It clicked into place for Sasha, then: they were mates.
His growl died in his throat. He straightened. Tested the air with his nostrils. Mates. Philippe had said that wasn’t possible, that wolves were, by nature, loners. But that wasn’t true; it had pained him to hear it at the time, had felt wrong to him. Wolves were pack animals. He’d thought of the simple joy he’d felt when the rest of his pack pressed up around him, four-and two-legged, and he’d recoiled from the idea that wolves weren’t supposed to mate. To have a partner in life on whom they leaned. Whom they loved.
And here, right in front of him, stood proof that Philippe had been a liar: a mated pair. When he breathed now, he could smell the ways their scents overlapped and held one another: his on hers, and vice versa.
Despite his circumstances, he found a kernel of happiness, and he smiled because of it.
“Fulk. Stop.” Annabel put her hands on her mate’s – on Fulk’s – chest and he stopped. He could have pushed her aside, but he didn’t; he let her hold him back.
Because she was his mate. And he didn’t want to hurt her.
“He’s chained up,” Annabel continued. “Look.” She stepped to the side so he could see Sasha, one hand still clenched tight on his arm.
The other alpha took in a few ragged breaths through his mouth, chest heaving. Slowly, slowly, the fight drained away – or, rather, was pulled back into something manageable. A human level of aggression that could be packaged and dispensed at will.
“Babe,” Annabel said, “meet Sasha. Sasha, meet Fulk. My husband. The territorial jackass,” she tacked on, growling a little herself in clear warning.
Her mate stopped growling. Mostly. Just a low rumble deep in his chest. His lips closed over his teeth, and when he wasn’t snarling, Sasha could see that he had sharp, cruel features. And that his hair was pulled back at the crown, thin, elaborate braids arching over each ear in an almost elvish fashion.
“Fulk,” Annabel said, patient, quiet. “You’re gonna stop freaking out soon, right? Before Ad-vla comes to see what all the fuss is about?”
Sasha had gone through a phase in the early nineties when he thought pig Latin was hilarious. It was, admittedly, a short phase – about a week – because Nikita hated pig Latin worse than he hated country music, and that was saying something. So Sasha had dropped the habit, but not the knowledge.
“Vlad?” he said, and both halves of the mated pair turned to regard with him surprise. “I’ve talked to Val, remember? I know who his brother is. And that he’s awake.”
They blinked at him.
He gave a little wave, cuff heavy on his wrist. “Hello. I’m Sasha.” His head was clearing, his anger ebbing. “Are you mates? You are, aren’t you? I’ve never met mated wolves before.” He managed a smile.
Fulk looked at him, and then at Annabel. Back to Sasha. “What?”
28
Buffalo, New York
There were plenty of beds, but Nikita never sought one. The idea of sleep was laughable.
Dawn saw him on the back patio, sitting with his back to the dew-damp wood of the house, one leg pulled up and the other dangling over the rail. He’d lost count of the number of cigarettes he’d smoked, the butts dropped in an empty soda can, the smoke curling upward in lazy swirls against the indigo backdrop of the fading night sky.
“Smoking will kill you, you know,” Alexei said somewhere behind him, and Nikita’s fingers spasmed on the filter in his hand. “That’s what all the advertisements say. And the doctors. And people on the street.”
Rustle of fabric, click of a cheap lighter, quick inhale. The first drag. Audible relief in the exhale.
“You and I,” Alexei went on, wandering into view, coming to lean against the rail a few feet down from Nikita, arms dangling over it, “we come from a generation in which everyone smoked. All the time. Just to keep from going crazy.”
Nikita took the last drag from his own smoke and dropped it into the can. “We’re not from the same generation,” he reminded, and for once, the words weren’t laced with contempt or leashed fury. They were just words. He was starting to think that though he’d never like Alexei, never trust him, maybe never even respect him, it required too much energy to continue hating him. His hatred, he’d decided, would go toward the people who’d taken Sasha from him. The people who he was going to enjoy killing with his bare hands when the time came.
“That’s right,” Alexei said, the faint light of pre-dawn flashing off his teeth as he smiled. “I’m older than you.”
“Only in years. Not in any way that counts.”
Alexei chuckled. “You are very stubborn. It’s a pity you didn’t work for my father. Things might have gone differently for your sheer stubbornness alone.”
Nikita hummed a sound that was neither agreement nor disagreement. He wasn’t so sure he would have been any better than a puppet in Nicholas’s time – same as he had been in Stalin’s.
“Did you sleep?” Alexei asked.
“What business is it of yours?”
“In general? It’s not. But given our mission, it’s important that you’re rested. That you’ve fed. That you don’t faint.”
Nikita growled at him, quietly.
Alexei tsked. “You don’t take care of yourself, bratishka.”
“I am not your brother.”
“We are both vampires. Both Russians. Both Whites. Both united in a similar cause. One could argue that we are brethren,” Alexei said.
“No.”
“Very well. But I’m right about the rest, and you know it. You live like you already have one foot in the grave, Nikita. Like your own life doesn’t matter. Wearing yourself down until you have to eat, to feed, to sleep. Do you take pleasure in anything?”
Nikita freed another cigarette from his pack and lit it. “I was enjoying the quiet before you came out here.”
Another chuckle. The asshole. “Very well. I can take a hint.”
“Can you?”
“Yes. I’m much more amenable than you.” He raised his cigarette to his lips, took a drag, and started to withdraw.
“Why are you here?” Nikita asked, and Alexei froze, turned to him with raised brows and wide-eyed innocence.
“Lanny drove us here in his car.”
“You know what I mean.”
The tsarevich smoked a long moment, glancing out across the yard.
“Don’t look out there; there’s no answers there,” Nikita said. “Why are you coming along? Why are you helping?”
He took a deep breath, shoulders lifting and dropping. When his gaze returned, he seemed younger somehow; the polished, charming royal veneer had vanished, and he looked now like a lost child. “It’s…it’s been lonely,” he admitted, haltingly. “No one ever…there have been times when – when turning wasn’t an accident. When I just wanted a companion. But they never stayed.” His eyes flicked up to Nikita’s, his smile small and melancholy. “Everyone I ever turned left me. I think there’s something – something in the blood. It turns people…wrong, somehow.”
A spike of anxiety tightened Nikita’s gut. He’d confessed as much to Sasha before…or had tried to. Every time he expressed his fear that Rasputin had tainted him somehow, Sasha grew frantic with worry and guilt, whining and curling up in his lap, asking for a forgiveness that wasn’t owed because he’d never done anything terrible in his whole sweet life. So Nikita had learned how to keep such thoughts to himself, all of them festering like a sore that would never come to a head.
“It’s only blood,” he said, tersely. “We were already the people we were going to be before it was given to us. If they left, that was on them, and not you.”
“You make me want to believe that. When I look at you and Sasha, together all this time.” His smile flickered, unsteady. “It shows me what I’ve been missing all this time.”
“And what’s that?”
“A family.”
Nikita’s hand shook when he lifted his cigarette.