I had been checking in on her, I really had.

As Alexei and I had arrived at the party, Lissa and Natalie were just waking up, set on beating the crowds and the midday sun by arriving early in Missoula. When we were all sitting around the fire, they were just getting in the car. As Paul had dragged me away to play, they were just arriving at their first store.

Between Paul and Dimitri, distractions in my own present had taken precedence. But I had been watching. Dutifully.

The moment I had let my guard down, tore my watch away - for what? ten minutes? - was when it had all flooded in.

Confusion. Surprise. Fear.

I looked at Dimitri, who scrambled to regain the space he'd just put between us. The horror must have been evident on my face as held my face in his hands, hands that had just been all over me.

"Roza, what's wrong?"

I shook my head, disbelieving, giving no answer as I disappeared into Lissa's head.

They were in the back alley of the mall, exactly where they had first entered from to keep them out of the developing sun. It was shaded, but not perfectly, and Lissa felt dizzy from the filtered light as well as the chaos ensuing in front of her.

It didn't make sense, and I told Dimitri as much.

"What's going on?" I heard him plead, guardian instincts kicking in, desperate to know what was going on.

"They were shopping in Missoula," I reminded him. "But something bad is happening. There's these people in masks, the guardians are fighting them off but-"

"But what, Roza?"

It was all wrong.

They had brought along two of Victor's guardians, Lissa's personal guardian Serena, and another school-sanctioned chaperone. The masked opponents only had one on those numbers. While not ideal, it wasn't the worst odds anyone had ever survived in a Strigoi attack.

Except, I wasn't quite sure that they were Strigoi.

Besides the filtered sunlight, in all the teaching I'd ever had, it was drilled into me how superiorly fast and powerful Strigoi were in a fight. We trained our whole lives to close the gap they naturally had from being changed; Dimitri had forced me to do more than enough running when I'd first arrived to get that point across.

And though I had never technically seen a Strigoi outside of classroom videos, this wasn't how I'd come to think of them.

"Nothing makes sense, Dimitri. It's like Victor's guardians are fighting in slow motion."

"Strigoi are fast," he reminded me. "You've never seen one-"

"I know," I confirmed. "But something is wrong. Those are some of the best guardians we have, they have to be to protect a Royal Moroi of Victor's caliber… But they aren't fighting with half as much power as Serena or Yuri are."

"Lissa is just confused," Dimitri started. He gave another half-hearted counter argument that I drowned out in favor of taking in every detail around me - her.

Against all odds, just as everything went black, Lissa got a good look at the eyes in front of hers.

"They're not Strigoi."

It didn't take long for Ivan and Alexei to arrive. Dimitri had called them with their long-arranged distress signal and, by the looks of it, they'd run straight back, storming through the house and into the room where Dimitri and I had finally given into each other. It felt sacred. But the dire needs of the present situation clouded over any lingering emotion. In a haze, I had thrown Dimitri's college sweatshirt, leftover from the night before, on my body.

Dimitri was still shirtless, frantically pacing the room.

"What's going on?" Ivan boomed, fiercer than I had ever heard him. "Dimitri said something was wrong with Princess Vasilisa."

I nodded blankly, staring off into space as I tried to will her to just wake up.

I could help her, even from a different continent, if she would only wake up.

"Somebody took her," Dimitri stated, finally coming to halt to stand with them.

"Strigoi," Ivan stated, no question as to any other possibility. Something like this had never happened before. "Strigoi would die to take out a Royal bloodline."

"Rose doesn't think so."

"But who would-"

"It's not Strigoi," I said firmly, rising from my place on the bed. "It was sunny out and one of the attackers looked directly at her as she was knocked out. Clear blue eyes. No trace of red. They were dhampir."

"Why would a dhampir take the Princess?" Alexei questioned, posing the question to no one in general.

We stood in silence for a moment before Ivan opened his mouth. He started and stopped himself a few times, almost as if he could hardly believe what he was going to say. "What if… they were serving a Moroi?"

"Why would a Moroi take the Princess?" Alexei amended, growing more incredulous. "Political leverage?"

"No…" his charge pondered. "She's still a minor, she doesn't have any power. Never mind the fact that she doesn't meet the Quorum… Does she have any enemies, Rose?"

"No one has a problem with Lissa," I started, my mouth turning to a sneer as I realized exactly who might have a problem with her. "Queen Tatiana. She's always had it out for Lissa."

"As much as we love to back talk the Queen, I don't think so," Ivan countered. "Every time we've met the Queen, anytime she happens to bring up the Dragomirs, she talks about her like a future successor, not a vagrant."

"But-"

"What about the threats she's been receiving," Dimitri asked. He'd been quiet up until this moment, concentration clear on his face. "We thought it was some stupid student, but what if it was something more?"

"Like what?" Suddenly I felt so, so small. The threat had been under our nose for years, and we'd just ignored it.

Dimitri shook his head, still trying to put the pieces together internally.

"Can you reach her?" Ivan asked.

I could've given myself whiplash from how quickly I shook my head. "She was knocked out, I don't know when I'll be able to get to her again… not til she comes to."

"Then we have some things to do," Ivan said, taking command of the situation. "Dimitri, let's call Guardian Petrov, inform her of the situation if she doesn't already know. Alexei, you call Mark and Oksana. I think we might be needing some of their guidance again."

"You should sit in on this," Dimitri told me, swiping his discarded shirt from the floor – not without a pointed look between Ivan and Alexei – and pulling it over his head as he gestured for me to follow him to the living room.

Dimitr settled at the kitchen table and Alexei slipped outside, intent on calling the couple. I felt bad that they would be dragged into this business again, at such a late hour nonetheless, but knew why it was a call that had to be made. If Oksana had bolstered me to help Lissa from across the world once, why couldn't she do it again?

"Petrov," Dimitri grunted, getting through to the head guardian at St. Vladimir's. He set the phone out in front of him, on speaker phone, and Ivan and I moved to fill in the seats on either side of him. "This is Guardian Belikov, I'm Ivan Zeklos's guardian, stationed at St. Basil's Academy in Siberia."

"Guardian Belikov," Alberta replied, surprisingly chipper for the time of night in Montana. As long as I'd known her, it seemed like she could function under any circumstances. "This is a surprise. You're mentoring Rose Hathaway, last I'd heard, is that right?"

"It is," Dimitri confirmed. "She's actually a part of why I'm calling. I've got her and my charge with me and, shoving aside the formalities of introductions, we're calling about something rather urgent."

"Get on with it."

"We have reason to believe that Princess Vasilisa Dragomir has recently been… taken."

We could hear Alberta on the other line, sputtering over his words. "I'm afraid that's simply not-"

"This is Ivan Zeklos, ma'am. I don't know if you're aware of this," Ivan interjected. "You may not know that the Princess and Miss Mazur, Miss Hathaway as you know her, are in fact bonded."

She was silent on the other line.

"It hasn't been acknowledged for quite some time," he continued, wary to her silence. "But since we've had Rose with us, she has been able to sense Vasilisa's feelings and, for lack of a better explanation, she's been able to see through her eyes as if she was there."

"Surely you can't be serious," Alberta held, obviously dumbstruck. "We would know about something like that."

"This is something we can discuss at another time," Dimitri said, trying to bring the conversation back to its original purpose. "Right now, we have reason to believe the Princess has been taken, she-"

"I saw it with my own eyes," I shouted, making Ivan cringe as I took over the conversation. "Lissa was at the mall on her trip to Missoula and some people in masks ambushed them."

"Strigoi," Alberta said matter-of-factly.

"No," I pushed, exasperated at having to repeat myself. "It's full on sunlight out there, and besides, she got a good look at their eyes before they knocked her out, they were dhampir."

More silence.

"Look, I know it's all hard to believe-"

"That's simply impossible, Miss Hathaway."

"It's not," I said, smacking my hand against the table in anguish. Dimitri caught my hand, shooting me a look that screamed calm down. I fought to regain my composure. "I know what I saw, Alberta. Their eyes were blue. Not red, blue. Now, Lissa is in trouble and we need to find her."

The other line was silent for a moment. Just as I was about to speak again, urge her to do something, I heard the tone of a radio. "This is Petrov. Has anyone heard anything from the Dashkov party?"

We listened with bated breath, all three of us leaning into the receiver as Alexei shuffled back inside and sat with us.

"They'll be ready for us whenever we get there," he whispered, leaning closer himself, well-aware not to ask questions.

"Get me Serena or Yuri on the phone, we need to make contact."

The clear sound of a phone ringing on the other end before it connected.

"Petrov, this is Serena," a voice trembled. She sounded so distant. "There's been an accident, we were ambushed. No one is seriously hurt, but I… I lost Lissa. Yuri and Kent, Prince Dashkov's guardian, have the scene secured. Guardian Sebastien and I are on our way back with the Prince and his daughter."

"Good, Serena," we heard Alberta reassure her. "I'll send a team to review the scene. When you return, please bring the entire party to the Guardian's Headquarters to be briefed."

Their conversation, curt in the way most guardians mastered young, ended. Alberta turned her attention back to us.

"Does Rose have a read on where the Princess might be yet?"

The boys looked at me, expectant. I tried to drop my walls, reaching out to Lissa in a way that had become second nature to me. Nothing.

I shook my head, my heart sinking into my stomach.

"No, she's still incapacitated," Ivan responded.

Dimitri rose from his seat next to me, allowing Ivan and Alexei to continue coordinating with Alberta. He took me gently by the arm and lead me to the couch.

"Everything is going to be okay," he whispered, pulling me to sit next to him. There was no pretense of keeping anything from the boys, especially since they'd arranged for us to have alone time to begin with. So, I tunneled my head into his chest and let the sob I'd been holding in rake through me.

"I should've been keeping a better watch."

"There was nothing you could have done, Roza," Dimitri reassured me, hands tangled in my hair. "Her guardians were the only physical barrier that could have saved her."

"That's what bothers me about all this," I said, wiping a lingering tear from my eye and straightening myself to look Dimitri in the eyes. "The only guardians I saw giving it their all were Yuri and Serena. When I said it looked like the guardians were fighting in slow motion… I only meant Victor's looked that way.

"If they weren't fighting Strigoi… what was going on?"