Page 151 of Golden Eagle

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Kolya was getting restless as a caged tiger in the hotel room, pacing, playing with his knives with alarming proficiency; flipping them up in the air, even juggling with them. He’d tossed one at the wall, and it had landed, point embedded in the sheetrock, and Fulk had stood up from the couch, quivering with suppressed anger and said, as calmly as he could, “You know what? This isn’t working.”

It was Anna’s idea to go for a walk, and while she wouldn’t say it was going well in the usual sense, nothing disastrous had happened, and some of the tension had left Fulk’s face as they walked through the cool mid-afternoon air, the city reassuringly busy around them. Sometimes she wanted to hide in hollows in the forest, covered in drifts of old leaves, wolf-shaped and attuned to every snapping twig. And sometimes she wanted to be two-legged, and human, holding hot coffee and window shopping; wanted to hide that way.

They reached a newsstand, and Kolya came to a halt, head tipped back, gaze running across the headlines of the papers clothes-pinned on a string overhead.

His posture – arms slack at his sides, hands open, neck tilted and face one of naked confusion – struck her as woefully childlike. An image incongruous with the man who’d thrown a knife into a wall an hour ago.

She moved to stand beside him, glancing up at the headlines. Most were political. She spotted a few entertainment-related ones; the NCAA football match-ups and predictions for the upcoming weekend.

“Can you read any of them?” she asked, quietly.

“Some.” He lifted a hand and pointed at one paper. “Dancer?”

The photo was a moody, black-and-white shot of a slender, popular actor, a beam of light from out of frame falling across high cheekbones, and carving shadows down the clean, strong lines of a throat.

“Actor,” she explained. “He’s in movies. Films?”

He nodded, slowly.

The newsstand owner was giving them the stink-eye. Fulk stepped up beside her, peeling bills out of his wallet. “Copy of theTimes, and three Snickers.”

They moved on, Fulk paging absently through the paper.

Anna held out a Snickers to Kolya and he stared at it. “What,” he said, flatly.

“It’s candy. It’s good.” When he continued to stare: “Chocolate. And not Army chocolate, either. Good shit.”

That had him reaching for it.

Anna watched him tear open the wrapper and take his first careful bite, worrying belatedly about what would happen if he had a peanut allergy he didn’t remember. Of course, the odds were no one with any major allergies had survived the Soviet Union of his original life.

He chewed a moment, and his eyes widened.

“Good, right?”

He nodded, and ate the rest of it in a few efficient bites.

Fulk’s phone chimed with a text alert and he fished it out of his back pocket. Sighed a moment later. “Val says he’s spending the day with Sasha.”

“Huh. WithjustSasha?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Hmm. I wouldn’t have thought Nikita would want him alone with Val.”

Fulk made an inquiring noise.

From the corner of her eye, she noticed Kolya watching her, his gaze pinned to the side of her face. Any mention of his friends captured his attention.

“From what Sasha said about him, I get the impression Nikita is, uh, a bitterritorial. And Val – well, Val’s very charming.”

That earned her a very different kind of look from her husband.

“What? He is. You know he is. And Sasha’s very sweet, and, well…”

“Val’s mated,” Fulk said, firmly.

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