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Sabrina presses her cheek against mine, saying fiercely, “It’s crazy and I don’t care. I want to be crazy with you.”
I hold her tight, making a promise I know I won’t break:
“I’m never letting you walk away from me again.”
* * *
19
SABRINA
On September first, instead of boarding the ship in Dubrovnik, I fly to Moscow with Adrik.
I send my parents one single text:
I’m going to Russia
Then I shut off my phone so I don’t have to deal with the fallout of that particular bomb.
I feel strangely calm all through the flight. Now that my decision is made, I’m no longer pulled apart at the seams. My confidence returns, and I fill with excitement.
Adrik likewise seems altered.
He’s dressed in his usual way—t-shirt, jeans, boots, same battered leather jacket he wore the day he picked me up in Dubrovnik. And yet he’s different here in the Moscow airport, amongst the throngs of people who look somewhat like Americans do, but not quite the same.
There’s enough dissimilarity in the style of suits and casual wear, amplified by the incomprehensible announcements over the loudspeakers and the Cyrillic signs, to remind me that I’m very much in a foreign country.
Eastern Europeans have their own characteristics—high cheekbones, narrow eyes, strong jaws, broad noses. Seeing Adrik next to his countrymen seems to emphasize the dark exoticism of his looks. He’s never looked more brutish, or more Russian.
I’m all nerves and anticipation. I wish I could read the signs—I’ll have to learn. I like learning new things.
“Where do we go first?” I ask Adrik, once we’ve retrieved our bags.
“Home. I want you to meet my brothers.”
This is the part of the adventure that concerns me most. Adrik lives with five other men. I know his actual brother Kade and we get on well. But Kade is headed back to Kingmakers today. The five I’ll be meeting are strangers to me. I’ll have to learn to work with them, integrating into an already tightly bonded group.
I understand group dynamics well enough to assume that there’s already heavy competition for Adrik’s favor. As the only woman—and presumably the only one fucking him—I can expect a certain level of animosity.
I don’t enjoy frat-house fervor. Ilsa had to put up with it constantly in the Gatehouse. She didn’t seem to mind it as much as I would. She’s not as fastidious about hygiene, and she has a brash humor that served her well. She’s as likely to pull a prank or start a brawl as anyone.
Besides, she’s an actual gold-star lesbian who’s never even kissed a man. The constant flirtation lobbed at her in her first year died off when the guys finally accepted her adamant disinterest.
My situation is a little more complicated.
I don’t have to wait until we arrive at the house Adrik jokingly calls “the Den”—one of his Wolfpack is waiting for us at the curb, leaning out the open windowsill of a black SUV. I can deduce his name from the forearm and fist propped up against his jaw, tattoos of skeletal bones superimposed on the flesh—this is Jasper Webb.
He graduated before I ever came to Kingmakers, but my cousins described him in detail. He was an enemy to Miles and something of a friend to Leo. I don’t know what that makes the two of us.
“Take the front seat,” Adrik says, throwing our suitcases in the trunk.
He doesn’t want us both in the back with Jasper as chauffeur, nor does he want to relegate me to the backseat alone.
Adrik is cognizant of small social cues. Without any obvious effort, he’s the oil that keeps the gears running smoothly when people come together.
Jasper turns his cool gaze on me. His unblinking eyes, pale and reptilian, offer no welcome. Grim skeleton tattoos run from his fingernails up the backs of his hands, his arms and his shoulders, across his chest and up his neck to his chin, visible through the thin material of his white shirt. If I could see through his jeans, I’d guess they run down his legs as well. Jasper doesn’t look like a man who does things by halves.
The sides of his head are shaved, his shock of dark red hair falling down on the right side. His flesh is bone-white, his mouth thin and unsmiling.
