Page 26 of Wolfsbane

Viktor froze, pulling away. He didn’t go far. I could still feel the heat radiating off his broad chest, so close the hair on it tickled my forearms.

I curled my fingers down so I could see him, but my hands still pressed against my cheeks like I hadn’t just spent the last hour with him, naked. It was different when he was touching me, thinking about fucking me.

“For this,” I choked out, “for this could you just . . . could you pretend you don’t . . . hate me? I know it’s not what you’d choose, but I don’t think I can—I just need⁠—”

I needed him to want me, at least a little bit. I needed this first time to be something other than horrifying.

“Please,” I whispered. I couldn’t have spoken any louder if I wanted to. I couldn’t even draw in a full breath. “I am . . . I am so nervous, so just . . . please.”

CHAPTER 13

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.