“Not him,” Wanda said, slowly drawing her gun from her ankle holster. “He’s handsy.”
Max barked out a laugh. “My reputation precedes me.”
“Pietr,” Cat instructed.
From behind Max he came. Not even sparing me a glance, he took Wanda’s gun. “Ten shots. Three for him, three for me, two for Cat. Two left. Alexi and Jess,” he presumed. “Good thinking. You might get out alive.” He ran his hands over her arms and legs, skimming down her front and back. “She’s clean.” He handed the gun back to Wanda.
He didn’t miss her look of surprise.
“You can’t take away our teeth or claws—we shouldn’t take away your weapon, either.”
“Now do Jessie,” Cat commanded.
His upper lip curling, Pietr glowered at his sister.
“You’re the one who suggested limiting her involvement. Your attitude toward her has changed. So search her.”
Pietr looked to Max for support.
“I’d search her for you, little brother, but I’d enjoy the job.” He grinned, regarding Pietr smugly. “And I’ll bet I could make Jessie enjoy it, too,” he rumbled, the challenge clear.
Pietr stayed perfectly still a moment, eyes closed, waiting like someone praying for a stay of execution.
“Do it,” I snapped.
Pietr’s face a study in control, he bent to the task. His nostrils flared and I knew he caught the scent of Derek’s most recent kiss on my face, Derek’s body on my hands and covering my clothes. Well, good for him. I hoped it stung his sensitive nose.
He ran his hands along my arms and slowly down my ribs, his touch so light it tickled. He brushed over my hips and my breath caught treacherously as his fingertips stroked down my legs and traced along my ankles. Then he stood, his gleaming eyes hooded, expression masked. “She’s clean.”
Peering past him to me as if to say, See? Cat darted a glance at Pietr’s hands, noting how they trembled.
I looked away, unsure how she could mistake loathing for something like interest. “Let’s get this over with,” I urged.
We took up positions in the sitting room, facing each other in well-stuffed seats like some bizarre war council.
“I’ll start since I’m mediating. I expect your people”—I addressed Wanda—“to let them see their mother as soon as possible.”
I turned my attention to Cat. “I expect your family’s cooperation giving Wanda the samples she needs. Blood, hair, and tissue, right?”
“For now,” Wanda said with a nod.
“And what later?” Cat snarled. “Marrow? Sperm? Eggs? Gray matter?” She clicked her teeth together. “I want all the terms clearly defined. Here and now.”
I just wanted to go. To no longer be the one spot in the room Pietr’s eyes never went to. But they’d asked for my help. And I knew too well that sometimes the greatest help was the thing that hurt the most.
“Wanda. Tell the Rusakovas exactly what you expect and what they get by agreeing.”
She began to open her mouth.
“Without threats.”
Her mouth shut and she rethought her words. “Blood, skin, hair, fur, marrow. A baby tooth, if available. You get to see your mother—alive and in good health—in a contained and safe facility under unobtrusive observation. You will be allowed into her environment—”
“Her environment?” Cat’s nose wrinkled. “How is she being held?”
Wanda looked at me.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I took a breath. “We’re only talking terms, now, Catherine.”
“These are the terms of our mother’s imprisonment, Jessie,” she protested. “If your mother was alive—”
I winced.
“Wouldn’t you want to know her condition?”
“Wanda,” I said, “are you in charge of their mother’s captivity?”
“No,” she whispered, leaning forward, her eyes slightly wider than normal. She read the contempt in Cat’s glowing eyes, and I knew that in a moment Wanda might go for her gun.
“Then, Catherine, you cannot—can not—hold the terms of your mother’s captivity against Wanda. Do you understand?” I paused, praying it sank in. “No matter how she’s being held … Wanda’s not responsible. Tell me you understand, Cat.”
“I understand.” She bit off the words. It was something.
“Wanda.”
“She is in a twenty-by-twenty-by-ten cubicle in a secure facility. Nearby. She is provided with all the essentials and some of the comforts high-ranking political prisoners are granted.” She looked at me again. “That’s all I’m at liberty to say.”
Cat sighed. “Does she ever get to go outside? Can she see the moon or stars?”
“That’s all I’m at liberty to say,” Wanda repeated, Cat’s frustration shared.
“Can she be released?” Pietr. Asking the hard question.
“I do not have sufficient rank to warrant her release at this time.”
“Then why the hell are we all here?” Max snarled, baring his teeth. “She’s committed no crime, and she’s probably never seen a courtroom except on TV. She should be here. With her family.”
“I wish it was that easy.” Wanda stared at her fingers. “Technically your family defected from the USSR decades ago. You are U.S. citizens because you were born here, but she’s an illegal. If I push too hard, they could deport.”
“They’ll be waiting for her in Russia,” Catherine said. Her head tilted, and she faced the room’s open door. “Da, Alexi?”
He stepped into the room, his dark hair disheveled, shirt buttoned wrong. I wondered how long he’d stood outside, uninvited but certainly not uninvolved. There were hollows beneath his eyes where shadows nestled. Being labeled a traitor by his family wasn’t working well for him. “Da. They’ll be waiting to take any of us.” He tapped off his cigarette, letting the ash and embers fall into his open hand. He didn’t seem to notice the singeing of his flesh. “Better a jail in America than a hole in Siberia.”
“Okay.” I threw my hands into the air. “Then let’s leave it like this—visitation on Wanda’s terms. Samples given the day of visitation, except for marrow and fur. That can be after a successful first visit. Release can be discussed later.”
Alexi nodded. “Wonderful. Except we can’t stay.”
“What?” Wanda and I asked in unison.
“We will shortly be out of money. The Mafia no longer supports us, and my skills are—negligible—anywhere but in a black-market economy.” He grinned like a ghost smiling up from a grave. “If we stay, we’ll be on the street in under a month. What can your people do to keep us?”
Wanda flopped back onto the love seat and yanked on her ponytail. “Take five.” Cell phone in hand, she stepped out of the sitting room. The door to the porch opened and shut.
“Jessie,” Alexi muttered, sitting in the spot Wanda vacated. “You’re doing a good job, but why did Cat bring you into this?”
“We needed a mediator,” Cat said.
The strain in Alexi’s voice spilled across his face. “You could have asked me,” he said.
“You would have sold us out all over again!” Max roared.
Alexi leaped up. “When did I first sell you out, brother? Tell me!” he demanded. “I stood beside you on the field of battle. I bled as you bled and when you face down the Devil you don’t even invite me to help?”
“I’m facing down the Devil right now,” Max snapped, eyes glowing, nose to nose with Alexi.
“Stop it!” Catherine shouted. “Both of you. Sit!”
Something in her tone brought them both down.
She rested her head in her hands, elbows on her knees. “This is precisely what I hoped to avoid by not inviting you, Alexi. By having Jessie take your place.”
I rose, crossing the room to stand beside Cat. Reaching over I gave her shoulder a squeeze.
“Our family is broken. Why must you boys rip it further apart?” Her head against my hip, she looked up at them, eyes damp and i
mploring.
Max grumbled and shoved his hands into his pockets. But Alexi stared at Cat as if seeing her for the first time.
“Eezvehneetyeh, Ekaterina,” he lowered his gaze. “I am so sorry … sorry for any part I played that hurt this family.”
And then he was gone.
Wanda reappeared in the doorway. “Why do I get the feeling I missed something big?”
“It was nothing,” Max growled. “Absolutely nothing.”
“Uh-huh.” She pocketed her cell phone. “Well. The good news is we can see our way clear to grant you a stipend and, uhmm, specialized health care as government employees. The bad news is there’s no way it’ll do everything the Mafia money did.”
“We’ll take it,” Catherine said. “Jessie, thank you. Spahseebuh. I think you two had better go.” She grabbed my hand, yanking me down so we were eye to eye. “Things will get better between you two,” she promised.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When Wanda showed up announcing a spectacular sale on purses at the mall, I knew something was up. Dad smiled, gave me cash like money didn’t matter, and wished us luck purse hunting. Annabelle Lee stayed curled on the couch, reading All the Pretty Horses as if she hadn’t been overlooked again.
I felt a twinge of sympathy for her. No one wanted to be forgotten, but I had a job to do.
“What’s going on?” I asked, climbing into the car.
“We have a delivery.”
“Ohhh-kay.”
We hadn’t gotten far when Wanda pulled the car over. “I need to know something, Jessie.”
“What?”
“Whose side are you on in all this?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Theirs.”
Wanda nodded. “That’s what I figured. I’m not going to waste your time trying to explain how we’d like to save the werewolves—”
“They have names.”
She just plowed ahead. “To find a cure for their abbreviated life spans,” she said with a wave of her hand.
“No. Wait. You want to do what?”
“We want to fix the werewolves, and not in the trip-to-the-vet way.”
“Huh.”
“It’s come to our attention that having a more normalized population is more beneficial to the ongoing success of both military and government operations.”
“Okay. I don’t believe you.”
“I knew that would be a risk of my being honest with you.”
“How would you benefit from undoing their time line?”
“Imagine. You’re forty—or younger, in their case, as they’re doubly full-bloods—and you collapse in public. A good Samaritan gets you to a hospital. Doctors find you’ve got the liver and heart of a ninety-year-old. And some parts of you, internally, are just sort of melting. Is it a new disease? Quick, get the CDC on the phone! But faster still you’ve got NBC and ABC on the phone. And … disaster. And that’s if your werewolf hasn’t triggered and destroyed the E.R. So. Fix the life span and there’s less chance of them making the evening news as some bizarre focus spot. Less chance of an inquiry into the experiments we did during the Cold War, and before—”
“We did? Our scientists did stuff like this, too?”
Wanda paused. “No. Not like this. We were the good guys.”
I squinted at her summary. “Seriously? It was that black and white? We were the good forces of democracy and they were the diabolical Communist Reds?”
“Ugh. Look. It doesn’t matter who did what. The fact is, we made some bad choices—did some unethical experiments. But that’s history. We just don’t want it being rehashed. So.”
“So?”
“We want to help them, but it takes time,” Wanda said.
“Yeah. Their most precious commodity.”
“Exactly. So while we’re scrambling for a cure—based on the samples you got them to agree to give—we need to keep a better watch on them so they don’t do something stupid.”
“Have you met Max?”
“Precisely.”
“Why not tell them the truth? Give them some hope?”
Her eyes slid toward me. “You know the truth isn’t always accepted. Or believed.”
“Yeah. They don’t trust you.”
Wanda nodded. “So I need a huge favor. I need you to plant a bug.”
“What?! I. Will. Not.”
“Jessie. This can alert us if trouble starts or if somebody gets hurt. We can get someone there to prevent it from making the papers.” She touched my shoulder with her free hand.
I shook it off.
“If the public found out, they’d be hauled away, you know? There’d be no more—”
“No more Rusakova family.” She was right. If Pietr wondered what sort of monster crawled beneath his skin, what would the public demand the government do to find out?
“What if the Mafia returns? They’ll need backup.”
Another good point. “You do it.”
“They’ll be watching me, Jessie. I won’t have a chance.” She fished around in her purse and pulled the bug out.
Such a small thing, really.
“They trust you.”
“That’s because I won’t betray them.”
“Right. You won’t. You’ll protect them. If there’s trouble, we’ll know about it. We can get there and help.” Opening my hand she placed the bug in my palm. “Help us help them, Jessie.”
“Where?”
“Under a table in the sitting room.”
“Okay. But if they catch me we’re both in big trouble. I will throw you to the wolves. Like a juicy bone.”
“Nice.” She pulled back onto the road. “Glad to know you haven’t become jaded by helping your government and friends.”
“Yeah. What were the odds of that?”
* * *
The wad of cash Wanda presented to the Rusakovas went a good distance toward cementing their agreement. Alexi quickly divided the money into mortgage, utilities, food, and incidentals. The last two piles were thinnest.
“They’ll need to hunt,” he pointed out. “Otherwise we can’t maintain their calorie count.”
Wanda glanced at each of the Rusakovas in turn.
“You don’t want them roaming hungry, do you?” Alexi asked.
“No. Crap.”
“Not so easy being a werewolf keeper, is it?”
“You are not our keeper,” Max snarled.
Alexi braced himself. “I am my brother’s keeper,” he said. “And, like it or not, I am still your brother.”
Max paced. Growling. I heard joints snap, changing. Without looking, I knew his eyes glowed red with emotion.
“Max…” I stepped back.
He swung his head toward Alexi, jaws long and lined with sharp teeth, eyes glowing like banked coals—holding his transformation mid-change. It seemed even more a threat—seeing the wolf’s head on the broad human shoulders.
Max puffed out a breath. “Brrrrotherrr.” He swung his heavy head toward Pietr. “Brrrrotherrr,” he repeated, looking to Catherine. Swinging his head back to center, he lunged, snapping at Alexi; his teeth closing a hairsbreadth from Alexi’s face.
I jumped.
Alexi simply sighed. “You want the job?” he asked Wanda as Max’s feral features sank back into his human face.
“Hunting.” She hit something on her cell phone. “Signal’s not so good in here.” She stepped out of the sitting room, followed by the Rusakovas.
It was my chance.
They trailed her past the staircase. The back door made its regular whine of protest and I dropped to my knees, reaching under the marble-topped table to plant the bug. It stuck easily. I was preparing to stand when I heard him.
Which meant he wanted me to hear him.
“Lose something?” Pietr asked.
“Just—”
“Don’t lie to me, Jess.” In two quick strides he closed the distance between us. “What have you done?” So close his breath warmed me all the way down, he drop
ped to all fours, the grace of the wild animal within ever-present.
He stood again, a lithe move that set my heart pounding far more than my fear at being found out. Encircling my wrist with his fingers, he towed me onto the front porch.
“Why…” He released me to rake a hand through his hair. “Why would you bug us?” He arched toward me, his height accentuated as he threw me in shadow. His searching eyes clouded with anguish, and I felt a pang in my stomach. “Why betray us?”
“No, Pietr—no betrayal—” I rested a hand on the wall, throat burning as my heart and lungs battled in my chest. “A safety precaution,” I gasped. “Please. Puzhalsta. Believe me.” I reached up to touch his face.
He flinched, closing his eyes.
“I would never betray you.” My hands walked down his arms. His skin was chilled by my touch; goose bumps rose wherever my fingers traveled. “Believe me, Pietr. Take the bug, crush it.”
“How did Wanda convince you to do this?”
“Things are so volatile right now, and if you get into a bad situation, the CIA may be useful.”
He opened his eyes to marvel at my hands. Clinging to his arms.
“Pietr. What if the Mafia comes back? Don’t you want some firepower on your side?” I stepped deeper into the shadow he cast, resting my head on his chest.
He stiffened, frozen like a rabbit who’d just spotted a hound. “You smell like him,” he murmured, the words tinged with disgust. But his heart sped at my nearness, racing even faster than normal. “Stop,” he begged, nudging me back.
“I can’t stand the idea of you being hurt. I’ll do anything to protect you,” I swore.
He sighed, a ragged, beaten sound. “We’ll discuss important things in another room.”
“What?”
Sunlight sneaked across me as he stepped back. “It stays. I don’t trust Wanda, but in this, she could be useful. Are there any other bugs?”
“Not that I know of. I mean, the phone’s still tapped.…”
“Da. We make few calls that interest the CIA.”
“Yeah. Thursday’s weekly pizza order probably doesn’t top their list of concerns.”
He chuckled.
“I miss that,” I said, examining the wood floor of the expansive porch.
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