Page 125 of White Wolf

“What are you sorry for?” he asked.

She offered a thin, sad smile. “I cried all over your shirt.”

“It wasn’t a clean shirt.”

Her smile widened and she finally let go of him – a small but painful loss – so she could smooth her hand across the damp fabric over his heart. “Still. Sorry.”

He cupped her face, while his thumb was still wet with her tears. “Are you really alright, though? Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m fine.”

He smoothed his hands down her arms, chasing the fine tremors that coursed through her, brows lifted in silent question.

She sighed and leaned in again, temple resting against his shoulder. “I was scared,” she admitted, voice heavy with shame.

He rubbed her back. “I was too. But you didn’t show it. That was good shooting.”

“Being scared isn’t an excuse for bad shooting,” she said, scandalized, and he chuckled.

“No, I guess it’s not.”

She took a deep breath and let it out in a warm rush against his shirt, the tension finally bleeding out of her. “God,” she murmured, dazed-sounding. “I keep thinkingcannibals, and then I think that’s probably not the most awful thing I’m going to see.”

“I know.” He had a bad feeling the thing they were taking south in the back of the truck was much, much worse than anything in Leningrad.

In the glow of moonlight, he could just make out her face, pale and fragile-seeming in the dark, her lashes long against her cheeks. And he didn’t want to think of Rasputin or the poor wretches they’d killed that day.

“Katya.”

She heard the change in his tone, lifted her face, gaze searching his.

They met halfway, lips already parted and open, wanting. A kiss to chase the fear away. One that slid quickly into something deeper, hotter, the searching kind of kiss that made his heart race. He wanted to pick her up and lay her down on the forest floor, open her clothes and sink into her, feel the bite of her nails in his skin, lose himself in the quiet sounds she made.

But he couldn’t, not now.

She gave a quiet, strained laugh when he pulled back. “I knew you were going to do that.”

“We can’t.” But heached, because he wanted to.

“I know, I know.”

He rested his forehead against hers and they breathed in the warm air between them, taking small, fleeting comfort in body heat and mutual longing.

“Do you–” she started.

The bell in his pocket rang.

~*~

It was cave-dark in the back of the truck, but Sasha could see a little, with his wolf eyes. His four-legged pack stood or sat at attention on the ground below, strained and waiting. Sasha knelt on one side of the footlocker, Val on the other. Even though he wasn’t truly there, Sasha was glad of his company.

“Good God, is he folded up in there?” Val asked, sounding almost delighted.

“We, uh, had to bend his legs, a little. But we didn’t break them.”

“Wonderful.”

Sasha opened the lock with the key – he’d lifted it neatly from Nikita’s satchel – and then carefully eased the footlocker open. He bit down hard on the urge to snarl as the scent flooded his nostrils:old,blood,wrong,dark.

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