Charlie frowned in confusion before realizing she'd have known her siblings by their diminutives and not their full names.

"What happened to them?"

Lark's eyes hardened. "Sergey and hisChernyye Volki."

"Cherny what?"

"The Black Wolves. Originally, they were the nameless sons of lower class noblemen Sergey banded together. They protect him and carry out his dirty work. They’re thugs."

"The same ones we saw at Grigoriev Palace the other day."

No wonder she'd been so bloody distraught. Even entering the place was a nightmare for her.

"Yes. They howl," she whispered. "It was the first I knew we were under attack. Fire was flickering in the lower halls. Men wearing wolf head masks were running through the hallways, hunting the servants. I wanted to go to my mama so badly, but I was so frightened.

"So I climbed out the window. Papa was always lecturing me about climbing trees and the stable roofs, but it was probably the only thing that saved my life. I made my way to my mother's rooms and hid on the balcony outside her doors. I could see shadows inside the room, and hear my mother pleading for mercy...."