Rivals and Retribution (27 page)

He sat down in the next booth.

How could there be any “us” when all I could focus on was the
him
of Pietr Rusakova? He was like a drug in my blood, coursing through me with every pump of my heart, poisoning my thoughts and controlling my actions.…

Gabe’s hand rested on mine, and I realized the water glass in my grasp was rattling. “You’re shaking,” he said as an apology, pulling his hand away.

“Thank you, Captain Obv…” The word strangled in my throat. Captain Obvious. One of the pet names Jessica used for Pietr.

Pietr with the strong shoulders and lean build and smug smile … Damn it. I raised my head just to let it hit the table with a solid
thunk
. Pietr, whose very biological existence threatened any hope of happiness I might ever have with Gareth.

“Things don’t have to be this way,” Gabe said, his eyes intense and determined. “You didn’t know before. What if there was a way to erase the imprint?”

“There isn’t,” I hissed. “Once you imprint, it’ll haunt you both for life.”

“For life,” Gabe agreed. “But if it could be undone … if you could be freed, would you want to be?”

“God, yes. I’d give anything to have this gone—”

He was out the door before I could even finish my sentence, and something dropped like lead into the pit of my stomach.

Once Gabe was gone, Gareth raised his chin and sniffed, checking the direction the air flowed before he sat down next to me at my booth. “Sorry, Princess. I make you sick—trying to take a few precautions. Are you okay?”

Hold it together,
I urged myself. Just keep it together. He’s here trying to do what he thinks is the right thing. He had no idea how much the right thing hurt.

My stomach squirmed in my gut, threatening to toss up even the small bites of toast I’d choked down not fifteen minutes earlier.

“Sorry,” I gasped as I shoved him out of the booth and onto the floor in my headlong rush for the bathroom.

Embracing the toilet with no thought of germs, I wondered just how far I could go fighting the imprint. And what was the worst that’d happen if I just gave in?

But I remembered the look on Gareth’s face as I’d burst past him, and shaking with dry heaves, decided I could go at least a little longer for his sake.

Jessie

“Why do I feel I’m going to absolutely regret this?” Sophie asked me as we led the pups to the door of the boiler room.

“Because taking a leap of faith can be difficult?”

“Maybe because working with werewolves is even more nerve-wracking than working with exploding citrus,” she griped.

“You know I love you, right?”

She snorted. “That and five bucks might get me a decent coffee.”

I held the door for them and watched as they all quietly trudged down the stairs, Harnek’s special Guidance passes clutched in every hand.

Only one was missing from the group, and it was a planned exclusion: Gabriel. He’d made himself scarce since his major falling-out with Marlaena’s pack, and frankly, I hoped to never see him again. He was nothing but trouble. A devil in a wolf pelt.

“So here we are, kids. Nirvana for the paranormal underground,” Sophie announced.

The pipes rumbled and the pups looked up, frightened.

“Nirvana has many unrealized charms,” I reassured them.

“And just why should we be coming down here?” Londyn asked, an eyebrow raised and her body language doubtful at best.

“Because pack or not, more friends are better to have than less. At least if they’re good friends,” I said. “Specialists, meet your new friends.”

Neither group looked impressed.

“Yeah?” Sam, the group’s firestarter, asked, “what makes them so special?”

“They can teach you—”

But Terra morphed her head into that of the wolf like the pro she’d already become.

After the screaming stopped, Terra changed back.

Fabulous.

Sam got his jaw working long enough to say, “That’s hot.” Coming from a pyro, that was a big deal.

“Yeahhh. To clarify, they can’t teach you that. What I was going to say was they can teach you how they survived with their own strange powers so that you can, too.”

And so we began. Awkwardly, but that’s the way some of the best friendships start. And when I finally had a minute to get Sophie to myself, we talked long enough to know Derek wasn’t just my problem. And if he still had a hold on Soph, I could bet he still had his hooks in Sarah.

So I gathered two of my girlfriends together and arranged to do what every teenage girl with a boy stuck in her head needs to do: get some control.

*   *   *

I slipped up the stairs on quiet feet—nowhere near as soft-footed as an
oborot,
but I’d grown stealthy through my association with them. And because of the danger we’d seemed to be in nearly constantly.

At Pietr’s door I paused, standing in the opening, just taking it all in.

The room was filled with built-in bookcases. From floor to ceiling every space was occupied by books: whether a classic of foreign literature, a modern-day novel, or a book on philosophy or religion. Different colors, fonts, and languages covered the room like the most well-educated wallpaper imaginable. The only place without a shelf was the spot where a single circular window peered out over the yard like the wide and staring eye of a cyclops.

Pietr was stooped over his homework, absolutely enthralled with math. Or science. At this stage in high school it seemed they blended so well, they were frequently taught together.

The hair he’d been so often sweeping back out of his eyes had fallen down to obscure them, and occasionally he blew out a frustrated puff of breath to try to send the shock back to its desired place.

He was so focused—one hand scribbling away in pencil at an amazing speed while the other tapped on his keypad, his eyes darting between the two as he checked and transcribed some sort of equation.

I stepped into the room and dropped my bookbag on his bed.

He startled in his seat, spinning to face me. “Jess,” he said with a sigh that sounded like it held the very definition of relief.

“A little jumpy today?”

A faint smile slanted across his face.

Something was off. Something was wrong.

I sat down on the bed to study him. “You okay?”

He nodded. Too quickly.

“Come here,” I commanded, patting the mattress. “Sit with me.”

He rose slowly—hesitating—and set down his pencil. For a moment my heart pounded at the way he looked back at his stack of homework—as if it would win over me.

Again.

But sandwiching his papers into his book, he closed it and came to sit down beside me. My heart sped up, and I leaned against him only to draw back in surprise.

“You’re burning up,” I whispered, not caring that his arm slid off my shoulders as I turned to face him more fully. I placed my hands on his strong shoulders and bent forward, pressing my lips to his forehead.

He was hot—and not in the way my amazingly sexy boyfriend usually was, but in the way that made the breath come boiling out of him and made me worry sweat would simply sizzle across his skin. “What’s wrong? Is this because of round two of the cure?”

But it couldn’t be.

He shook his head slowly, leaning into me.

“Talk to me, Pietr.”

He rested his forehead against my collarbone, and I moved back against the wall to keep us both upright.

“I need to talk to Alexi,” he said softly. “He’ll know what to do.”

“What to do…?”

But he was getting up, leaving the comfort of my arms and the bed, and not looking at me.

“Know what to do about what?” I asked, but the door shut behind him and soon all I heard was the sound of his footsteps on the stairs and the thumping of my anxious heart as it rattled against my rib cage.

Alexi

“I am working on a special project,” Nadezhda said softly. “Something big. It may well be the project that defines my career as an agent.”

“Or do you mean the project that defines you as a woman? You as yourself.”

I could hear her smile into the receiver. “Perhaps that as well,” she admitted. “There is a company that has, shall we say, ‘nested’ in the United States. A very immoral company that is doing experimentation.”

“What sort of experimentation?”

“A type you are quite familiar with, it would seem. Personally familiar with, if surveillance tapes are to be believed.”

I sat straight up, my spine tingling as a shiver raced along its length. “What are you talking about, Nadezhda?”

“Are you in league with the Devil, Sasha? Or would it be better if I asked if perhaps I might know precisely
which
devil you are in league with this time?”

I stayed quiet, thinking as fast as I could. “I have been working at a particular facility.…”

“How involved are you in said facility?”

“Tell me why it matters.”

“Perhaps I am looking out for you.”

“Perhaps I am there because I am looking out for someone myself,” I returned.

“Answer my question, Sasha.”

“
Nyet
. I owe you no answers.”

Now she was the one who grew silent. Speculative. “
Pravda
. True. You owe me no answers. You owe me nothing. But I also owe you nothing. And yet, here we are, still connected. Still speaking, and this is me—trying to connect us as well as I can.”

“Perhaps the distance is too great,” I suggested.

“You are not speaking of physical distance.” Not a question, she was simply stating the fact.

“I am working for a Mr. Wondermann,” I conceded.

“
Da
. I know that much.”

“On research of a scientific—of an experimental—sort.”

“I suspected. And is the nature of the experiment legal?”

“Does Interpol want to arrest me?” I chided.

“Do not be an ass. I want you to understand that the corporation employing you—”

“They do not employ me. I volunteer.”

She was stunned to silence. “Did you get her out? Were you the one who called in the other wolves to free her?”

I held my breath.

“It took me weeks to arrange to get her there and set all the snares I had to…”

“What?!”

“She was being held illegally by someone outside of the government. By having Wanda retrieve her, we might have shut his operation down even earlier. By providing the werewolf, I hoped he would have finished with you—erased your entire involvement with his corporation before we sprang the trap on him. I was trying to protect you.”

“By trying to protect me, you nearly ruined everything.” No Wondermann meant no cure, which meant no Pietr.

“Perhaps you are no longer the person I should be speaking to. Perhaps…”

“Perhaps what? Perhaps we are enemies now?”

Her lingering silence was answer enough.

“We are not enemies. I do not think I could ever be your enemy. I am volunteering under duress.”

“Then that is not truly volunteering.”

“We are on the same side, Nadezhda. We are still on the same side. We seem to even
switch
sides together.”

“So will you help me now?”

“Help you do what exactly?”

“Gather information to bring down Wondermann’s company. All very legally.”

“How will you do it?”

“All you need to know is that, with your help, we will bring them to justice—slow, grinding justice.”

“Is there any other kind in America?”

She laughed.

So did I. “What do you need from me, Nadezhda?”

“Paperwork. A trail that shows the Wondermann Corporation is guilty of tax evasion. We are close, but a man inside…”

“Fine.” I waited, but knew she’d tell me details when she was ready. “Does he make you happy?”

“What? Oh. Alexi. He and I … we are no longer together. It did not—it would not—work.”

“Just like us.”

She sighed so heavily into the phone that it sounded like a gust of wind pushing straight into my ear. “Alexi…”

“
Nyet,
” I insisted. “I will do this thing for you. I only need to make sure my plan is completed before yours goes fully into action.”

“Do not take too long, Alexi,” she said. “This must be done soon or many more will suffer at the hands of this corporation.”

“I will be as quick as I can possibly be. I am doing this for a most important reason.”

“So it is for
you
? Because
you
used to always be your most important reason for any course of action.”

“Perhaps you did not ever know me as well as you thought.”

“Perhaps not,” she agreed.

“Because
you
used to be the most important thing in my world.”

She hung up the phone, and I was left with my cell at my ear and nothing but silence coming back to me.

Jessie

Pietr came to help me with the horses, his fondness for them growing as he got to know each of them. We didn’t board and train as many as we had when Mom was alive, but the barn was always full of personality, and of stalls that needed mucking out. And Pietr was not afraid of lifting a shovel. I had to imagine he’d lifted one frequently getting rid of Dmitri and the hunters’ bodies.

Pushing the thought from my head, I returned to grooming Snap while Pietr checked the water buckets.

My attention shifted from my work to Pietr when I heard a bucket hit the floor, water sloshing everywhere. “What the—”

Gabriel was in the barn, the door to the outside shut, my dogs going crazy as Gabe took Pietr to the ground and started pounding on him.

No longer wolf, Pietr wasn’t even able to defend himself.

“Gabriel! Get off of him!” I eyed the stack of hay bales I’d stashed the gun case in and did a quick visual tally of the tools I’d decided earlier could be used as weapons.

They’d all been neatly rearranged in their normal rack on the far wall. Dad had decided to be helpful and clean up after his highly distractible daughter.

Awesome.

I dove for the gun case and popped it open, slipping the clip into the gun’s butt until it clicked and then I stood. “Stop! Stop it!” I ordered.