Page 47 of Nightshade

Yes, sure, I hadn’t had a ton of sex, period. I was a werewolf in a small pack in the middle of nowhere, so it wasn’t like I had a lot of opportunities to sleep around, but still. It had been mind-blowing. It was definitely the kind of sex in books, not the kind most people had in real life when they were in a hurry and didn’t really know their partner.

It was perfect.

Altair was perfect.

And then he’d worried about hurting me. Tried to make me promise I wouldn’t allow him to hurt me. It wasn’t hard to see my brother’s fingerprints on that, and it annoyed me even more at Viktor.

So when I slipped my sleep pants back on just after dawn, when Altair had finally fallen into something like a real, if fitful sleep, and went out into the hallway to find Viktor standing there, well . . . I was maybe a little more annoyed than I’d ever been with him before.

I narrowed my eyes at him, and initially, just shooed him down the hallway without a word. Down the hallway, then the stairs, and into the kitchen. Maybe vampire hearing was as good as ours and Altair would hear every word no matter how far I took Viktor, but I hoped not.

“What?” I demanded in a whisper-shout once we were there in the kitchen.

He kept his arms folded over his chest, glaring at me like I’d committed a fucking crime by sleeping with Altair, rather than just having near life-alteringly amazing sex. “You fucked that leech.”

Standing at the stove stirring eggs, Mama made a noise of disapproval, and we both turned to look at her. She was looking at Viktor, not me, and something in my gut settled at that. “We wouldn’t want to be called mutts, Viktor. Perhaps we don’t call other people by pejoratives based on their species either?”

That was fair. It wasn’t exactly a full-throated defense of Altair, but she also wasn’t judging my behavior, so I accepted it without a word.

Viktor sighed and shook his head. “Neither of you are taking this seriously enough. You’ve never met his kind before. They aren’t like us. They⁠—”

He broke off mid-sentence and went silent, turning his whole head away and not looking at either of us.

We were butting up against the things we weren’t allowed to speak of, obviously. Viktor’s kidnapping, and the time he was held by the Russian government. I’d known that if he had met a vampire, it had been then, but also, we didn’t talk about it.

We never had.

It was simply . . . off limits.

When he’d first returned home, too many reminders of the time he was gone would just make him zone out altogether, staring off into space for hours at a time, lost in his own head. So we’d learned to talk around it and over it and every which way but at it.

For the first time, I wondered if we’d done Viktor a disservice by allowing things to continue that way. I didn’t know if there were a lot of therapists who dealt with kidnapping and torture trauma for the supernatural, but there had to be someone, right? And Viktor would be better if he talked things through and dealt with them?

I didn’t know for sure, since my knowledge of both therapy and massive trauma were miniscule, but there had to be something we could do.

“Viktor. I . . . I know we don’t talk about this. But if you want me to believe all vampires are bad, you’re gonna have to give me more than just ‘all vampires are bad.’ I love you, but Altair hasn’t done a single thing wrong. There’s no reason to think he’s any danger to us, other than his race and your insistence.”

His face scrunched up at that, and he turned back to glare at me. “He bit you.”

“I told him to. And it didn’t hurt me at all. I told him it was enough, and he stopped right away. Even though I’m pretty sure he was half starved when he found me. Nothing but complete control over himself.” I stepped in, closer to him. I hated to be at odds with my brother, but damn it all, I needed him to hear me. To believe me, and know I wasn’t just a naive child who was going to get hurt.

“How do you know he was starved?”

Mama sighed at the question, giving Viktor a look that said we all knew how I knew.

Did we all know?

Did they . . . there was no way they could know that Altair had attacked me before speaking to me. Only Altair and I knew, and neither of us would tell, because there was no reason for it.

“He’d been held prisoner for years,” I pointed out. “You think the witches were letting him bite them?”

There was a sigh from the door then, and I realized Aleks had come in when I’d been worrying. “I know you’re trying to protect Altair’s pride, Leo, but I think you should tell the truth. All of it.”

I stopped and turned to him, blinking in shock. Did everyone know something I didn’t?

When he turned back to Viktor, though, he said something I hadn’t been thinking at all. “He’d been eating rodents. He was half-starved because he was subsisting on rats. Voles. Field mice. I found their bodies out near the hunting lodge where Leo had him staying.”

Clearly, Viktor had also not been expecting that. He just stared at Aleks for a moment, then turned back to me, as though for confirmation, so I nodded, because it was actually true. I didn’t know anything about rodent bodies out near the lodge, but I supposed it made sense Aleks had looked. He was less loyal to Altair and more worried about the pack’s safety than anyone else alive, so he’d checked to make sure Altair wasn’t a danger.