by Jacey Conrad
Nik snagged the glass from Irina’s hand. “And you, my dear Rina, are officially cut off.”
Irina sniffed and glared at him, making a sloppy grab for the glass. “Konstantin, how do you stand this utter stick in the mud?”
“He’s got a big dick.”
Nik spit out the vodka he’d just swallowed.
Irina shook her head. “I’m suddenly glad I wasn’t drinking just now.”
“Waste of good vodka,” Andrey noted with a smirk.
Nik’s lake cottage was perfectly cozy, three bedrooms and two baths done up in a tasteful country-chic-meets-Adirondack style with no neighbors for miles. Kon and Nik had agreed to “switch off” weeks as her babysitter so it wasn’t too obvious to Alexei that they were keeping Irina. But the first few nights, Nik had been too nervous to leave his mate—because that’s what Kon was to Nik and Irina dared anyone to say otherwise in her presence—alone. Irina could hear the noises coming from Nik’s room and it didn’t hurt nearly as much as she thought it would. She was glad her brother had found someone. He’d been alone for too long. She didn’t particular want to hear him, but she was happy for him.
Nik and Kon mostly left her alone the first day. She sat on the porch, wrapped in a quilt, watching the water lap at the shore. The quiet gave her time to unravel her regrets from her grief. It was a bit like unsnarling the devil’s emotional yarn. The ache of missing Viktor had settled into her bones, making her feel like a prematurely old woman. She wished she’d asked him to give her the mating bite. If she had, maybe she would be carrying his child right now.
Irina knew she would never love again. This wasn’t hyperbole or melodrama talking. She couldn’t open her heart again after this. It hurt too much. The irony was that she was now perfectly prepared for a loveless marriage of convenience, but her engagement had been canceled.
Yeah, she was a little bitter.
On the second morning, Nik felt comfortable enough to leave. Kon brought her a bottle of water and they stared out at the rising sun reflecting on the water. “I lost someone that I loved about ten years ago.”
“Another werewolf?” Irina asked.
“No, Robbie was a human,” Kon said, smiling fondly, though his dark eyes reflected faded grief. “He died a perfectly normal, though accidental, human death. A truck skidded across three lanes of traffic and hit him head-on. It was quick, he never knew what hit him, and I tried to find some comfort in that.”
“Yeah, so far, picturing Viktor being blown up is not helping much.”
“I don’t blame you, it didn’t help me much either,” Kon admitted. “And I was pissed off for a really long time. At myself, at the driver who hit Robbie, at the ambulance drivers who didn’t get there quickly enough, and eventually Robbie himself. I closed in on myself, made a lot of shitty choices, hurt people. I forgot about the people who really cared about me and only saw my own pain.”
“Your point is getting awfully pointy, Konstantin.”
“You’ve got a lot of anger bottled up inside of you, Irina. And it will poison you if you don’t find a way to drain it out of your system. Even if you find happiness again, if you rebuild your life after all this is done, all of those repressed emotions are going to boil up and wipe out the people around you, like Pompeii.”
“So what do I do about it?” Irina asked. “Take up drinking? Therapy? Some sort of twelve-step program for repressed rage-aholics?”
Kon grinned at her and held up a pair of her sneakers.
“Those are my favorite pair. If you chew on those, I will smack you,” she told him.
“Galina says you’re a runner. So we’re going to run. It will be good for you. Get the blood pumping through your brain, fresh air in your lungs.”
Irina was surprised that she didn’t protest. She’d spent too much time in near catatonia since Viktor and her father’s death. She knew she needed to do something besides sit and stare. She couldn’t stay in this state of inertia any longer. She nodded and stood, shrugging off the blanket she’d had wrapped around her. Kon gathered it up and clapped one of his huge hands on her shoulders, nearly bowling her over.
“Come on,” he said, gesturing toward the back door of the cabin. “I’ll make you a big plate of pasta. We’ll carbo-load for the morning.”
“Every meal with you is a carbo-load,” she muttered, suddenly stopping short of the entrance of the cabin’s kitchen. “Hey, Kon? Can you teach me how to shoot, too? I mean, I know how to operate a gun. Papa insisted that Galina and I at least know how to handle them safely with so many around the house. I’m actually a pretty decent shot, but I’m rusty. I want to be ready for what’s coming. I’m tired of waiting for the next horrible thing to come and get me. I want to help.”
Kon seemed to think it over for a moment before nodding. “Okay, but if Nik asks, we’re doing needlepoint or scrapbooking or something.”
“Nik would never believe I was scrapbooking,” Irina told him. “He knows how I feel about decorative borders. By the way, Kon, I’m sorry I called you a ‘goat fucker.’”
“No, you’re not,” he said, making her laugh. “But you will be, about five miles into our first run.”
At dawn, Kon dragged a suitably dressed, but groggy, Irina to the tree line and made her stretch thoroughly. He let her start off at a comfortable pace, a loping jog, until she was warmed up. And then she had a yapping black wolf snapping at her heels, urging her on until she was running at full speed. Her feet pounded into the ground, a steady, angry tattoo that pushed her through the trees.
Her brain clicked into automatic pilot. Images began flowing through her mind unbidden. Dancing with Viktor at the party. Sergei’s shooting. Mama Anya’s funeral ravings. Alexei destroying her clothes. The first time she’d made love to Viktor at the Beaumont Hotel. Her father handing her over to Andrey at their engagement party. Viktor knotting her.
Something snapped inside of her, a hot, dark tide of sorrow and anger, rising up to her throat in the form of a primal, howling scream. Irina skidded to a stop, and almost lost her balance on the forest floor.
“Motherfucker!” she yelled. “Sonofabitch! What the hell is wrong with me? Why did I put up with it for so long? Why did I just keep taking it? Why didn’t I walk away? Why? What’s wrong with me that I need any sort of fucked up love, even if the price tag is my fucking dignity? My life? You took my life from me! Fuck you, you stupid, fucking fuck!” She wasn’t sure who she was yelling at by the end. Papa? Alexei? Sergei? Herself?
She screamed and raged and cried until her voice disappeared into a hoarse rasp. Kon waited patiently for her stop and then walked her back to the cabin. He gave her a cup of tea, liberally laced with whiskey, and then ran a bath for her.
And so a routine was established. Irina ran. Over and over, in the mornings, the afternoons, once during the full moon, her legs would eat up the ground as she sped along a trail only she could see. Kon ran at her heels, yapping encouragement. Her running sessions usually ended in another massive screaming session. It was beyond therapeutic, letting loose all of the feeling she’d bottled up over the years, letting them fester.
In between runs, Kon set up a line of empty tin cans and she shot a Glock 9mm, a Browning shotgun, a .22, even a little pearl-handled purse-sized lady pistol, just to round out her gun repertoire. The target practice involved less screaming than the running. Irina didn’t want to push Kon past the limits of his “crazy tolerance.” She wasn’t a sniper by any stretch of the imagination, but she hit her target more often than not, and she was surprised how therapeutic shooting could be. She lined up her shot, focused her breath and destroyed her target.
She tried not to take it personally when Kon kept the guns—with the exception of the one in his side holster—locked up in a rifle cabinet between shooting sessions. She did spend an awful lot of time screaming at trees.
Eventually, the anger ebbed. There was no one left to be angry with. She supposed she could be angry with Alexei, but they would never
be able to prove that he took out their father. It all seemed so hopeless and stupid. She could leave now, she supposed. Without the threat of Papa’s retribution hanging over her head, she could run away. But it seemed unfair to leave Galina and Nik to deal with the mess on their own, not to mention cowardly.
Then again, hiding up here at a secluded cabin in the middle of nowhere while Galina and Nik were facing Alexei alone wasn’t exactly the height of bravery. But nothing Irina said would convince Galina that she needed to come out of hiding.
“Rina, I understand you’re frustrated,” Galina told her in the latest of her near-daily phone calls. “I get it. But short of finding a handily written confession that Alexei decided to blow up his father because it was a day that ended in Y, I don’t think there’s much you can do here. If Alexei knows you’re back in town, he’s going to try to see you. And we’ve seen how well that ends.”
“I take it your search efforts have not been successful?” Irina asked.
“No,” Galina snarled. “He’s moved into Papa’s house, along with his whole operation—computers, goons, any records that he keeps. It’s like the Waco compound now. I bribed his building’s maintenance guy to let me into his condo, but I got nothing. He took everything with him to Papa’s.”
“What about Nik? Can he get anywhere with him?”
“No. He barely lets Nik onto the property. I can’t get near him unless I do some serious Black Ops shit.”
“He would let me in,” Irina said.
“No, absolutely not!” Galina’s voice dropped to Alpha command level, the gravelly tone she used to compel Betas to do her bidding.
“Do not pull your Alpha crap on me, Missy. You know that doesn’t work on me.”
“Then stop suggesting highly dangerous things!” Galina snarled. “We’ll get him, Irina. I just need a little more time.”
“Meanwhile, you’re in danger and Kon and Nik are stuck babysitting me.”
“And you’re healing, which is what you need to be doing right now,” Galina told her. “Just relax, Irina. Let us take care of it.”
That afternoon, on her run, Galina’s words ran through Irina’s head. Alexei wouldn’t let her close enough to look for anything incriminating. But he would let Irina close. Hell, if anything, he wanted Irina way too close for comfort. If she went to him and asked nicely, he’d probably give her the password to his e-mail accounts and porn memberships. Even the really gross ones.
She came to the end of the trail, where the trees overgrew the path and she couldn’t run safely anymore. She stopped, bending at the waist and balancing her palms against her knees. She could do it. She didn’t have a lot of strengths to work with, but she was smart. She was fast and she’d learned manipulation from the masters. She could get close enough to Alexei to find the proof Galina needed. She could do it for Papa and for Viktor. She could find a way to punish Alexei for what he’d done.
Kon skidded to a stop beside her, huffing, nosing at her leg. She smiled and scratched him behind the ears.
All she would have to do is talk Kon into taking her back, which was unlikely…or she could do something that was going to make Kon really, really upset with her.
Kon gave a short “harrumph” sort of bark, arching his head toward the path back to the cabin. She smiled and patted his head. “Sure.”
Kon started a slow jog back to the cabin, speeding up only when Irina fell into step. A plan slowly formed in her head as her feet pounded against the ground.
Yep, Kon was going to be pissed.
Hours later, Irina sat at the kitchen table, flipping through a magazine as a pot of solianka, traditional Russian beef and mushroom soup, simmered on the stove. Chopping mushrooms had given Irina time to construct and reject several different plans for approaching Alexei. One included showing up and surprising Alexei at Papa’s home, which would make him suspicious, since Irina never visited Alexei by herself. Plan Two involved attacking him with a sock filled with silverware. She doubted very much it would be as effective as she hoped.
She glanced out of the window, noted the sun setting over the pines. It was a Thursday, which meant Alexei would be presiding over his usual table at Predavat’sya, with his horde of toadies. If she was going to do this, she was going to have to find a way back to town, and soon.
Kon came into the room, stripping out of his shirt. She made a dramatic show of averting her eyes. “You know, you’d think after living with werewolves my whole life, I would be used to people walking around, stripping out of their clothes…but, no.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kon said, tossing his shirt at her. “I happen to like this shirt and don’t want to rip it when I phase. Just let me run a quick perimeter check and I’ll be back for dinner in a few minutes.”
“Okay,” she said, smiling absently as she flipped another page. Kon gave her a wink, but graciously waited to drop his jeans until he was out of the door. Irina waited to hear his bark as he ran for the woods. She dashed back to her room, slipped into running shoes and grabbed her purse. She went into Kon and Nik’s room and took his keys from the nightstand. She looked around for the key to the rifle cabinet, but apparently, Kon had the presence of mind to hide that. She would try not to take his good judgment personally. She peered out the front window and didn’t see any sign of her werewolf companion.
“I am really, really sorry about this, Kon,” she murmured and sprinted out of the door to the SUV. She clicked the keyless entry to slid into the driver’s seat, starting the engine and gunning it down the gravel road to the main road. As she approached the road, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw a large black wolf burst out of the trees.
“Shit.”
Kon ran at full speed, barking so loud she could hear it over the engine. She sped the through the turn and pulled onto the road without stopping.
“Yeah,” she muttered as she watched Wolf Kon stop on the pavement behind her and set up a howl. “He’s pissed.”
13
Getting Kicked by a Trojan Horse
HER PLAN HAD WORKED OUT exactly as she’d hoped, but Irina couldn’t help but feel that she’d fucked herself over royally. Irina was once again, tucked away in a safe bunker of werewolf protection, behind several layers of security. The problem was that those layers were provided by Alexei and meant to keep Irina contained and “protected” from the interference of the outside world.
Irina paced her papa’s former bedroom, Alexei’s bedroom now, searching for Alexei’s laptop, wallet, receipts or Galina’s aforementioned “because the day ended in Y” confession. But so far, she hadn’t found anything beyond an alarming number of hair care products and some magazines that she would take every measure possible to have hypno-therapied out of her memory.
She should have known it was too damn easy. She’d strolled into Alexei’s favorite restaurant, past silk orange trees carefully strung with fairy lights, to the red-draped banquet table where her brother lounged, flanked by Maksim, Vasily, Timur, two giggly prostitutes and the expected henchmen. The laughing and carousing stopped almost immediately as Alexei went on full alert.
“Irina!” he yelled, toppling the table as he bolted up from his seat and rushed toward her. He ignored the yelps of the two girls tossed aside in the process. Alexei flung his arms around her, burying his face in her neck, scenting her without permission. She stiffened and suppressed the urge to shrug him off or kick him in the shins. He glanced down and raised his eyebrows at her less-than-dress-code-worthy ensemble of a hoodie, jeans and sneakers. “Where have you been?”
“I just needed some time away,” she told him, acutely aware of the way conversation around the restaurant had gone quiet. Alexander Oniayev was sitting two tables away, talking furtively into his cell phone. Kirill Demensky sat an adjacent booth, shaking his head in disgust. The tables were filled were the top players of werewolf mafia society and they were all watching Alexei causing a huge scene over what should have been an everyday interaction with his own sister…and m
anhandling her in a decidedly unbrotherly fashion. Irina tried not to take their discomfited grimaces personally.
She pulled back, trying to at least keep his face away from her neck. He frowned and clutched her cheeks between his palms. “Why would you ever need time away from me?”
“Because I was frightened, Alexei. Who wouldn’t be after what happened to Papa?”
Confusion flickered across his features for a moment before he nodded. “Of course, of course. Who wouldn’t be frightened? You’re a good girl, a smart girl. But where were you?”
“Does it really matter?” she said. “I came here to see you, Alexei. I wanted to know if it’s safe enough to go back to my house?”
Irina gave him her best big, innocent doe eyes, even though it made a shudder ripple down her spine. His too-warm hands slipped down her neck to her shoulders. “Of course, you are always safe as long as I’m around, sweetheart. But why don’t you come back to the family house with me? You could stay in your old room. You would have the protection of my men. And we would have more time together.”
Even in Irina’s head, she knew he came up with that solution way too quickly.
“Oh, I couldn’t, Alexei. I prefer my privacy. I just want to make sure my house was safe. I really just want to go home.”
“Nonsense, nonsense,” he insisted, kissing her temple and lingering too long. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and urged her toward the restaurant’s front door. “You’re coming home with me.”
“No, Alexei, please,” she said, just a little too loudly. “I don’t want to go with you!”
“Irina, stop fighting me. You are coming with me!” he shouted, dragging her across the floor as she “struggled” in his grip. Alexei’s posse fell in step behind them and murmurs echoed across the restaurant as he dragged her out the door. She hid her smile in Alexei’s shoulder as she “squirmed” in his grip. That little scene should get some people talking. Alexei had just behaved like a lunatic—well, way beyond his normal lunatic threshold—in a very public place.