*
He shouldn’t have come here. That thought pounded inside Nikita’s head like a heartbeat as he sat at a long, handmade plank table in Steve and Rachel Baskin’s kitchen, an awful, cold numbness overtaking him like frost creeping across a statue. After Sasha was taken, every conscious thought had been dedicated to worrying about the horrifying possibilities that lay there. Sasha wounded; Sasha held captive; Sasha tortured. Food tasted like ash; breath felt like the scrape of knives in his lungs; all he’d cared about was finding him, freeing him, getting him back and looking over him with his own eyes and hands to make sure he was whole. And then ripping the throats out of the bastards who’d taken him. He’d been compromised by his worry, and that was why he’d let Trina talk them into coming here.
Which he now knew was a horrible mistake.
“So let me get this straight,” Steve Baskin said, turning away from the counter to set a heaping plate of bacon on the table in front of them. “You,” he said, speaking to his daughter, “managed to find your great-grandad, and Alexei Romanov, and get Lanny turned into a vampire all in one go. Right?”
Trina glared up at him. “And you knew he existed” – she gestured toward Nikita – “and just decided to never mention it?”
Steve propped his hands on his hips. “We didn’t know. Nobody did. It was just stories my grandmother used to tell.”
“Why didn’t I ever hear any of them?” Trina asked hotly. She vibrated with anger.
Her mother came to the table, a plate of bagels in her hand. “Well, honey, they weren’t nice stories. Monsters, and the war, and all that blood.” She made an elegant face of distaste. “They weren’t the sorts of things I wanted to tell my little girl.”
“Unbelievable,” Trina muttered.
“Lanny,” Steve said, brows knitting in concern. “How did this – are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah.” Lanny shrugged, and Nikita could tell his bravado was entirely fake – in the part of his brain that was managing to catalogue all of this and read emotions. “I’m cool. I mean, I wasn’t. This guy” – he jerked a thumb at Alexei beside him – “didn’t even ask, or anything. I was pissed. But. Yeah, so I had cancer…? Was kinda dying. I guess it all worked out.” He shrugged again, inelegant caveman that he was.
Steve opened and closed his mouth a few times, traded a helpless look with his wife. “Alright…”
In the awkward pause that followed, Nikita’s brain latched onto one small, important detail. The only thing capable of breaking through his fog.
“Wait,” he said, voice coming out rusty, and all eyes turned toward him. It was the first word he’d spoken since they arrived. “You said…your grandmother.”
Steve turned to him, expression full of so much unselfish, freely given sympathy that Nikita had to turn his head away, pulse flaring hot in his throat, stomach churning. “Yeah,” Steve – his grandson – said quietly. “Katya.”
Nikita stared at a knothole in the wood of the table and forced his lungs to work. Inhale. Exhale. “Is she…?” He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“No, I’m sorry.” The room had gone silent, no sound save the gentle tone of Steve’s voice. “She passed last year.”
Last year. And all the time up until then she’d been here, in Buffalo, a car trip away. If Trina had found him a year ago, if he’d thought to look…
He couldn’t breathe.
“Nik,” Trina said, sad and soft, but he was already moving, shoving up from the table and stalking back through the house to the door.
Last year. Another chance to torture him.
*
“I should have told him,” Trina said, a blanketing guilt replacing her anger. She took a deep breath that did nothing to ease the tightness in her chest. “Things have been so crazy, and it hasn’t come up. I just.” She shook her head. It was just blow after blow for Nikita. He’d survived a lot – survived horrors – but everyone had a breaking point. Even ex-Chekist vampires. She wondered if they were nearing the edges of his.
“I’ll go check on him,” Jamie offered, rising.
He wouldn’t be much comfort, but Trina let him go, knowing she had to stay here and keep hashing things out with her parents.
Both of whom studied her with unusual expressions. Part regret, part sympathy, part fear.
She felt very tired, suddenly. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
They sighed together.
“Not unless we had to,” Dad said. “We were betting on that being a really, really slim chance.”
“So none of this is a surprise to you?” She gestured to Lanny and Alexei beside her.
Her dad winced.
Her mother said, “Well, it’s a little bit of a surprise.”
“God, Mom…”
“You didn’t expect us to believe vampires, and werewolves, and all those existed, did you?”
“Ouch, Mrs. B,” Lanny said, deadpan. “That hurts.”
“You know what?” Trina held up a silencing hand. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry. So. Whatever. Just assume I’m going to be pissed about this for a while.” And she would.
“Sorry, bug,” Dad said, his smile genuinely apologetic. Then he seemed to realize something, gaze sweeping back and forth across the kitchen. “Hey. If Nik’s real…then where’s Sasha?”
Trina blew out a breath. “That’s actually why I dragged these guys up here.”
*
Sasha always said that Nikita liked to punish himself. He said it as sweetly and supportively as it could be said, but still. Nikita always denied it, because that wasn’t the sort of thing a person could own up to and continue to do. He was in denial – was it really punishing yourself if everything truly was your fault? He didn’t think so. He’d done terrible things in his unnaturally long life, for the Soviet Union and then for himself afterward, and he thought a little guilt was his due. Or a lot of guilt, in his case.
Sasha would have had something to say about this, the way he stood amid the sparkling dew and twittering birds of early morning, digging his nails into his palms until his hands bled, hating himself.
Warring with himself.
When he’d awakened propped against a tree on a snowy November morning in 1942, and Sasha told him what he was now, had seen the way Katya recoiled from him, he’d known that any future he’d envisioned for the two of them was gone. The possibility starved out the moment Rasputin’s heart crossed his lips. He wasn’t a man anymore, but a beast. A thing. A creature with insatiable cravings and too much strength in his hands. One who would, inevitably, kill the woman he loved in a fit of lust, or rage, or thirst. The most important thing was to keep her safe, and he was the greatest danger of all. Clean cuts always healed the fastest, so he’d never allowed himself to search for her. When he started to imagine what it could have been like, he sliced the thoughts away, never letting them fester, never letting them haunt him.
(A few had festered anyway, digging deep, impossible to weed-out roots in his mind. Portraits of what could have been: staying with her, holding his child when it was born; sinking his fangs into a pillow in bed so he wouldn’t be tempted by Katya’s throat. She would grow old, and he would stay twenty-seven, smooth-skinned and unchanging. Would he turn her? Would he sentence her to the cold, terrifying depths of forever out of the selfish need to keep her with him?)
But now. Now that she was gone. Last year. He faced the truth: he hadn’t cut anything away, had only stowed it in a locker somewhere deep, and now the lock was busted, and all of it was spilling out, slick and dangerous as oil. He could have seen her again, but he’d never looked. Had she ever missed him? Had she grieved for him? Or was she glad he never showed his face again?
None of those questions mattered, because she was gone now. Just like Sasha was gone.
Christ, Sasha…