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“Don’t you ever get tired?” I murmur as I lie draped over his chest one night, my heart still racing from the intensity of the orgasm I just had. Normally, I pass out right after our evening sex, but I napped this afternoon, so for once, I can stay awake a little longer.
“Tired?” He shifts underneath me, positioning my head more comfortably on his shoulder. His fingers tangle lazily in my hair, his heartbeat strong and steady against my ear. “Of what?”
“Just physically tired,” I explain. “You seem inexhaustible sometimes, like a cyborg of some kind. Don’t you ever want to just laze around and do nothing? Or slack off and not train with the guys one day?”
“I’m lazing around right now,” he points out with amusement. “And I have to train; otherwise, we run the risk of getting killed.”
I bury my nose against his neck, breathing in his warm, clean scent. Nap or not, I’m getting drowsy, the light tugging of his fingers in my hair inducing a state of near-hypnotic relaxation. Suppressing a yawn, I mumble against his neck, “That’s not what I meant. Don’t you ever just get tired? Like a normal human being? You know, limbs heavy, muscles sore, don’t want to move?”
His powerful chest heaves with a laugh. “Of course I do. I just have a higher pain tolerance than most. I wouldn’t have survived to adulthood otherwise.”
He says it lightly, his tone still amused, but my Peter revelation radar goes on high alert. He rarely talks about his youth—almost never, in fact—so when I do get a chance to learn something new, I jump on it, even though what I learn horrifies me most of the time.
“What was it like?” I ask, my drowsiness gone. Lifting my head off his shoulder, I meet his gaze in the dim light coming from the bedside lamp. “That juvenile prison camp you were sent to, I mean.”
Peter’s face tightens, all traces of amusement disappearing as he shifts me off his chest, turning to lie on his side facing me. “Like hell,” he answers bluntly as I pull a pillow under my head. “A cold, dirty hell, populated by demons in human form. Pretty much exactly as you’d imagine a labor camp in Siberia to be.”
I shudder, remembering a book I once read about prison camps during Soviet times, and reach for a blanket to ward off the chill spreading over my skin. “Was it like a gulag?”
“Not like.” A grim smile cuts across his face. “It was a gulag at one point, used to punish, and quietly kill off, dissidents and other undesirables. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the place wasn’t utilized for some time, but then someone got the bright idea to repurpose the facilities into a correction camp for juvenile delinquents. And that’s how Camp Larko was born.”
I fight the urge to look away from the darkness in his eyes. “How long were you there?”
“Until I was seventeen. So almost six years.”
Six years starting from when he was just a child—nearly all of his teenage years. My hand squeezes into a fist under the blanket, my nails cutting into my palm. “Why did they send you there? Was there no other alternative?”
His mouth twists bitterly. “Not in Russia. Not for an orphan criminal like me.”
“But you were not even twelve.” I can’t fathom that someone would be so cruel as to send a child to the frozen hell I read about in that book. “What about school? What about—”
“Oh, they taught us.” His teeth flash in another mirthless smile. “We had exactly two hours of instruction each day. The other fourteen, though, were reserved for work—that’s what we were there for, after all.”
Fourteen hours? For someone who was still a child? Swallowing the lump forming in my throat, I force myself to ask, “What kind of work?”
“Mining, mostly. Also road repair and laying pipes. Some construction work too, but that was only around our camp, to fix the Soviet-era shit that was crumbling all around us.”
I stare at him, not knowing what to say. I knew he hadn’t had an easy life, of course, but somehow I never imagined this, never realized that most of his formative years—a time when other boys his age played video games and challenged their parents on curfew—were spent doing hard labor under hellish conditions.
Trying to ignore the ache banding my ribcage, I reach out from under the blanket and brush my fingers over the tattoos covering his left arm and shoulder. “Is that where you got these?”
Peter glances down, as if just now recalling the ink that’s there. “Most of them, yes,” he says, folding his other arm under his head. “A couple I got later on, when I joined my unit.”
“What do they all mean?” I ask softly, tracing the intricate designs with my fingers. The one on his shoulder resembles a bird’s wing and a few more look like demonic skulls, but the rest are just abstract lines and shapes.
