Bargains and Betrayals

by Shannon Delany

  Nyet. Heavy guards. Derek’s inside. Watching.

  “Damn it,” I snapped. Out loud.

  “Now, Jessie,” Dad reprimanded in his jolly way, “just ’cause they didn’t win that game doesn’t mean we should get upset.”

  U have 2 get her out.

  No good unless ur out 2.

  Even texting, Pietr had a gift for pointing out the obvious. They’d need my blood to make the cure.

  Focus on ur mother. I focus on me. Do what u have 2 to get her out.

  Nothing.

  Do what u have 2. It will work.

  Has 2.

  I imagined the set of his jaw, the way his eyes would pinch near the bridge of his nose realizing there were no other options and so little time.

  Time was running out so fast. For almost all of them. The distinct advantages of being an oborot were balanced cruelly with a huge disadvantage. They were stronger, faster, more nimble. They could hear, scent, and see better than someone like me—simply human. But the canine aspect of their DNA meant strength, agility, and superior senses as much as it meant shorter life spans.

  By human standards, Pietr’s mom appeared to be middle-aged. But internally, her liver would be hardening, her heart racing even faster than its normally rapid rhythm, her arteries toughening. She’d be fighting an even harder battle to keep the wolf that always longed to claw its way out of her deep inside. If she hadn’t been dangerous before, she’d be a gun with a hair-trigger now.

  Pietr and his siblings—well, not Cat, she’d sucked down the cure like it was nothing—might live even shorter lives because they were the offspring of two full-blooded oboroten. No one really knew what would happen as the generations progressed and the genetics compounded. Both powerful and poisoned by their own DNA, the oboroten were victims of their genetic code.

  I love you, I concluded.

  I want to hear it.

  U will. Soon.

  g2g

  I snapped the cell shut and nudged it against Dad’s leg, obscuring the sight of the phone with my hand.

  He shook his head. “Well, I just wanted to update you on the sports world. I know how you love that sort of stuff.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I really appreciate it.”

  “I better get back to the farm,” he said, rising.

  “Uh, yeah. Geez, is it hot in here?” I asked, tugging at my neckline just enough to pop the cell into my shirt, resting it in my bra.

  Ha. An ample bosom wouldn’t have left room for such a clunky phone. Score one for the averagely endowed.

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “It is a little toasty,” he agreed, swabbing at his forehead as if it were dotted with perspiration. He hugged me. “I’ve got us a lawyer. He’s going to push that I was under duress when I signed those papers. He says if court goes quickly, he’ll have you out in a little more than a week.”

  My heart leaped, trying to lodge in my throat. “How much will that cost?” I asked, but he squeezed me tight.

  “Freedom always comes at a cost, but no price is too high. God, Jessie, I’m sorry I put you in here.”

  “You did what you thought was best,” I admitted begrudgingly.

  “I had the very best of intentions,” he agreed. “I’ll get you out soon. It’ll all work out.” He pulled back from me, blinking rapidly as he looked into my own damp eyes.

  I nodded sharply. “It has to.”

  Jessie

  Back in my room, I hugged my journal and thought things through. Dad would work from a legal angle to get me out, Pietr would work on getting his mother out, and I would try to be the best little patient I could and hope nobody knew where’d I’d been or, more importantly, what I’d seen.

  It was official: We had something that passed for a plan.

  But what Pietr had mentioned about Derek’s involvement, the way he was tucked safely away and watching things from a distance, worried me. I’d known Derek since I was in middle school and had crushed on him starting around then, too. He was Junction’s golden boy: fast on the football field, smart, smolderingly hot with all-American good looks. Very popular.

  But I’d known all that before the Rusakovas moved in.

  I’d lived in a comfortable bubble before the werewolves moved in and Pietr showed me what he really was the night of his seventeenth birthday. I accepted things I could see and prove—although I researched things that defied explanation.

  I expected to find werewolves in high school just as much as I’d expected to meet the love of my life there.

  So meeting Pietr blew my mind doubly.

  But the world got even stranger.

  If the company had Derek in their underground bunker, he could watch the werewolves coming. He’d done it using my eyes and we’d dug poisoned bullets out of Max and Pietr as a result.

  Derek’s abilities made him a huge threat. He’d manipulated more than me with just a touch, implanting and fuzzing memories. And he juiced up when people got emotional—making me a prime target of his attentions since the death of my mother. He could even transfer energy from one person to another in a pinch so he was hard to take in a fight. But what the company wanted him most for was his remote viewing—his ability to see what was going on some place he wasn’t near.

  He had the abilities spies dreamed of and a hunger that made him doubly dangerous.

  The physical connection Derek made with me when we dated amped up his viewing power. Having me as a direct and—my stomach twisted, remembering, touchable—link to Pietr had been like giving Derek super-creepy 20 / 20.

  I needed to get out of here, and Pietr’s mother needed to get out of there. Eliminating Derek might be a necessity.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Alexi

  We were gathering for breakfast when Pietr leaned over the table to speak to me. He glanced back toward the hallway, making it clear he knew Amy was nowhere near enough to overhear.

  “We cannot wait any longer. We need help to free her.”

  I resisted the urge to reach up and choke him for thinking I was waiting. That because things appeared normal, no progress was being made. “I am examining options.”

  “Not good enough,” he said. “We need help. Now.”

  “And where would you suggest we get help, little brother?”

  Max scraped his chair back from the table.

  Pietr ignored him. “There’s only one group that has the firepower we need.”

  Our eyes met and I read his intentions clearly. Desperate times. Desperate measures. “Nyet. Absolutely not.”

  “What?” Cat had leaned in over my shoulder. “Pietr—who?”

  “Think, Cat,” Max said, which I found amazingly ironic.

  Her eyes widened, reading the stern expressions we all wore. “Nyet, Pietr. The Mafia?” She shook her head, disbelieving. “Why would they help us? They want—”

  “They want something we have,” he said with deceptive simplicity.

  “Pietr—no. You cannot,” Cat replied.

  “This discussion is over. We’ll find some other way.” Max stood.

  “Sit down,” Pietr commanded.

  Max sat, grumbling. He glanced toward the hallway, watching for Amy as well.

  “Be reasonable,” Cat urged. “They’ll want more than you—more than any of us—can give.”

  “When did we determine a limit to what we’re willing to sacrifice to free Mother?” He stood and picked up his chair just to slam it back down. “Didn’t you see her? Were you not in the same room with me?” He swung around, facing each of us separately for a moment, his face filled with turmoil.

  “So you would do what,” Cat whispered to her twin, “bargain away your freedom to earn their help and set Mother free?”

  “Da,” he said.

  A simple word, it was laced with all Pietr’s conviction.

  “They can’t be trusted,” Max reminded him.

  I stood, stepping back from the table—my appetite for breakfast gone before any food was offered. Tired of the post
uring, I had trouble believing what I was about to say. “Max is right. This conversation is over. We will find another way.”

  Alexi

  Approaching my room, dread stabbed me in the gut. I’d closed my door, but a narrow band of light shone from around it. Inside, someone rustled through my belongings. I held my breath, careful not to give warning of my presence. My training served me well as I crept with my back to the wall and rested my shoulder against the doorjamb.

  This was a part of being a displaced alpha that I hated—no longer having rights in my own home. “What are you doing?”

  Pietr jumped, caught.

  I fought back the smile tugging at my lips. I had surprised an alpha. Funny how that perked my failing ego.

  He closed my bureau’s drawer.

  “If you needed to borrow socks…”

  But we both knew what had brought him here. It was not my sense of decor, nor my reading material, though a selection of my magazines was scattered boldly across the bed.

  Catherine would have thrown a fit had she seen them, preaching to me about the exploitation of women, not believing that I, of course, read such magazines for the articles. The beautiful women inside merely broke the text in an appealing fashion. Pietr read less Russian than I did, so he surely suspected the magazines had another use.

  My eyes rested on the mess he’d made. I cleared my throat. “Or if you needed to borrow something else…”

  He followed my gaze and, seeing the magazines, blushed.

  I snorted. Virgin was more than a powerful British company.

  “I need information, Alexi.”

  I could not resist, having him on the ropes. I leaned forward and held a magazine out to him. “I thought they taught the birds and the bees in school.”

  His eyebrows lowered. I bit the inside of my cheeks to keep from laughing at how uncomfortable a simple magazine made him: the Rusakova alpha.

  Around a catch in his voice, he said, “I need a name.”

  I threw the magazine down, ruffling pages. “Nyet.”

  “Who else can we turn to?” he asked, tilting his head to examine me in his canine way. “What other option do we have?”

  “We will find another option.” I jabbed a finger at the door and pulled up every ounce of alpha I had in me. “I will not let my brother indebt himself to the mob.”

  His nostrils flared and he raised his chin in defiance, but he left my room, slamming the door behind him.

  “Allo, ladies,” I whispered, gathering the magazines up carefully and replacing them in the box underneath my bed: a box again starting to accumulate dust. As I closed them away once more in their cardboard tomb I realized, as beautiful as they were, they paled to nothing but aging paper beside Nadezhda.

  Alexi

  While I hurriedly researched options and contemplated the ulcer probably festering in my gut, Max had taken some initiative.

  “Come on, beautiful,” Max coaxed from the door that opened into the Queen Anne foyer.

  I looked up from the newspaper in a mix of curiosity and disgust. Watching Amy and Max together was a reminder I had the full legal right to get blind-drunk on cheap vodka and crawl into a dark corner in my own home. Full legal right and frequent motivation, the way they went at it.

  I snapped the newspaper up to block my view of their flirting. And kissing. And inevitable pawing.

  “CIA RECORDS SHOW EXPENDITURES DOWN—PUBLIC APPROVAL UP”

  Expenditures down? How was that possible if they’d expanded operations with things like the bunker they’d built in Junction? Maybe Wanda was right.

  What if …

  “I don’t know why we had to go so far out of Junction just for me to run,” Amy complained. “I like the trail that goes out by the college.”

  “Your ex knows that course. He used to run it, da?”

  “Daaa. Yesss,” she hissed. “But that doesn’t mean he still does.” Her jacket rustled as she hung it up. “I want to be able to run in my hometown.”

  “I want you to be able to run safely.”

  “Jesus, Max! You’re making this into such a big deal. Yes. I dated Marvin. Yes. He hit me—”

  Max hunched his shoulders, glowering at the thought.

  “But I know that. I was there!” Her foot stomped against the rug. Not loud enough, she took a step and stomped it again on the bare hardwood.

  I shook the paper again, a reminder I was still present. Even trying to read.

  They ignored me, pressing on.

  “I don’t know what you expect, but you need to stop dragging me farther and farther from town just to get my running in.” A telltale creak warned the basement door was opening. “And,” her voice lowered. “I have no frikkin’ clue why you felt the need to pee every couple hundred yards—”

  I bit my lip, realizing why Max was dragging Amy out so far from our normal perimeter.

  “But maybe you need to—uhm—get that checked. There may be something—wrong.”

  I choked.

  The door closed and she retreated down the stairs, alone.

  Folding the newspaper, I glanced at Max. “When are you going to tell her the truth?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and widened his stance.

  “You are going to tell her the truth. Da?”

  He collapsed into a chair across the table from me. “I can’t find a trace of any others,” he confessed. “We’ve followed the main road out of Junction. I even took her to our old hunting grounds. There’s no scent. No sign.”

  I forced myself to keep looking in his eyes. “We knew it was a very good possibility there’d be no more of us.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “Of you,” I corrected. “With all the news coverage of the Phantom Wolves of Farthington I would have thought if others wanted to find you … maybe none want to find you because that equates to them being found.”

  “We need backup. We can’t do this alone.”

  “You think I don’t know this?”

  “What other options do we have?”

  My brow wrinkled. “None I want to consider.” I had been thinking a lot about options, wild possibilities, and dramatic failures resulting in multiple deaths. The one option I still toyed with in the darkest hours of early morning was the one I was least willing to utilize. Numerically it was plausible. But to win with the numbers meant losing something irreplaceable.

  Mother would never agree if she knew.

  “No connections spring to mind.…”

  He was testing me.

  “What would you have me say? Who would you see me sacrifice?” My thumb smudged the newsprint. “I am no longer worthy—you understand? They don’t want me.” I raised my eyes to his again, heart hammering as we locked gazes. “And you, dear brother, are not known to be the self-sacrificing type.”

  The silence between us hung thick as the mist that cloaked Junction’s hills each late autumn morning.

  Max looked away.

  I took a breath, not realizing I’d been holding it. “You understand. There is no answer to give.”

  His brow lowered, giving his features a brutal edge.

  “She thinks something’s wrong with you.”

  “And you did me a great service by not agreeing.”

  “What are brothers for?”

  He snorted.

  “We are brothers, Max.”

  He stood. “You can change your”—he wrinkled his nose— “your cologne. Now that we all know, the imitation of our natural scent only annoys me.”

  “I like the scent. It reminds me of our parents.”

  “None of it’s yours to like.” He turned and left, stomping up the stairs as angrily as Amy had stomped down the others.

  It was as our people said: It takes two boots to make a pair. And they were quite a match.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jessie

  Pietr didn’t visit that night. As glad as I was that he was safe, I missed seeing him. So as soon as I could stretch
and yawn enough to seem convincing, I curled up with my back to the camera and, shimmying the cell phone out from under my pillow, turned it on.

  With no charger, I felt a glimmer of what Pietr must have felt regularly. Time was short. I had to make each moment count.

  Pietr, I texted. I <3 u. Miss u. Don’t come here. But know I’ll dream of u.

  I turned off the cell and flipped it shut, slipping it back beneath my pillow and curling into a ball, ordering sleep to give me dreams of Pietr.

  Jessie

  The forest was dark, cold, strangling in the grasp of an unseasonably cold autumn unwilling to commit to winter’s snowy and muffling blanket. I stumbled forward, heading for the few creaking swings that spun off the old park’s swingset’s belly, twisting and squealing in the wind.

  I grabbed a swing and sat; the seat creaked beneath me. I waited. My heart pounded in my chest, recognizing the fact but unable to define what I waited for in words that could drift to my brain, carried by my pulsing blood.

  Something skimmed the shadows, something dark and grim and beautiful, ghosting along and teasing the dappled moonlight as it stayed just beyond reach—just beyond the brush of starlight’s subtle fingers.

  “Pietr,” I breathed, something deeper than physical recognition pushing his name from my lips as it pushed my heart into my thickening throat.

  And then he was before me, lean and lovely, cloaked in night’s skittering shadow. At once too beautiful and wild for moonlight to dare touch him and yet so proud and powerful, how could even cool moonlight resist? Before me, his image stuttered; one moment wolf, the next moment not—his spirit equally both and none at the same time.

  I stood, releasing the swing’s chains, my hands numb from where my fingers had pressed the links so deep they’d engraved my palms.

  Behind me the swings screamed, metal grating and howling as chains twisted in the same breeze that tugged my hair out around my face, teasing my vision with Pietr’s image and then nothing. I wrenched the hair back from my eyes, hunting and hungry for another glimpse of him.

  He filled my vision and I gasped at his nearness, heat washing across me, radiating off his smooth skin. The frigid sting of fall was forgotten, winter but a weakly whispered rumor as Pietr wrapped me in his arms and crushed his hungry lips to mine.