“I do,” Sasha insisted, calm but firm. It struck her again – staring at him in his white wolf cloak, the way he stood tall and confident – that something significant had happened to Sasha. He’d changed in some fundamental way. “They’re our pack.”
“Our pack,” Nikita muttered, shaking his head. “No, Sasha, there is no pack. This is crazy.”
“So is what happened to me. But it’s real.” Sasha showed the captain his teeth, and then he growled.
Katya spun in a tight circle, rifle aimed, searching for a wolf hidden in the underbrush. But there was nothing behind her. The sound had come, impossibly, from Sasha.
She turned back to them. The sound was a low, rumbling warning sound. She’d heard countless dogs in her life make the same noise, heads lowered and ears back. The growl pulsed into the streambed, echoing just as their voices had.
Unbelievable.
“Sasha,” Nikita said, and the growl cut off.
Sasha blushed. “Sorry. I just–”
A twig snapped to her left.
She swung the rifle around and felt all the blood drain out of her face. A pair of amber eyes stared at her from the top of the bank. The wolf was a mottled gray, statue-still; if not for the brightness of its eyes, it might have indeed been a statue. It stared at her without blinking. Not snarling, not advancing, just watching.
She managed to take a shaky breath and said, “There’s a wolf right here in front of me.”
She was aware of the men turning toward her, but didn’t dare take her gaze from the wolf. She’d made the mistake of looking the thing in the eyes, and now she was afraid it would pounce if she blinked first. She didn’t want to shoot it – she was a sniper groomed to kill men, not a hunter with a stomach for killing animals – but she’d pull the trigger if it gave her a reason to.
“Oh,” Sasha said, that one syllable full of excitement, and he covered the distance between them in five long strides. When he reached her, he pushed the barrel of her rifle gently aside and positioned himself between Katya and the wolf. “There she is. Hello, beautiful,” he crooned, extending his hand toward the wolf.
“She’s going to eat you,” one of the men said.
“No, she’s a good girl.” To Katya’s amazement and horror, Sasha moved even closer, and then sank down on his haunches, back of his hand still held out in offering. “I’m sorry,” he told her, and sounded so. “I’m sorry they took him from you. That’s a good girl, come here.”
Katya held her breath.
“Sasha,” someone said, and then the old man said, “wait.”
Sasha made a soft whining noise that sounded like a request.
The wolf returned it. And then…then…it, she, stretched her neck forward, audibly sniffing the air. A paw slid forward. Then another. And then her wet, black nose touched the back of Sasha’s hand. They stayed that way a moment, wolf and man, and then the wolf’s jaws opened, her tongue rolled out, and, panting happily, she shimmied down the bank and into Sasha’s lap.
“Good girl,” he praised, scratching her behind the ears. “What a good girl you are.”
The brush rustled, and the rest of the pack appeared along the bank: gray, and black, and brown. Seven of them, not counting the female panting up at Sasha like a lap dog.
A hand landed on her arm, and it took every ounce of self-control not to jump.
“Don’t shoot,” Nikita said beside her, though he had his own gun in his hand.
“I wasn’t going to.”
His hand tightened once and then fell away.
When she looked at him, he was already looking away.
~*~
Sasha had never known a sensation like this. It was somewhere between joy, excitement, and perfect contentment. The wolf in him was delighted to be reunited with his wolf pack. And Sasha was delighted right along with him. Having his own human pack and the wolves together flooded him with warmth. They were all here, where he could watch over them, keep them safe.
He raked his fingers through the alpha female’s thick coat and she closed her eyes with happiness. He felt her heartbreak – they’d taken her mate from her – but she was happy to have his scent and presence here with her now.
“Wonderful,” Monsieur Philippe said.
Sasha was already growling when he turned to him, and eight wolves echoed the sound.
Everyone took a startled leap back.
Except Philippe, who, as always, smiled, eyes disappearing in his wrinkled face. “They’ve accepted you, Sasha. Marvelous.”
“They’re my pack,” Sasha said, because it didn’t require an explanation beyond that.
“So they are. That’s why we’re out here in the forest. So you can learn to hunt together. To fight together.”
18
MEN LIKE YOU
Ivan insisted that when a man went too long without the company of a woman, the backed-up lust went rancid and turned to violence. Nikita didn’t disagree with him, but the last time he’d visited Natalia, he’d left tired, but far from satisfied.
He hadn’t ever thought of himself as someone who wanted a substantial relationship – he didn’t tend to meet charming young women eager to accept courtship when he was looting through houses in the name of Communism – and certainly had never sought one. He could have found a wife, if he’d wanted to. But his cause had always been the most important thing. His brothers-in-arms had satisfied his need for human closeness – as much of it as he would allow. And he’d shoved all lascivious thoughts deep down beneath his layers of grief, fear, and general disgust with the state of the Soviet Union and this hellish war that was on.
He chose to blame it on abstinence when he woke from a vivid dream and found himself flushed and achingly hard, curled up on his side beneath his blanket, slick with sweat, breathing raggedly through his mouth.
He blinked to clear the sleep from his eyes and tried to calm his racing heart.
Dawn was just breaking, its light milky and barely-there through the gap in the tent flaps, not visible at all through the canvas walls. He was, thankfully, alone. Sasha’s insistence that he was plenty warm, and that he needed to sleep with the wolves – that was never going to sound normal to his ears – had left them with more tents than sleepers. As technical co-leaders of the expedition, Nikita should have bunked with Philippe, but the old man had said he would sit up for first watch, and then never come into the tent.
So. Alone. With a painful erection and a pulse that wouldn’t slow. He couldn’t remember being this desperate for release in his life. And he couldn’t pretend he’d been dreaming about anyone other than their sniper.
There was no shortage of beautiful Russian women.
But Katya possessed a quality that had always driven him crazy: competency.
Last night, sitting around a fire that was really just smoke thanks to damp wood, she’d polished her spotless rifle with methodical, deft movements. Nikita could tell with a look whether or not someone was comfortable with his or her weapon, and Katya was comfortable. If she’d listened to their conversation, she hadn’t shown that she cared. She’d set up her tent by herself without trouble.
He’d dreamed of her with her hair unbraided, her lips red and bruised, her deft, gun-polishing fingers wrapped around him.
She haunted him now that he was awake too: visions of the sleek, pale body hiding under her uniform, skin chilled and hungry for touch.
He strained his ears for the sound of anyone moving around the camp, and heard only the early twittering of birds. He could ignore the problem and eventually it would go away. Or he could help things along and be done with it.
With a sigh of mixed exasperation and relief, he unfastened his pants.
It was the first time he’d touched himself to do something besides piss or bathe in months, and the moment he got his hand around his cock, he knew it wouldn’t last long.
It didn’t. As riled up as he was, it only took a few intense minutes, his face buried in the musty blanket, sha
meless fantasies of Katya playing out behind his closed eyelids. He had the presence of mind to cup his hand and catch his release, sparing his clothes the indignity of stains. The wave crashed over him hard, pulling him down into a wakeful sort of sleep, a crushing exhaustion that set him reeling.
He dozed for what must have only been a moment, battling his heavy eyelids when the sweat began to dry and the spring chill snaked into his clothes. He still lay on his side, pants still open, hand resting on top of the blanket, his open palm sticky.
Ugh.
That was when the shame settled in. Not just for the act, but on behalf of the object of his lust.
He managed to do up his pants one-handed, stepped into his boots and, leaving them unlaced, left his tent and made his way across camp toward the stream that lay through a screen of bushes and down a hill from their tents. His damp shirt clung to his skin, and leaving his jacket behind would prove only the second-worst mistake of the morning.
At another time he would have been careful, but still groggy in the aftermath, he did only a cursory scan of the streambank, looking for wolves, or bears, or whatever the fuck might be out here, before he knelt and plunged his hands into the icy-cold water, washing them clean.
The water was so cold that it burned, and he hissed in discomfort as he worked his fingers together under the surface.
A voice said, “Oh,” and he came fully awake in an instant, surging to his feet, reaching with one numb, wet hand for a gun that wasn’t there. He didn’t have his hat or coat, but his clothes were black; anyone coming upon him would know what he was, and any number of villagers would take the chance to kill a lone, unarmed Chekist in the forest.
But it was only Katya, the dark, wet length of her hair caught in one hand, a bar of soap held in the other. The cold had brought out the color in her cheeks. And her hair, he reflected dimly, was unbound, just as he’d fantasized. He’d caught her in the middle of washing, he guessed, water droplets dripping between her fingers and landing on the leaves below with quiet patters. Water dotted the shoulders of the shirt she wore. Her eyes, surprised and wary, looked amber in the early light.
He had a sudden, intense worry that she knew what he’d just been doing, and that he’d been thinking of her. He thought those eyes of hers could look straight through his skull and see every awful, dirty thing he’d dreamed about.
But that was dumb. He was being dumb.
“Hello,” he said.
She looked at him a long moment, wringing out her hair. “Hello.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, because he was an idiot.
She pulled a small piece of burlap from her trouser pocket and wrapped the soap in it before tucking it away again. She started to finger-comb the tangles from her hair, the mass of it heavy across one shoulder, long enough to hang past her breasts. “What does it look like I’m doing?” From someone else, it might have sounded flirtatious, but Katya’s voice was cold, just shy of hostile.
He wanted that to make it easier – there could be no mistaking her hostility for any kind of invitation – but instead, he found himself approving of her coldness. She was here for the war, to do a job, and she had no interest in any of the men around her. He approved of that wholeheartedly – and that approval made him like her.
He nodded, acknowledging the stupidity of his question. “Water’s awful cold, is all.”
She shrugged and her fingers kept combing. A challenge infused her gaze, daring him to make a reference to the water matching her temperament.
He wanted to put his whole face in the stream, suddenly, so he did the next best thing: crouched at the bank, cupped water in his hands and rubbed it vigorously across his cheeks and chin. It worked. The last haze of sleep cleared, and all thoughts of sex promptly shriveled up along with his cock as a shiver overtook him.
He stayed like that a moment, hands and face dripping, the gurgle of the water and the singing of the birds the only sounds.
“I don’t disapprove of you, you know,” he said, surprising himself. If the small sound she made behind him was anything to go by, he’d surprised her too. “I have no problem with women, or snipers. I just don’t want to be responsible for anyone else.” It was ninety-percent of the truth. He also didn’t want Soviet loyalists finding out what they were really up to.
Katya released a deep breath. “Well,” she said, less certain, less cold. “I can look out for myself.”
“I’m sure you can.”
He heard her footfalls rustling through the leaf litter, and expected she had walked off. So when he stood and turned, drying his hands on his pants legs, he was surprised to see that she’d sat down on an old tree stump and was separating her hair into bunches so she could braid it. Her face was still cautious, but less aggressive.
“Can I ask something?”
He put his hands in his pockets to keep them from freezing. He longed for his coat, but wasn’t about to walk away from her, God help him. “Yes.”
Her gaze flicked down to her boots, fingers quick as they began to plait. “I’ve seen men like you. In black. They were in my town.”
“They’re in every town.”
She nodded. “I watched what they did. What they did in my home.” She shivered a little, and he wondered what she was remembering, how awful it was. “So I can’t figure out what you lot are doing out here in the woods.” Her gaze lifted, touching his boldly. “With an old man, and a bunch of wolves, and a man who thinks he’s one of them.”
“We do what we’re told to do.”
“So do I. But it usually makes sense.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “What is Sasha?”
Not who, but what. Smart girl.
“That depends. Do you believe in folk stories?”
“I used to.”
A sudden snapping of twigs and rustling of leaves startled them both. Nikita hadn’t seen the rifle before, but Katya instantly let go of her hair to reach for it where it rested against the stump. It was leveled on the shrubs beyond the stream by the time two gray wolves emerged, panting and unconcerned.
“You’re a little trigger happy,” Nikita observed.
“Sorry, I’m not used to living with wolves,” she shot back.
Nikita didn’t tell her that the sight of the animals made him want to reach for a gun, too. He’d studied them enough to know that these two belonged to Sasha – were part of his pack. As was the lanky, coltish brown-gray one that joined them. That was the omega, Sasha had told him.
Another crash, and Sasha himself appeared, holding a brace of hares in each hand, grinning ear-to-ear. “We got breakfast,” he announced happily.
Nikita said, “I can see that.” He jerked a thumb back toward camp. “Go wake up Feliks and tell him to get a fire going.”
“Right.”
The rest of the pack melted out of the underbrush and followed Sasha up the hill, their lanky, nineteen-year-old, cloak-wearing alpha.
It was never going to stop being strange.
When he – and his wolves – were gone, Katya said, “He’s very sweet. Nothing like the rest of you.”
Nikita fought the urge to smile. “Ah. We’re horrible, then.”
“You’re Cheka.”
They were. A sobering reality.
“But he’s sweet.”
“So you said. Are you sweet on him?”
She’d laid her rifle across her lap and resumed braiding her hair again. She snorted. “No. He’s just a boy.”
“Some women like that.”
“Some women have the luxury,” she said, and he didn’t think she meant to let the melancholy bleed into her voice.
Nikita’s stomach cramped with hunger and he leaned his shoulder against a narrow tree trunk to keep from swaying. The fading adrenaline from his orgasm, and the shock of the cold weren’t helping. But that note of sadness in her last words had snared his attention. (Also, he loved the way her skinny white fingers moved as she plaited her hair into two neat braids.)
&nb
sp; “You’re young,” he said, and thought he said it gently. That was his aim, anyway. “And pretty. You could have the luxury, if you wanted it.”
Her mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “I have my orders.”
“So does everyone. It doesn’t mean you can’t want other things, too.”
She tied off each braid with a bit of twine from her pocket and then shot him a level look. “Is that what all men think about all women? That we want husbands and children and hearths?”
Nikita returned her look. “I don’t think anything.” Except that she was lovely, and hurting very, very badly. He saw his own guilty grief when he looked in her eyes.
Her eyes fell to her rifle, and she polished it absently with her sleeve. “I want to be where I’m needed. That’s all I think.” She bit her lip. “I guess I don’t understand why I’m needed here.”
“Welcome to the military.”
She huffed a sound that was almost a laugh.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I think what we’re doing here, no matter how it looks, might turn out to be something important for Russia.”
She lifted her brows. “The Soviet Union, you mean?” But there was no censure in her tone, only curiosity.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
~*~
She couldn’t figure them out, and that unsettled her. After several days in the wilderness, she knew that Feliks was the default cook, and hated it. Knew that Kolya was spooky, quiet, and no doubt capable. Knew that Pyotr was uncertain and young – he smiled at her in a way that the others didn’t, more nervous than Sasha, but friendly all the same. Nikita was their leader, and the most unsettling of all. It had been easy to think of him as cruel before this morning – the gray eyes, and clenched jaw, and unsmiling mouth – but not after he’d spoken to her kindly, without condescension or licentiousness.
In fact, none of them had said anything untoward. They’d been cool, distant, secretive even, but no one had offered a leer, or a wink, or a suggestive comment. Not even their captain – the way she understood it, the leader always got the first taste, and passed things along to his men if he felt generous. But not Nikita.
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