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Scowling, Nik said, “I didn’t ask her.”
“I imagine you’re maneuvering her so that she yearns for your body when you are gone and you just conveniently show up once a month and can spend five days in her bed.”
Nik shook his head. “Unlike you, Brudin, I respect women. I don’t know where this is leading with Daria. But I want to find out.”
“Looks like you’ll have the time to plot, plan, and then get her to be pining for you when you’re out with us in that green hell.”
Nik remained silent as they reached the bottom of the hill. Their hotel, one that was used by prostitutes, was always busy with men coming and going. It suited Korsak and his team perfectly, but Nik hated it. He wished he was back in Daria’s clean, quiet apartment instead of going to his room on the third floor with too thin of walls. And by tomorrow morning, Nik expected Brudin to have filled Korsak in on his burgeoning relationship with Daria.
Desayuno, brunch to an American, would not be a pleasant meal with his leader tomorrow morning, either. He worried that Brudin was showing far too much interest in Daria. The two men reached the porch of the hotel and then split up upon entering the foyer. Nik went to the stairs to go to his room. As he walked through the lobby, to his left he saw Korsak and his men with women on their laps, drinking vodka and singing bawdy Russian songs. Their voices were deep and hoarse and he wanted to crush his hands against his ears and blot all of it out.
“So,” Ustin Korsak said slyly to Nik over their brunch ofdesayunoat the restaurant the next morning, “Brudin tells me you have finally found a bitch in heat.”
Nik cut into his steak and glanced across the table. Everyone else was hungover, their eyes red-rimmed and blurry-looking, their faces unshaven, their bodies unshowered, and their hair uncombed where they sat around the table in the otherwise empty restaurant. “I’ve met a very nice young woman,” he snapped back, glaring at Korsak whose thin mouth lifted at its corners into a parody of a grin.
“He’s a gentleman,” Brudin stage-whispered to Korsak. “You should have seen how sweetly he kissed her last night at her apartment door.”
The other men hooted and grinned wickedly at Nik.
“I didn’t know you had it in you, Morozov,” Ustin said mildly, smiling. “Here, we thought you had taken a vow of chastity. A Catholic monk among us, without the robes.”
“Unlike you,” Nik muttered, “to me women aren’t animals to be manhandled.”
All the men snickered, the clink of cutlery against plates the only other sound.
Ustin’s brow rose slightly. “So, she’s a Ukrainian botanist? Here on assignment?”
“Yes.” Nik knew Ustin wasn’t stupid. Unlike Brudin, who had no idea what a botanist was, he never assumed such ignorance of Korsak. He might be hungover this morning, but that steel-trap mind of his worked flawlessly. Nik forced himself to chew his food and pretend he wasn’t tense and worried.
“Where did you meet her?”
“At the Catholic church yesterday at the noon Mass.”
Brudin snorted, “Imagine that? Meeting a woman in church. This union has to be blessed by Heaven itself.”
The group snickered and laughed.
“Well,” Ustin told his second-in-command mildly, “you would never meet one there because you never go to church, Brudin. Maybe you are missing something, eh? A much classier type of woman?”
The table of soldiers chortled, well entertained.
“Morozov, on the other hand, is in that church two or three times in a week when we come here for R&R,” Korsak pointed out, stabbing his fork in Nik’s direction. And then his smile grew as he pinned his gaze on his men. “He prays for our depraved souls. Don’t you, Nik?”
“You’re all going to Hell. I don’t ever pray for any of you bastards. You’re all a lost cause.”
The table erupted into rolling, rollicking laughter. Korsak gave Nik a thoughtful, amused glance.
“Ahhh,” Korsak said, “our mild-mannered do-gooder combat corpsman has his hackles raised this morning.” He cast a look to Brudin who sat on his right. “I wonder? Is the good doctor falling in love with that black-haired beauty? Head over heels? What do you think?”
Brudin sneered. “He’s got a set of balls on him after all.”
Nik ignored them, taking a sip of his coffee, giving Korsak a calm look. He knew not to break and become emotional. The tension at the table was strung taut and he could feel it.
Korsak had put a pistol to his head one time when he’d tried to rescue a screaming, frightened fourteen-year-old girl they’d chosen. He hadn’t been about to let them harm her. Alex Kazak was already gone from the team by that point, and might have made a difference. But Nik, even on his own, had been desperate to protect that screaming, terrified child. And that’s all she was really: a child. Her parents had sobbed and pleaded with Korsak to not hurt their virginal daughter.
Korsak had jammed his pistol against Nik’s temple and cocked the trigger. It was the darkest moment of Nik’s life and he’d had to leave, scramble away from under the threat of the gun, away from the shrieks of the helpless girl’s cries. He had hidden in the jungle, blindly taking a trail, losing himself, crying for the girl, for her family. And the overriding sense of shame and anger that he hadn’t been able to do anything about it haunted him to this day. Alex Kazak had come within a hair’s breadth of being shot by Alexandrov when he’d tried to stop another woman from being raped by the team a year earlier.
Bitterness thrummed through Nik, his mouth tightening. The tension in his shoulders was daunting and yet he had to look relaxed among his team, as if nothing were wrong. He felt Korsak’s digging stare, but he did not raise his head to respond to it. He could feel Ustin trying to figure out what was going on between him and Daria. He’d started inwardly when the bastard had called her a ‘black-haired beauty.’ Nik was sure Brudin had given Korsak every last damn detail about her.
