Under different circumstances, Red thought Sasha might have been delightful company. He had pale eyes that somehow managed warmth; a pretty smile, two of his teeth just a touch crooked. She liked his hair, the platinum shagginess of it, and the vulnerable curve of his neck when he bowed his head.
But, circumstances what they were, Red didn’t trust anyone.
And Sasha seemed to be going through some sort of drug withdrawal.
He pressed the soles of his slipper-socks to the floor and tipped his head back against the wall, breathing in shallow shudders through an open mouth. His lips and eyelashes trembled; an unconscious vibration she swore she could feel from a foot away. Sweat stood out on his brow, temples, upper lip, and throat, a greasy sheen that glued tendrils of hair to his cheeks. His shirt clung to his chest.
A twinge of sympathy found its way through her suspicion. “What did they do to you?” she asked.
His eyes opened a crack and slid over. An aborted smile quirked one corner of his mouth. “Kidnapped me. Drugged me. They keep drugging me.”
She blinked, surprised despite herself. He wore the same kind of cuffs that she did, but if he was…what Fulk had said he was. What they were. Then maybe it wasn’t so simple as cutting off a flow of power like he was an electrical box. Not like with her.
“Is it because you’re a – a wolf?” she asked, stumbling over the word a little.
“No.” His smile stretched, his chapped lips cracking. “It’s because they made me. Seventy-five years ago. And they know I hate them.” His Russian accent lent the words gravity. Hinted at a threat.
“Seventy-five…” She lifted her brows. “But you look–”
“I was nineteen when I was turned.” When she only stared: “You look surprised. And you can make fire.”
“Yeah. Very true.”
He shut his eyes again with another unsteady sigh. “Did they leave him alive?”
The skin on the back of her neck prickled. “Who?”
“The human you smell like. The one they took you from. Is he alive?”
“They won’t tell me. I hope.” It hurt too viscerally to think otherwise. “What about you?”
He made a small huffing sound and smiled again, eyes still closed. “Mine is very stubborn.” The smile slipped. “And he feels very guilty. All the time. He will come for me, even though he shouldn’t.”
Red shifted to a more comfortable position, one that mirrored Sasha’s: feet on the floor, back to the wall. “That sounds like Rooster.”
He snorted. “His name is Rooster?”
“Well,” she said, defensive, “what’s your guy’s?”
“Nikita.” The name full of longing and worry and hopeless affection. She wondered if her own voice had sounded that way to him.
“Another Russian, huh?”
“What’s wrong with Russian?”
“What’s wrong with Rooster?” she shot back. Then softened: “His name is Roger. Rooster’s just a nickname.”
“I figured.”
They lapsed into silence.
It wasn’t uncomfortable, so Red couldn’t explain the way the confession built and built in her gut until she had to bring it up and let it out. Maybe it was the unlikely comfort of knowing the person beside her was a prisoner, too, brought here against his will.
“I was born here,” she said, quietly. Fulk had said wolves could hear like dogs – like real wolves. That she could speak softly enough to keep the cameras from picking up the words.
Sasha lifted his head away from the wall and looked at her.
“Not here, exactly, in this place. But at the Institute. The one in New York. I was raised there. In a lab.”
“Shit. Really?”
“Fulk says he can smell who my parents were, but I never met them. I’m just…an experiment.” A weapon, she added silently, because she understood, finally. She guessed Sasha was a weapon, too.
“I…” he started, and then cocked his head, eyes going to the ceiling.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think something’s happening.”
*
Of all the ways in which this job was worse than deployment, Jake had to give it to the bastards that the accommodations were decent. Well, lavish, actually.
Jake left his own sumptuous suite, with its four-poster and giant gilt mirror and real Oriental rugs, and walked down the hall to rap on the door of Ramirez’s room. When he didn’t get an answer, he looked first one way down the hall, and then the other. This was one of the windowless passages on the second floor, and though the hall was wide, the dark paneling and flickering sconces gave the impression that the walls were slowly closing in on him. Despite its richness, the manor had the air of a haunted house about it, and he suppressed a shudder.
“Ramirez,” he called, and knocked again. “Adela. You alright?”
“Fine,” she barked from the other side. Which wasn’t like her. She was coy, infuriating, and superior. But she wasn’t snappish.
“Can I come in?”
“Asshole.” But that wasn’t a no, and he was starting to worry.
He cracked the door and peeked in, then eased it open the rest of the way when he saw that she was sitting on the side of the bed in workout gear, her head in her hands.
“Hey,” he said, taking an uncertain step forward. “Is it your leg?” She wore shorts, and he could see the heavy bandage on her thigh. “Do you need to go back to medical?”
She sat up, pushed herself up, hands on her knees. Her hair, tied back in a loose knot, looked damp, like she’d just had a shower. She was very obviously not wearing a bra under her Nike tank top. And she was glaring at him. “Boundaries, dude.”
But what snared his attention was her foot. The right one. Because it…wasn’t quite the same as the left. And then he jaw the faint pink line of a scar around her calf.
“Hey. Eyes up here, asshole.”
He jerked and lifted his gaze to meet her furious stare. Not just angry, but desperate, spooked. Self-conscious. “Sorry–”
“What do you want?”
“You got hurt. I wanted to check on you.”
She sneered and dragged the folded blanket over from the end of the bed, up into her lap; it shook out over her knees, hiding her bandage…and her mismatched feet. “Right. ‘Cause you’re such a nice guy.” When she angrily tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear, he saw that her hand was shaking.
“Because you’re part of my team, and I was concerned,” he said. “What happened with Vlad?”
She made a face, but not fast enough. He saw a ripple of shock, even fear, before she shuttered her expression and just looked sour. “Nothing.”
Jake waited.
“He’s creepy as shit.”
“Yeah.”
She glanced up at him, finally, some of the fear peeking through her fa?ade. “Do you know what’s in the injections they give us?” she asked.
He shrugged. They’d told him it was an experimental drug, and he hadn’t cared what was in it or what the side-effects might be. There were people capable of living without sight – capable of thriving, even – but he didn’t have the grace or the temerity to be one of them. He’d signed – as best he could without being able to see the pen or paper – and never asked twice about the shit they were pumping into his veins.
“Why, do you?” he asked.
“I think–”
The walkie on his belt crackled to life. “Major Treadwell,” one of the guards said. “We have a situation.”
*
Rooster wasn’t proud of the way his stomach turned over when one of the guards cinched a blindfold tight around his eyes. Rob had warned him that something like this might happen, and he’d been mentally preparing himself, but he was already without weapons; take away his vision, and he felt breathlessly vulnerable in the worst way.