Page 27 of Wolfsbane

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.

CHAPTER 14

Daire

The way Viktor moved was incredible, like he had perfect and unyielding control over everything in the world. He didn’t doubt whether he could lift me up or slip his shirt beneath me one handed.