Page 131 of Golden Eagle

She capped the nail polish and reached for the remote. “Let’s watch a movie. I can’t take any more of this news crap.”

Neither of them protested, so she scrolled through the Pay Per View channels until she found something dumb and fun, and purchased it.

Fulk kept his head on her shoulder, and slowly, she felt the tension bleed out of him as he relaxed. His lashes fluttered, tickling her neck, and then his breathing evened out. A glance from the corner of her eye proved he’d fallen asleep, and her heart squeezed.

He hadn’t been sleeping well on the road, fretting, trying to keep them all orchestrated like a school field trip chaperone. They’d taken a zig-zagging path to New York, in hopes of throwing off a potential tail, and he’d done all the driving. She’d awoken more than one night in hotel rooms to find him wide awake and staring at the ceiling.

He had to be exhausted.

Anna didn’t think she was tired, but having her mate slumped against her, relaxed for once, proved to be incredibly soothing. Her eyelids flagged, and though she fought it, sleep finally dragged her under, too, as the movie played softly, unwatched, in the background.

She dreamed they were in their wolf shapes, trotting along happily behind their prince as he strode through a forest, humming to himself, content in the sun-dappled shade of ancient trees.

She jolted awake when Fulk shifted against her and said, “Hey!”

Her eyes fluttered open as Fulk leapt up from the sofa, and she saw what had made him shout.

Kolya was trying to climb out the window.

He had the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up, and wore his long, shapeless black coat, the one that resembled the black leather trench he would have worn as a Chekist. He’d worked the window open, despite all its safety locks, and given the only sound she heard was traffic down on the street, had managed to disengage the security alarm, too. The curtains fluttered in the cool, autumn breeze, and Kolya paused, hands on the window frame, one foot up on the sill, to look back at them over his shoulder.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Fulk demanded, furiously, and strode to the window.

Kolya blinked up at him, guileless, uncomprehending. He had moments of something like panic, when his eyes would widen, and his hands would shake, and he’d breathe in little stutters. That was when the memories returned, Anna thought. But when she asked, he always said he was fine, and, eventually, he would calm again, and return to his placid state of compliance.

She was starting to wonder how much of that was genuine at this point, and how much of it was a self-defense mechanism.

“I’m going out,” Kolya said, like it was obvious.

“Yes, I see that. But you can’t.”

“Why not?”

Fulk reached as if to push his hands through his hair, encountered the braids she’d given him, and dropped them to rest on his narrow hips instead. “For starters.” He sounded very parental; later, when he wasn’t worked up, Anna was going to tease him about that mercilessly. “You’ve never been to New York. You’ve never been to America. You have no idea where you’re going, and you’ll get lost.”

Kolya considered that a moment. “I’ll figure it out.”

“My good man,” Fulk said through his teeth, “you’ve only just learned how to speak English. Once step at a time, shall we? We need to stay together.”

More consideration. “If I get lost, can’t you follow my trail and find me?”

“That’s beside the point.”

Kolya waited, staring.

Fulk sighed. “You wouldn’t even know how to find them.”

Anna thought the responding blink was, somehow, a sort of argument to the contrary.

“And you can’t go leaping out of windows,” Fulk said. “We’re four floors up!”

“I wasn’t going to jump.”

“Well, you aren’t bloody Spider-Man!”

Despite all her efforts to avoid learning it, Anna had been raised on a steady diet of Southern manners and feminine grace. Her mother had despaired of her, and certainly wouldn’t have believed that she was capable of what she was about to do now.

She stood, smoothed her hands down her legging-clad hips as if she wore a hoop skirt and gown, and walked up to lay a hand on Fulk’s arm. He cut off mid-tirade, and glanced down at her.

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