And though the room was large with a kitchen just a few steps away and a door that most likely led to a bathroom, this definitely wasn’t the black-on-black suite she’d lived in all of her life. More like an apartment, with old seventies era everything. Shag carpet…an old Zenith with the kind of knobs you had to get up to turn…and a velvet couch covered in psychedelic pattern she hadn’t seen for years outside of old Brady Bunch re-runs.
What the hell? She’d never before in her life woken up in a room that wasn’t her own. And hadn’t set foot in a place this seventiesfied, since, well…the actual 70s.
Dread knotted her stomach because stories like Little Red Riding Hood read differently to her kind. Not as a warning, but a caution about what happened when shifters encountered humans in their werewolf form. Oh Jesus, what had she done?
She strained, trying to remember what had happened last night…oh Jesus, it all came flooding back…the decision to try out for All-American despite the full-moon night looming ahead…the even better than expected fight…Bohdan offering her a job on the spot, and then…
Wilma groaned. She’d just ran away. Ran away and locked herself inside the first room she’d come to, and then…
Oh hell, she couldn’t remember anything after that, and now she was…here.
But where was here? And how had she gotten here? Had she somehow broken out of that locked room? There had been a diner directly across the street from the community center. A two-story building with what looked like it could be apartments above.
Her stomach churned with the possibilities of what she could have gotten up to last night.
She jerked the covers back and scrambled off the bed, beelining to the apartment’s only window, praying to God that when she looked out of it, there wouldn’t be—but shit, shit, shit, there was the Lincoln Heights Community Center, big and beige, right across the street. Wilma fisted her hand on top of her chest.
So, was that it then? Had she gotten out of that locked room, then killed whoever lived in this small space? A chill ran down Wilma’s back, as she looked around the apartment intently for any trace of blood.
Shifters were dangerous as hell in wolf form. Even the most upstanding wolves morphed into stone-cold killers on full moon nights. That was one of the reasons they tended to live in remote, tight-knit communities.
The fact was any human who crossed a wolf’s path on the wrong night of the year was liable to be killed. While she and just about every wolf she knew had woken up from full moon nights, spitting out the bones and fur of bunnies and other small prey they'd eaten in wolf form, she’d never heard of one actually eating a human. For some reason when shifters in wolf form encountered humans, they only ripped out their throats while leaving the rest of their body intact.
Her father once told her a story about how back when the Michigan kingdom house had been located in the Upper Peninsula, they’d often found unlucky hikers and campers laying against trees with their throats ripped out after full moon nights. As if they’d been dragged there and left as an offering like cats often brought birds with broken necks to their owners. Only wolves had no owners, so that was a real mystery if you asked Wilma—okay, but nobody asked you, so why are you even tripping about that, Wilma? The utterance of her name centered her, pulling her out of the philosophical rabbit hole. You just woke up in a strange apartment, laying up in somebody’s bed like Little Red Riding Hood’s fake grandma. You gotta figure out how you got here…what you did last night—
The door suddenly crashed open, and Wilma jumped when Bohdan the Terrible came in with a box of Dunkin Donuts in one hand and a takeaway tray with two smoking coffees in the other.
“You are awake, wolf girl. I thought maybe you'd spend the whole day in bed.” He didn’t sound nearly as startled to see her as she was to see him. Also…
“Wolf girl?” she repeated, her voice weak. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, she moaned silently, her heart racing. Please, Jesus, say he wasn’t referring to what she thought he was referring to.
But Jesus did not have her back on this one.
“You are same wolf in my office when I come in after my auditions, ni?” Bodhan asked as he kicked the door closed behind him. “Or was that wolf another girl in same leotard?”
Wilma eyeballed the leotard she was still wearing. On the one hand, it had survived her transition. How cool was that? On the other, it more than gave away who and what she was. Wilma opened her mouth, then closed it. Opened it, then closed it again. While it was true that her Detroit pack didn’t take most human laws seriously, the wolf ones remained sacrosanct. And guess what rule was at the top of that wolf list? Never tell a human what you are. Ever.
Wilma’s mind raced, trying to come up with a solution to this problem. The rule was so sacred, she’d never even heard of any wolf in the Detroit pack breaking it. What would her father do if he found out? Kill Bohdan? Kill her? Take them both out in front of the entire Dark Wolf pack as an example, like he did whenever he caught one of his dealers trying to skim off the top?
But of course, she couldn’t give voice to any of these thoughts. So she was left with no choice but to stand there, feeling like an ant under Bohdan’s shark gaze.
“Be happy we are not in village where I grow up in Ukraine,” he said after several seconds of her “sorry, not talking” silence. “There we shoot wolf like you on full moon night, and everybody understand when we bring body to undertaker to burn next morning.”
This. This was precisely why werewolves kept themselves secret and tried to establish colonies as far away from human populations as possible. But apparently at least one pack of Ukrainian wolves hadn’t been as smart as the American ones. This man clearly hailed from one of the human populations who’d inspired that Number One rule for werewolves. Evidently, he’d grown up with the kind of humans who not only knew her kind existed but made it a policy to kill them on sight.
She swallowed, wondering how close she came to dying last night. And why she was alive now…
“Lucky for you, I no longer carry hunting gun,” Bohdan said. “But it was very dangerous what you did. Trying out for my wrestling promotion on full moon night. Dangerous and stupid.”
He'd gotten that right on both counts, but since Wilma couldn’t discuss what she was, she didn’t tell him that—much less list her reasons for deciding she just had to try out to become a wrestler before she was stuck pushing out babies for the rest of her life.
“So, you’re from Ukraine?” she asked, trying her damnedest to keep her voice as light as that Barbie girl from yesterday as Wilma throttled the conversation toward another subject. “I thought you were Russian.”
“Only in ring,” he replied. Setting the bags on the counter that separated the small efficiency kitchen from the rest of the apartment.
“So, this is where you live. It’s very…” She searched and failed to find a word to describe the apartment. At least not one that was both believable and polite.
“Dump. It is dump,” Bohdan finished for her. “But I have given every dime I have to buy All-American Wrestling. It is all I can afford at moment. And it seemed good place to bring you after you turn back to woman. Now will you take coffee with me or continue to stand at window like nosy American?”
Technically it was a question, but when he put it that way, Wilma didn’t feel like she had much of a choice but to join him at the counter. He had a way of bossing folks around that reminded her of her father. Firm and without options. With the hopes of getting her mind right enough to figure out what to do next, she took a sip of coffee, then nearly gagged when she discovered it was black.
“There is milk in fridge if you require such thing,” he said, observing her screwed up face with those shark eyes of his.
Yes, yes, she required such thing. “Any sugar?” she asked when she came back from fetching the milk.
“When I was child I put pastry in my coffee to make it taste sweet on my child’s tongue. Donut, I believe, is pastry, ni?”
She didn’t realize just how hungry she was until the first bite of coffee covered glazed donut hit her tongue, sweet and beyond delicious. One disappeared then she shoved in six more before she got around to taking another sip of the bitter coffee. And check it out, Bohdan was right. The taste wasn’t so bad with the aftertaste of donuts in her mouth.
Bohdan had watched in fascination as she shoveled all the donuts into her mouth and drank her coffee, then he said, “Now I understand the meaning of this English term, ‘wolf down.’”
She stopped, spewing coffee at the unexpected joke from the stern Ukrainian wrestler. But then she sobered at a new thought. Bohdan didn’t have any visible scratch marks on him, but she had to ask, “Did I…did I hurt you last night?”
She kept the question vague, but she was more aware than most of how werewolves were made. For reasons wolves hadn’t bothered to try to figure, Africa was the only populated continent with no wolf community. That meant almost all Black American werewolves could trace their ancestry back to a slave or in the case of her father’s old Tennessee pack down south, a bunch of runaway slaves, who’d gotten bit and/or scratched. If she’d turned this man, she’d have to—
“As I said, I come from Ukraine. I know how to handle wolf,” he answered with an arrogant twist of his lips, cutting off her worried thoughts. “But your wolf was not polite guest. You will help me clean office when you come into first practice tomorrow at five am.”
She jerked, more startled by the words “first practice” than the early start time. “Hold up, you still want to hire me? Even though I…”
She didn’t finish that sentence. Couldn’t finish that sentence without breaking the ultimate Lupine law.
But Bohdan answered as if she had, “Show up even one minute after five, wolf girl, and you will be fired.
Then he guzzled his black coffee like it was neither bitter nor hot.
The only logical thing for Wilma to do would have been to stay away. Recede into her pack, and hope to Jesus, Bohdan never tried to tell anybody about what he saw. Only a fool would have gone back to the community center after getting caught like she had.
Yet Wilma showed up at five a.m. the next day, ready to both clean and practice and suppressing all thoughts of what would happen if her father found out she was doing this.
Both were a lot more complicated than she expected. The area Bohdan called an office, an equipment room with a small metal desk inside of it had been completely trashed. Her wolf had not only ripped up a ton of paperwork but also deflated a few balls. Wilma did what she could but determined she’d be using this month’s allowance to make an anonymous equipment donation to the Lincoln Heights Community Center.
It took two days to fix the mess, and Bohdan didn’t allow her to start training with Ursula until it was done. In the end, it was all worth it, even though after she finally got clearance, she was told to mostly observe all the other male wrestlers' routines and rehearsals until they went on their lunch break, leaving the ring free for her and Ursula to give it a spin.
This meant most of her days over the next few months consisted of waiting around. But Wilma didn’t care. Moves that had taken her weeks to figure out on her own were broken down for her by the male wrestlers in a matter of hours. Then she actually got to practice them with Ursula for one hour at lunch and two hours after the end of rehearsals, when the male wrestlers either went to the gym to weight train or sometimes to other parts of the buildings for “meetings.”
“Do not ever accept meeting invitation,” Ursula warned her the first week. “Meeting's codeword for cocaine.”
Wilma had schooled her face to look appropriately shocked and nodded accordingly. But the truth was, she didn’t need the warning. The Dark Wolves MC, as her pack had labeled itself for its criminal dealings with the humans, drank and smoked like nobody’s business. But they all knew that street drugs did weird things to wolves. Heroin prevented them from shifting on full moon nights. Crack would just shift a bitch, period, no full moon or personal will needed. And as for cocaine, it was often referred to in mange packs as “Mate Guarantee,” because when mixed with alcohol, it sent a she-wolf straight into heat. Most she-wolves wouldn’t touch cocaine unless they wanted to create a baby during the demented mating ceremonies her pack called weddings.
For all those reasons, Wilma had been raised under the mantra of “don’t get high on your own supply.” So no, Ursula, had nothing to worry about. There was zero chance her first and only worthy same-sex competitor would become a cokehead.
Wilma turned down all invitations to meetings, and she trained like a beast for the next three months.
Bohdan, she couldn’t help but notice, soon after she started training, watched her.
The first few weeks, when he’d stay behind at lunch or put off his own weight training to oversee the beginning thirty minutes or so of her sessions with Ursula, she thought he was just checking to make sure his investment was worth it. Not that it was really an investment. She’d yet to deposit any of the personal checks she’d received every two weeks like clockwork.
Her father oversaw her checking account, depositing her allowance into it once a month. And the thing was, to come to the human world without him knowing, she’d sold him this story about her deciding to nanny for Sam and Deidre Wolfsmith. Sam was the head of Wolfsmith Automotive, one of the country’s leading American car parts companies, and on a personal note, a second generation of the many white wolves who’d decided to break ranks with the state pack after her father’s surprise challenge and win against the white former Michigan king and his beta.
Of course, her father had balked at the idea of his princess daughter working for one of the wealthy white families, who acted like the state pack had somehow disappeared after a bad-ass black biker took it over. But Wilma had pitched it as a peace mission. Her father had been looking for ways to legitimize their claim to the state throne, maybe this would create an inroad. Also, Sam and Deidre Wolfsmith were connected to some of the most influential wolf CEOs in the country. If she nannied for them and they liked her, maybe they’d put in a word with one of the legitimate royal families for her.
Her father had grudgingly agreed to her plan, even though he still wasn’t too happy about his black princess daughter doing anything close to serving a white family, who thought they were better than him. She’d only convinced him to go along with the plan by pitching it as a kind of genteel service on her part, one everyone involved would understand. So, yeah, regular paychecks from her new boss would destroy her cover story.
But after six weeks of not depositing his checks, Bohdan cornered her in the hallway, catching her arm, before she could walk past his open office door. “Why do you not deposit my checks?” he demanded.
Jesus, he was big, she'd thought as he towered over her. And to have him so close, without a counter, coffee, and a box of donuts separating them…a strange feeling had come over her. One that made her stomach flip like she was on a roller coaster.
But it wasn’t fear. Wasn’t anger either.
It was something else.
“Because, I don’t need it,” she’d answered licking her suddenly dry lips. “You know what, man, you don’t even have to bother writing them, because I’m not going to cash them.”
“Why not?” he’d asked, his shark eyes squinting. “You think I cannot pay after seeing my apartment?”
She could have lied, could have said something so damaging to his pride he’d never ask her about the paychecks again. But that morning after the full moon hung over the conversation like a cloud. He could have killed her. Could have left her in his office to wake up confused and scared. But he hadn’t. He’d brought her to his apartment and put her in his bed and fed her donuts without asking for a thing in return.
He hadn’t held her secret ove
r her head. Or threatened her with it in ways that would have made her have to think of ways to silence him, even though she wasn’t a stone-cold killer like her dad.
In his own way, Bohdan had been a perfect gentleman, and that wasn’t something she was used to. She hailed from a pack where male wolves had made nasty offers to pop her cherry behind her father’s back just because she’d handed them a beer. And if any of them had this kind of dynamite on their pack princess, believe they would have blackmailed her with it. She shivered at the thought. The Dark Wolf MCs weren’t nice to she-wolves, most often regarding them as objects to collect, and treating them the same way. She could only imagine what one of them would have tried to make her do in exchange for keeping any secret.
Bohdan was…she didn’t know…upstanding in his own way. And in that hallway moment, she didn’t want him to think she respected him any less. Especially when the exact opposite was true.
“No, that ain’t it at all,” she assured him. “I…my family doesn’t know I’m here. My kind, especially she—I mean females, don’t do…this.” She waved a helpless hand around the hallway of the community center he’d turned into a wrestling gym. “If they did, they’d make me quit. And I really, really don’t want to quit.”
For a few long moments Bohdan studied her with those sharp, shark eyes. Then he said, “I will pay you cash then. Under table.”
She immediately started shaking her head. “You don’t have to. I don’t need the money.” That was the God’s honest right there. Her father tossed twice as much in monthly allowance into her account than Bohdan had paid her in the entire six weeks she’d been there.
But the large Ukrainian insisted, “I will pay you cash. Starting next week.”
So, he paid her in cash. But even after that was agreed upon, he continued to watch her instead of eating his lunch like everybody else. His dark shark eyes followed her every move during these sessions, and on the rare occasion when he spoke, it was only to Ursula. “Tell her to grunt as she lifts you up. Harder. It must seem to audience like she is in much pain.”
The Brothers Nightwolf Trilogy Page 47