Page 76 of White Wolf
“Thanks.” She scrambled for a handhold, found it, and pulled herself the rest of the way up into a perfect perch in a crook near the trunk.
His hand landed on her boot. “Alright?”
When she looked down at his face – and God, the aristocratic cut of his features, the way his gray eyes had a blue cast in this light – a jolt of awareness crackled through her. The weight of his hand, of his gaze, of his breath turning to frost in the air between them. She wanted, absurdly, to shove his black fur hat off his head and spear her fingers through the dark waves of his hair, feel the warmth of his scalp in her hand. Wanted to climb inside his coat, up close where his heat bled through his clothes, smell the sweat and dirt on his throat.
The sudden, visceral urge horrified her. She’d been close, skin-close, to a Chekist before. When she closed her eyes and turned her face away from Nikita’s concerned gaze, she could see theotherface – the crooked, nicotine-stained teeth, the harsh lines around his mouth, the grimace of effort as he tore at her skirt…
She made a frightened, involuntary sound in her throat.
“Katya.”
“I’m fine,” she said, but she wasn’t. Because she’d allowed him into a dark and secret part of her psyche. A damaged place in which rape and intimacy had become so tangled that she wanted to sink her teeth into his skin for reasons that shocked and confused her.
“Katya.”
“I’m fine,” she repeated, and this time she forced herself to be, taking a deep breath, fixing her gaze on the clearing ahead of her. She unslung her rifle and snugged the stock into her shoulder.
He lingered at the base of the tree; she heard the quiet rush of his breathing. It took every ounce of self-control not to look at him again, to keep her thoughts fixed on the threat of strangers.
Then, thankfully, Kolya said, “Nik,” and he walked to join the others.
They were conferring in a huddle, and her breathing was mostly back to normal, when the first gunshot cracked through the quiet forest.
She watched one of the men go down in a flutter of black and her heart lurched up into her throat. Her palms filled with sweat and she juggled the rifle for one horrifying second. Oh God, oh God…
All her training, all her rifle-polishing, all her hours spent staring at the ceiling and telling herself that she was icy-cold and indifferent now, and one shot was enough to send her reeling.
No!
No, she thought. No. She wouldn’t fall apart. This was what she wasfornow.
She shoved down her panic and took stock, just as another shot rang out. Ivan was down, and two of his friends had ducked down to shield him. Kolya and Feliks, she thought. Nikita was shouting something, waving with one arm, drawing his gun with the other.
Another shot rang out – she heard it whizz through the limbs somewhere below her – and someone yelled with alarm. They had to get Ivan to cover…and they were, working as a group to wrestle the big man into a shallow depression off to her right, Nikita laying down cover fire with his Nagant pistol, Monsieur Philippe holding – impossibly – fire in each hand.
She needed to find their attackers, and did so. She spotted a group of uniformed German troops hunkering behind tree trunks off to the west, close enough to hit them with handgun rounds.
Katya took a steadying breath. Germans. Scouts. Brave idiots who’d crossed the river somehow and snuck behind enemy lines. Nazis. She’d been groomed for this, and she knew what to do.
She was dimly aware of the Chekists shouting, returning fire. Getting Ivan safely down into the ditch – he was alive, moving, cursing a blue streak. But she couldn’t let herself dwell on that right now. She leveled her sights on the nearest German. Young, just a boy, red-cheeked, wild-eyed. They hadn’t expected to come up on a group of secret police, but they were going to take the chance to kill them all the same.
She found his face through the sights. Sketched the math in her head, the trajectory, the wind speed. Quick, quick, easy as breathing. She pulled the trigger, the rifle kicked, and he fell.
Click-clack. The hot cartridge bounced off her wrist as it fell. It burned her, but it wasn’t as hot as her blood was now. Now that she’d killed, and all vestiges of fear had burned off her skin like steam.
She’d had one round in the chamber, which left her with five more. Two Germans stared at her, slack-jawed, while a third knelt above their fallen comrade, gloved hands hovering over the ruin of his face.
She took a second Nazi, a vivid flowering of blood as the round went through his throat.
She searched for another shot, calm down, sunk deep in her own head. A sniper and not a woman, not anyone who was afraid.
It was quieter now. The Chekists had reached a safe distance, ducked down into the depression, their voices just a murmur at her periphery.
The Germans weren’t retreating, and she found that odd. They weren’t firing at her, either. By this point, they had to have at least some idea of where the rounds had come from.
Why weren’t they running? They should have been.
She lined up her next shot...
