Page 15 of White Wolf

The Volunteer From Siberia

4

THE CAPTAIN

Moscow, January 1942

His footfalls rang against the glossy floors. Uneven. A slight hitch. The wooden heels of his boots went off like gunshots each time they kissed the polished tiles. He didn’t have eyes for the opulence around him, the creamy white walls and their gilded drippings. The soaring domed ceilings. His mother would have given her last heel of bread to see the inside of this place. Nikita had given the life of his closest friend – though not willingly.

His destination was the set of gold inlay doors that loomed a dozen strides ahead. The uniformed guards standing at attention on either side shifted forward as he approached. One – young and pale-faced – opened his mouth as if to speak, and his partner silenced him with a hand gesture. Their eyes skipped over him, but they didn’t move to intercept him. His long black coat, the black boots, the gloves – it marked him for what he was.

The young one caught his lower lip between his teeth, and Nikita knew he’d seen the blood, the shiny splashes down the front of his coat; the trickles that ran down his sleeves and filled the palms of his gloves with tacky pools.

“I want to see him,” he said, without slowing.

They conferred with a glance. And opened the doors.

Major General Rokossovskywas entertaining a guest, a small man in a gray fur coat, bundled up in a chair opposite the expansive wooden desk. The major general glanced up with obvious annoyance, displeased by the interruption, and did a double-take. It was the blood. Plenty of men demanded it, but so few of them ever wanted to see it. Rokossovsky’s nostrils flared as if he could smell it.

Nikita could smell it. Some of it was his, still oozing from the long gash across the tops of his shoulders.

Most of it was Dmitri’s.

The flecks on his boots – those were a different story.

“Captain Baskin,” the major general began. “This is unexpected.”

But it wasn’t. Or, it shouldn’t have been. Maybe in other parts of the world, commanders expected their men to challenge this kind of bloodshed. Here, though, complete, unswerving loyalty was a given. To the major general, Nikita was not a man – capable of independent thought, emotion, resistance – but a weapon. A tool. And tools didn’t question their handlers.

Nikita reached inside his coat and withdrew a small, bloody bundle of cloth. He tossed it onto the desk, and it landed with a wet plop that caused the major general to wince.

“What is this?” he demanded, lip curling back in disgust.

“What we found in the village.”

Rokossovsky glared up at him.

Nikita met his stare.

A muscle twitched in the major general’s cheek. “What is it?”

No response.

“Major General,” the stranger said, his accent light, cultured. Like a Russian who had studied abroad, and who had lost the heaviness of Moscow. “If I may?”

Rokossovsky gave a stiff nod.

The man leaned forward over the desk and gnarled fingers flicked back the cloth. In the center, dark with blood, rested a small bird-shaped pendant on a chain.

Nikita recalled the slender, white throat, the soft gasp, the speckled brown of frightened eyes.

“All of them,”Rokossovsky had said of the families Nikita and his men had been charged with searching.“Anarchists, all. And anarchists aren’t human.”

It was artifacts they’d been charged with looking for – anything of great value. To be retrieved by any means necessary.

The stranger pinched the chain between thumb and forefinger and lifted the necklace, so the bird swung back and forth, a grisly pendulum. “A trinket,” he said, smiling softly. “A pretty bauble for a little girl.”

“Yes.” Nikita’s tongue felt oily; he could taste the blood. “A little girl.”

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