13. Viktor
Viktor
For a moment, all I could do was stare at him.
He seemed to draw a conclusion from my hesitation, his head dropping, cheeks somehow flushing an even deeper red. “I’m sorry. I know, that’s ridiculous, and I—we abused your whole pack, and how could you—”
“I do not hate you.” The words came out blunt, but my words always did that. It was who I was. How I was. Still, he was at least willing to listen, even if his expression was dubious when his gaze flashed back up to my face. I sighed. “This is not a judgment. This is me.”
His eyes narrowed at that, and the dubious look intensified. “You treat other werewolves like this? You . . . always . . . ” As he spoke, his gaze went distant, as though he was sorting memories, looking for something that put the lie to my words.
I sighed, because this? I was not good at this.
Daire’s nervousness reminded me of Cash, in a way.
I had always been more comfortable with Cash, if only because we’d never been trapped, hiding from witches, in a cave miles away from the pack.
But Cash had always been this concerned about how people around him felt, and whether he was in any way responsible for it.
Fear was the commonality, I realized upon consideration.
Cash had been on constant guard because whenever he’d caused the slightest inconvenience or annoyance to monsters like Reeve and Grant, he’d paid in pain.
Sometimes, in the pain of others, like when Reeve had taken his father’s leg to punish him for an imagined crime.
I wasn’t sure why Daire seemed to have the same fear, but I didn’t know his life or what he’d been through.
I had no place to judge him.
Again, I’d had two excellent, loving mothers, and he’d had none. Perhaps that alone was enough to make people vastly different.
I couldn’t do what I’d done with Cash, treating him like a feral creature and slowly bringing him out by being there, and being safe to be around. We didn’t have time for that. We needed to get moving again.
There was only one answer left, and I . . . I didn’t like it. I’d never done it before, didn’t want to. Worse, if it didn’t work, if it horrified Daire, then we had no chance of survival.
But no. He was as soft and sweet as Cash. As hurt as Altair. Well, maybe not that hurt. No one else had been tormented and imprisoned and treated like a thing for centuries like Altair.
On the other hand, people were different from each other. What merely hurt one person could utterly destroy another, and Leo’s mate had proven himself more resilient than most. Perhaps Daire was a more sensitive soul than the vampire.
Also, his mother had just tried to murder him, which had to leave a fucking mark on a person.
“The government in Russia knows about wolves,” I told him.
He’d been staring at the ground again, and his head snapped up, eyes meeting mine with confusion, so I continued.
“They raid wolf packs, kill those who defend the packs, and steal young wolves. Then they take us to military camps and retrain us.”
His eyes rounded and filled, so . . . precisely as I’d been thinking. Sensitive.
I sighed again. This was so awkward. My family knew, so I’d never needed to explain to them.
Sure, they hadn’t known the details, but they knew, in all the ways that mattered.
I slid down to sit on the ground across from Daire, and he settled slightly, looking less like he wanted to bolt, as he fell into a position that left his knees touching mine, right across from me.
“I was taken as a teenager. I trained fourteen or more hours a day, every day, for years. Corrected with a cattle prod. Beaten to unconsciousness when I failed at anything. Fed starvation rations. Forced to fight for them. I was a tool. A missile they pointed at a target and expected me to cause devastation. And I did. Emotions were not necessary, so they beat them out of me.”
He made a tiny squeak and slapped a hand over his mouth, one tear finally falling, and that seemed to open the floodgates. “That’s awful,” he finally whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
This was not what I’d been looking for, even if I supposed it had been an inevitable result.
I shook my head, and he flinched, as though he thought me angry.
“You don’t understand. I am not angry. I do not hate you.
I”—cocking my head, I considered for a moment, and came to an odd conclusion—“I will not say I do not hate. I hated Ivan. Grant. Another woman in the pack who used to help abuse small children, Giselle. I hated them. They intentionally hurt people I cared for. People whose lives I felt responsible for.”
I tried not to think about the boy they’d taken from my unit and given to Ivan.
We hadn’t been friends. There had been nothing so sweet as friends in the camp.
But he’d been nice. Kind to the other wolves.
Shy, almost. There had been almost nothing left of him the next morning, certainly nothing recognizable.
“When they killed a boy I should have protected, I decided we needed to leave. So I made a plan. Bided my time as I gathered what I needed and found the correct opportunity. And then I killed the guards in their sleep and took the kidnapped wolves away. We went to Ukraine and threw ourselves on the mercy of the government there. I offered to be a soldier for them if they would take care of the others.” The next part still confused me, the government agent looking at me with a mix of sadness and pity, telling me that no, they required nothing from any of us.
That we were refugees, and they would take us all to a local pack to help with new lives and placements.
Still, it had left me able to do what I’d wanted to in the first place: return to where I’d been taken and seek out my family. I wasn’t sure I’d have found them if the man Aleks had hired hadn’t found me first, because I’d still been lost at the time, in so many ways.
Oddly Daire’s jaw set at that, his bright eyes squinting in anger. “What did they do? Did they take advantage of you too?”
I blinked at him a moment. “Who?”
“The . . . The Ukrainian people.”
“No. They tried to send me to a wolf pack in Ukraine, to give me a new place to live. They were fine. I am not trying to make you angry. I am trying to tell you . . . this is who I am. It is not your fault. Your mother is a monster, but it is not even her fault.”
He leaned back, sucking in a deep breath and letting it out in a gust. “But you . . . I mean, sex is . . . have you even had sex? Sorry, sorry, dumb question. You’re super hot, of course you have. I just—”
“Not really,” I said, interrupting what was sure to be self-hatred, which he seemed as full of as my brother.
His eyes went wide. “In the camp, most people who had sex—it was not because they wanted to have sex. It was because they wanted to control others. Or because they had no choice. I decided when I arrived that I would be neither. There was once, almost, with one boy . . . but then he died.”
My accent thickened briefly on the thought of Nik.
On the image, again, of what Ivan had done to him.
I cringed at the sound of my own voice, because that had been another source of retraining.
We’d been taught Arabic, Chinese, and English, and any sign of accent had been another source of punishment.
Not that I could have ever passed for a person whose first language was Chinese or Arabic, but that hadn’t mattered.
In retrospect, I could see that it hadn’t been about teaching, but about power.
Everything in the camp had been about power. They had it; we did not. They wanted us to know. To feel it. To feel small and insignificant.
It made me want to go back to the night I’d killed them all, and make sure each was awake and aware when I’d killed him. So they would have the chance to feel as small and helpless as they’d done to all of us, over and over.
I shook it off and looked back to Daire.
“I was a child when I was taken. I had barely started to think about awkward, childish fumbling with the other children in the pack. There was no sex in the camp. After the camp, I . . . I am not like people anymore. This is what I am trying to explain. I am not angry. I do not hate you. This is how my face looks. I will do as you like for this awakening. It does not offend me.”
For some reason, Daire looked even more as though I’d struck him.
Then he lunged forward and pressed his lips to mine.
It took me a fraction of a second to realize this wasn’t an attack, but .
. . affection? I knew what a kiss was, yes, I’d seen thousands of them in my life.
My brothers were exceptionally affectionate with their mates; I might have seen thousands in the last six months alone.
But it wasn’t something I’d often experienced myself.
Just once with Nik. Maybe once or twice with other children back in the pack, but this wasn’t the same as that.
Oh, it was awkward and confusing, sure. But it was completely different.
I wasn’t emotional and shaky and out of control.
We were hiding, but not for the privacy to kiss.
Hell, Drew was hanging around somewhere, though I thought he’d gone out to keep lookout in case the witches came.
Or maybe he’d gotten smart and abandoned us.
This wasn’t frightening. It didn’t make my heart pound like it was trying to come out of my chest.
But it was . . . it was nice. Soft. Sweet.
Daire brought his hands up to cup both of my cheeks, and he pressed forward, until I worried he was going to unbalance himself.
Instinctively, I reached up to wrap an arm around his back, stabilizing him, and if I were being honest, tugging him closer.
Holding him nearer to me. Turning toward the kiss.
His lips opened under mine, and he gasped for air, but came right back to the kiss.
Deepened it, reaching out to nip my lip with his teeth as his eyes opened again.
This time they were forest green, so much darker than before.
Heavy lidded like that, he looked like a different person than the sweet, innocent youth who hadn’t understood that his mother was a killer.
This way, he looked like something from the magazines we’d found in Grant’s house. Naked and beautiful and like he wanted something.
Something from me.
And suddenly I wanted to know what it was, because I wanted very badly to give it to him. My breath hitched, and I realized that for the first time in years, my cock was hard. For Daire the witchboy.
If I’d had my wolf, we’d have growled in something like possessiveness, and wasn’t that the strangest sensation ever?
Without looking, I reached over to grab my folded shirt, shaking it out and then sliding my arm down around his hips to lift him off the cave floor, so I could slide the fabric between him and the dirty, rocky ground.
And then, without even thinking about what I was doing, a strange and disconcerting thing that never fucking happened to me, I was climbing on top of him.