Page 20 of Golden Eagle

He lied down as slow and stiff as an old man, on his back. When his head landed on the pillow, it reinforced just how drained he was. Not merely tired, or low on sleep, but flirting with a true vampire sleep. The kind of deep, coma state that needed a wolf’s blood to wake the sleeper.

Just as his sire, Rasputin, had needed.

The thought chilled him to the bone.

Sasha toed off his own boots, and tugged off his shirt, launching it across the room and into the hamper, neat as a three-point shot.

Nikita stared. He could have blamed it on his condition, his oncoming swoon, but that wasn’t it. He’d been staring – stealing glimpses, looking too long, wanting – for decades now.

In the soft glow of lamplight, Sasha looked carved from marble. Pale, and sculpted with lean muscle, shoulder-length hair ruffled from his shirt. His eyes glowed, gem-bright in the dimness. He met Nikita’s gaze, and offered a smile, heartbreaking in its sincerity, in the way it was touched with sadness.

He was beautiful.

Nikita loved him more than anything. Heached.

He swallowed with difficulty, fangs already elongating. “I’m sorry, Sashka.”

“You should be.” Sasha climbed onto the bed beside him, kneeling at his hip, close enough for his heat and scent to wrap around Nik, and comfort him. But he wanted him closer; there was no such thing as close enough. “The next time you try to starve yourself when I’m perfectly healthy and–”

“No,” Nik said, and Sasha went still. “I’m sorry for everything.”

After a moment, Sasha exhaled; his face twitched into a complicated expression, pained at the edges. “Everything is a lot.” He shifted closer; put a hand on Nik’s shoulder, swung a leg over his hips, and leaned down. Delicious warmth and slight weight, bearing him down into the mattress, blanketing him. “Now, hush.” He tipped his head, shook his hair back out of the way, and brought his throat right up to Nikita’s mouth. “Drink.”

He spoke calmly, soothingly, but his heart raced where it beat wildly against Nik’s chest; his breath hitched as their ribcages swelled against one another.

Nikita wanted to touch his face, to tip his chin down, and lock their gazes, and tell him everything. But his gaze latched onto the stretch of pale throat before him, the visible throb of the pulse there. Safe, warm, with his wolf, blood offered….

Everything else faded away, until there was only a vein, and his hunger.

He opened his mouth and bit.

~*~

The bite seemed to touch every nerve, all the way down to his fingers and toes. The sensation of fangs breaking his skin moved through Sasha like a body blow. He gasped, and shut his eyes, reeling.

Nikita’s mouth closed around the wound, and Sasha went boneless. This. This was what he’d craved.

To be needed.

Touching head to toe, heartbeats echoing one another, Nik’s arms tightening around him with every pull, he rested his forehead on Nik’s shoulder and just breathed. Drank in the scents of home, and safe, and pack, and Nik.Mate, he thought with a painful inner pang. Because he knew now, after meeting the le Stranges, that wolves could mate, that they did. And he didn’t know of any other word that better described what Nik meant to him. Nik called himbratishka– little brother. And maybe that was all it was to Nikita, but it was so much more than that to Sasha.

Tears built behind his closed eyelids, and his breath came in rough, hitching little starts that pressed their chests together, because he didn’t know how to put that into words. How did you tell someone that you loved them so much, so hopelessly, that you wanted to melt together, until you were no longer two separate beings, but one? That even if you cherished the closeness you already had, you wanted more?

Selfish. It was so selfish, and Sasha was ashamed of himself for wanting something that Nikita didn’t.

He didn’t…did he?

As he fed, Nik grew hard against Sasha’s hip. His pulls came harder; he made low, deep rumbles in his throat, like a lion purring, and his hips began to move in shallow, unconscious twitches. Natural, mindless; a reaction to the live blood filling his belly.

Sasha’s own stomach clenched with want, though. An inexpert, vague sort of urge to grab, to touch what skin he could, to hold. Virgin or no, his hips knew the rhythm, old as time. A dance he longed to join.

He’d tried, once, decades ago, the first time Nik fed from his vein. The two of them alone, denned up in a hollow in the snow. Sasha had felt his desire, and offered to touch – but Nikita had brushed him away. Disgusted, he’d thought, or simply uninterested.

But now, tonight, fueled by weeks of distance, tired, and frustrated, and his head still full of that woman’s face. The cold threat in Nikita’s eyes in the club bathroom;show you the ropes.

Now, he ventured again.

He slid a languid hand down Nikita’s torso, the firm swell of pectoral, and the too-flat washboard of his sunken stomach, warm even through the cotton of his shirt. Reached down between their bodies, and pressed his palm over the growing bulge in Nik’s jeans.

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