Rivals and Retribution

  Max glared at his brother. “Don’t be a dick. You know that’s not the whole story.”

  “Well then, brrrotherrr,” Pietr said, rolling the r’s so they sounded like a distant drumroll, “what is the whole story?”

  “I wish I knew. But something’s not right with you. Ever since you snapped through the cure,” he said slowly as if he was puzzling bits and pieces together. “You’ve been pale, you haven’t been as hungry—except when you hunt. It’s strange.…”

  “You are imagining things. Perhaps I am pale because the fear of nearly losing Jess still hasn’t left me.”

  I reached out and took his fingers in my own.

  “Perhaps I have no consistent appetite because our family is more stressed than ever with nearly a dozen new long-term guests in the house.”

  Max nodded slowly. “True. It is possible. But you’re also being a dick to Jessie.”

  “I am not—” He shook free of me, tugging his fingers loose from my grasp to point in his brother’s face. “I am not being a dick.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “Am I?” he asked, turning on me so fast I hopped back a step.

  He looked at me, his eyes scanning the surface of my face and finally landing on my too-wide eyes.

  “I am, aren’t I?”

  “Just a bit,” I squeaked. “But”—I reached out for his hand again, drawing it into my own once more—“you’re right. About the stress and the worry. It’s okay.”

  “Nyet,” he whispered, his gaze falling to the floor. “It is not okay for me to treat you that way. Not ever.”

  “Great,” Max proclaimed. “Now that we have that established, can I go back to my sandwich? You two can make up on your own, da?”

  I reached over and patted his arm. “Da,” I said with a smile. And Max strode off.

  I waited a solid minute, glancing down both ends of the hallway before I opened my mouth to speak again. “Just tell me the truth, okay?” I asked him. “If something’s wrong, just tell me. If something’s changed—be honest with me. We’ve been through Hell and back. I love you with every bit of my being. But if you don’t feel the same … just speak the words. I love you so much, I’ll let you go and wish you well on your way … and I’ll be mad at first—royally pissed—but I’ll get past it to see you as happy as you’ve made me.”

  He looked away, uncomfortable with my honesty. “I do love you, Jess,” he said. “I’m just—adjusting.”

  “To the new pack being around? It is a hell of an adjustment.”

  He nodded, and I wondered if by speaking too soon I’d given him an easy out—something close to the truth that he could say and I’d cling to.

  “Is that all?”

  He nodded again and my heart sank. My nervous babbling in this case meant I might never know what he would have said.

  Dammit.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Nyet. You’re fine,” he assured me. A heartbeat too quickly.

  “What do you need from me?” I pressed him even as my brain begged me to shut up. I was fumbling. Something was wrong with Pietr—something was wrong between me and Pietr, and he couldn’t define it, so I couldn’t fix it.

  I felt sick.

  “Time,” he said. “I need some time.”

  I swayed on my feet and steadied myself by wrapping my arms tightly around his. Stupid girl, stupid heart. “Time away from me?” I whispered. God, how needy I sounded. It was disgusting. Focus, Jessica, I warned myself. You’re stronger than this. Act it.

  “Nyet…”

  I let go of him and took a small step back. “No. It’s okay, Pietr. I’ll give you all the time that you need. I’ll always give you whatever you need.…”

  “Dammit,” he said, reaching out to grab me. He pulled me tight against him, his arms like steel bars caging me to his chest. “I need you. I know that much. But right now,” he admitted miserably, “that’s all I know.”

  “I’ll take it,” I whispered into his chest, knowing that this, too, was going into the book Ms. Ashton was making us write for lit class.

  I’d be on top of this assignment and it’d be great therapy.

  Alexi

  I grabbed some important papers, locked up the lab, went down to the lobby, and signed out early. The guards at the lobby’s main desk watched me fill out the sign-out sheet.

  “Taking the rest of the day off?”

  “I may be taking off a long stretch of days soon,” I complained.

  “Almost done with the secret project the boss has you workin’ on, yeah?”

  “If I told you, it would not be so secret, would it?” I returned.

  “Ah, he’s a clever one, this one, ain’t he? Well, you go enjoy your afternoon, you hear? And think of us poor slobs still stuck at work.”

  Nodding, I spared them a smile, but the whole way to the train and back to the Queen Anne, I struggled to formulate a way this entire mess might still work out.

  Luckily, trains were perfect for solving just such types of problems.

  Marlaena

  It should have been a simple run to the grocery store with Gareth, but the illness began to wash over me the moment I was confined in the car with him. I clutched the door’s handle and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to get my vision to stop swimming.

  His scent permeated the warm air of the car’s interior, spice mixing with leather and the heating metal of a well-tended engine. I loved Gareth’s scent—I always had. But now it twisted my guts into knots.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his hand light on my arm.

  I shivered under his gentle caress, my body rebelling against my heart.

  “Fine,” I choked out. “Fine. Just drive.”

  He drew his hot hand away from me and rested it on the steering wheel. “Okay.”

  We drove in silence, and not the type of silence I had once enjoyed with Gareth—the kind that grew from understanding, and … I nearly gagged … love. But it didn’t matter now—none of it did. Because part of me was desperate to destroy the best bits of what we had, and I didn’t know why.

  We got a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel and grabbed the items we needed. I walked alongside the cart as he pushed it and gradually we began to make small talk. About brands, about prices. To anyone watching, we would probably appear to be a normal couple. Not a couple at our happiest moment, certainly, but a couple in a functioning relationship—two people who had known each other long enough to stumble through even the dull moments.

  But every time we passed a heater and a puff of air blew across him and toward me, I had to turn my head away or hold my breath so my knees didn’t weaken.

  My head ached at the sound of his voice, my eyes blistered at the sight of him, and my heart? My heart was breaking because I still loved him, although my body—my treacherous body—was repulsed by his very existence.

  “I—I can’t do this,” I finally muttered in the frozen foods aisle.

  “What?” he asked, but I was already gone, loping down the last bit of the aisle and out of range of all the things I’d grown to love about Gareth.

  He met me by the car. He didn’t comment about the fact I was still standing outside of the car in the cold when he caught up to me, or the fact I didn’t help him load the groceries into the trunk.

  He didn’t speak to me again until we were nearly back at the house.

  “What’s really going on between us, ’laena? What’s changed?”

  I kept my mouth shut and stared straight ahead, letting the road ahead entrance me.

  “I thought we were getting closer … and then you took Jessie, and Pietr changed, and…” His words faded away.

  “I…”

  “Do you want us to be close?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do. Of course I do.”

  “But it’s like you can’t stand to even be around me sometimes.”

  “No. It’s not you.”

  “If you say, ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’
I’ll…”

  “No. That’s not what I was going to say.” Dammit, how did he know what I was going to say? “I was going to just say…”

  “What? What is it, ’laena? Because you know you can say anything to me. You can bring any of your baggage to my door and I’ll deal with it.” His knuckles were growing pale as his hands clenched the steering wheel. “Just say whatever you need to say.”

  “I was just going to say, ‘It’s not you.’ That’s all. That’s really all I was going to say,” I muttered, shaking my head as panic blended with sudden understanding. “Because, Gareth, it’s not you.”

  It’s Pietr.

  * * *

  He took both Gareth and me aside almost as soon as he returned home. “I have found her.”

  “What? Who?” Gareth asked, startled.

  “Terra,” Alexi said mildly. “Wondermann has her.”

  “Wondermann?” I breathed the name out. “Then Dmitri and Gabriel…”

  “Da. They are all connected somehow. And she needs to be out of there before two days’ time is up. Otherwise she will be shipped off or used as bait and then experimented on.”

  “So take us to her—now,” I demanded.

  “That is impossible. We cannot afford for this to be traced back to me. It would ruin all my best-laid plans.”

  “And we wouldn’t want that,” I sneered. “We wouldn’t want to impose upon your plans—even if the life of a pack member depends on it.”

  “You would not understand,” he protested. “You need to track her. Track her all the way to Wondermann. You must infiltrate the building and break her out—without my assistance.” He paused and drew a quick breath. “And you must do it all within two days, otherwise you will have lost your opportunity—and your packmate.”

  “We’ll take Pietr and Max,” I said stubbornly.

  “You cannot. For this, you are on your own again. Your pack rescuing your packmate. Is that not how you have always preferred it?”

  Gareth nodded and laid a hand on my shoulder, the warmth of his touch sinking into me and making my head fuzzy with nausea.

  “And how do we know this is not a trap for us?” I asked him, realizing the danger.

  “You must simply trust that it is not” was all he’d say.

  Alexi

  I called Jessie next. “You must warn her,” I said firmly. “I do not care what else you talk about or how you get Wanda on the phone. But you must warn her that Wondermann has baited a trap for her by using a werewolf and that the werewolf in question is being removed from play this evening.”

  “What about when she gets all untrusting, the way Wanda always does?”

  “Assure her she has a friend on the inside.”

  I could hear the smile on Jessie’s face when she next spoke. “I’ll pass it along. And, Alexi? I’m so glad you’ve moved past the … the past,” she said. “I’m so glad you’ve forgiven her for whatever happened then.”

  I grunted into the phone. “I try to learn something from every situation,” I assured her before hanging up. I did not mention that what I had learned was that by delivering this single message, I rebuilt trust in Wanda, made Jessie believe all was well, and would probably make Wanda more anxious to get back at Wondermann.

  And that all those things rolled together beautifully to set the stage for Wanda’s undoing.

  Marlaena

  We rode in on one of the last trains of the evening, Gareth’s eyes fascinated by the world blurring into indistinct smudges of night punctuated by bursts of speckled light—towns and small cities.

  “Not a trap,” I whispered.

  Gareth looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “Not a trap,” he agreed. “Alexi wouldn’t betray us. He does not strike me as the type to betray another.”

  I snorted. “Doesn’t he?” I wondered aloud. “He strikes me as the exact opposite—the most efficient and clever of traitors.”

  “I’ll just hope you are wrong, then,” Gareth muttered, a smile dimpling at the edge of his generous lips.

  “I’ll hope that, too,” I admitted, but my stomach still twisted—this time at more than Gareth’s proximity to me.

  Our train arrived at the station, and we stumbled out of the car and onto the dimly lit platform, following a meager trail of people as they headed out. We stumbled up and onto the street, getting our bearings.

  “Can you smell her?” I asked, my own nostrils flaring to drink in the flavor of the city’s night. I caught the scents of steel, concrete, and glass—smells as cold as ice and freshly fallen snow. Too near the vents in the sidewalk or the steaming manhole covers and my nose was filled with scents far warmer and fouler.

  “No, not yet. There are so many trails by so many people,” Gareth murmured, scuffing his shoes across a soft dusting of snow. “The city must be the best place to disappear.”

  “I’ve considered it myself,” I returned, looking at the lights that soared up from the sidewalks and macadam, lights stretching and glaring along the silhouettes of sleek buildings. “Here. It’s this way.”

  We blended with a slow-moving crowd focused on the occasional nightspots that cropped up in small groups. We stopped near the footprint of Wondermann’s building and glanced at each other.

  “Remember our plan?” I asked, but I knew he did. Gareth was sharp and had no problem remembering.

  “Around back, in and up to fifteen. A fight, then down, out, and away.”

  I nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  Jessie

  I had already written three more chapters in my lit assignment and made additional notes in another notebook about what I needed to add later. I was reviewing some homework with the pups when I finally had to say something about Pietr’s twitching. “What’s wrong? You can’t sit still for all of five minutes, it seems.”

  He refocused on his own schoolwork, but three minutes later he was looking toward the foyer. Toward the door.

  “What’s going on, Pietr?” I asked, dismissing the last of Marlaena’s pack from the table.

  I pulled out the chair to sit beside him and rested my hand on his arm. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “It’s nothing. I just can’t focus on this.” He shoved his papers away, dropping the pencil on top of them.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Nothing,” he said. Quickly.

  “You’re worried about something. You keep watching the door.”

  His eyes widened the barest bit before he regained control of his expression. “I was just wondering what’s going on right now in Wondermann’s building. Is she okay or should we have gone, too?”

  “I’m sure Terra’s going to be fine.”

  “Right,” he said. “Terra and Gareth. And Marlaena.”

  I blinked. Shoving away from the table, I stood. “Right. I’m sure they’re all fine, Pietr. Even Marlaena.” And then I walked away from the table as fast as I could so I didn’t start yelling.

  Or crying.

  It wasn’t long before I pulled out my lit notebook and started writing again.

  Because writing was so much cheaper than therapy.

  Marlaena

  I tugged the can of spray paint out of my coat pocket and loped around the side of the building, Gareth going the opposite way. We had agreed we’d split up if we had to—whatever it took to get Terra out of Wondermann’s grasp. We knew where we’d meet up afterward in case things didn’t go well and we knew at what point to abandon hope of the other ever returning and to just get out of the city.

  Slinking along the very edge of the building I saw there was only one camera whose eye I had to blacken, and then it was just slip around to the area they used as a loading dock and … there he was.

  Gareth stood on the steps, his foot in a door, though from the rug that was wedged to hold it open, it didn’t seem an entirely necessary move. He glanced down at the ground, which was littered with cigarette butts. “The place for the guards’ smoke break,” he said. He pointed to the neare
st stretch of observable sidewalk with his chin. “Alarm’s disabled,” he added. “See the food cart?”

  I took a look. “Yeah?”

  “It serves gyros and drinks. Two-handed food. And no one wants to fight with their food and an alarmed door when they’re getting ready to enjoy a break.”

  “Noted,” I said, slipping into the doorway.

  “Ready for some cardio?” he asked with a smile.

  “It’s the key to escaping zombies, so yeah,” I returned with a grin.

  “Up, up, and away,” he said, starting up floor after floor of stairs.

  We were barely even winded when we reached the fifteenth floor.

  “In and take the first left. The guard marks the spot,” Gareth reminded.

  We carefully opened the door and jogged down the hallway, peeking around the first left to get a glimpse of the guard. He stood stiff and straight at his post and looked bored beyond belief. I cracked my knuckles and spotted the place on his belt where the keys hung.

  Right beside his holster.

  He yawned and rubbed his face with a slow hand, not knowing how we intended to liven things up for him.

  Alexi

  It was awkward, watching them. Pietr drifted further from Jess unwittingly, his eyes never resting on her for long unless he truly forced himself to focus, and yet, when I’d seen him watching Marlaena, everything about his attitude intensified. He straightened his back, threw back his shoulders, and raised his chin, a swagger in his walk. With Jess, he was gutless and guilty—tired beyond recognition, and pale.

  Jessie clung to him, watched him more closely, and kept her hands on him as much as she could.

  After the pups had finished their homework, and Cat, Amy, and Jessie had figured out dinner, Jessie grabbed me to go outside and spar.

  We fought and we stumbled around each other, practicing both our best and worst moves. When we had exhausted ourselves and she had spilled out her frustration all across my rib cage, we sat in the windbreak the porch’s corner provided and talked—me rubbing warmth back into her hands.

  “Something’s wrong. He’s sick. I can tell,” she whispered, blowing on our joined hands. “He’s sick. But it doesn’t make any sense. He’s oborot again now.”