by K. C. Crowne
Axel wouldn’t know any of that. He would go in blind. And he was a good guy. He would help if I asked it of him. No, I could take care of this shit myself. It was my mess, so it was up to me to clean it up.
After making sure my weapons were ready and checking my ammunition boxes, I took two knives from one of the cabinet drawers. The blades glinted in the dim light that fell through the wooden slats that made up the shed. I tucked the sheaths into my waistband and pocket and left the shed, making sure it was properly locked again.
I walked back to the cabin, the blades hard against my skin through the sheaths and the material of my clothes. I hated having to carry weapons. I’d been alone for so long, I’d started putting my weapons away. I had allowed myself to believe that my life could be peaceful.
After this, it would be. Once Maksim was taken care of, my life would belong to me once and for all.
Angela
Sleeping with Viktor was incredible. He was amazing in bed, drawing me out of my virgin shell, encouraging me, making me feel alive in a way I’d never felt before.
But I wanted more than that with him. Of course, I wanted to sleep with him all the time. And we kind of were… but I didn’t just want to sleep with him. I wanted to know what he was like as a person.
After spending a lot of the day in bed, Viktor and I showered together in his tiny shower. We didn’t need a lot of space, pushed up against each other the way we were. Of course, I don’t think we were exactly clean when we climbed out, starving.
We wandered to the kitchen to make food. His shelves were sparse, but I found pasta, pasta sauce, bacon, and cheese. I could do something with that.
“Did you go out hunting earlier?” I asked. Viktor hesitated before he nodded, and I lifted a brow. “You didn’t bring anything back.”
“The animals are hiding away from the weather,” he replied.
I glanced out of the front window that looked out over the valley. Clouds were gathering and the wind was picking up, but it didn’t look threatening. If a storm was coming, it was still far off. “Already?”
Viktor nodded. “The storm comes from the mountain,” he said. “That over there is just for fun.”
“Fun?”
“Mother Nature likes to play.”
“Like the mudslide I was caught in,” I said darkly.
Viktor chuckled and nodded. “It’s a reminder of how small we really are.”
I didn’t know if I needed reminding in such a way. But being caught in that mudslide had brought me to Viktor. It was strange how things worked out sometimes.
“What happens when you get stuck in something like that and you’re out here all alone?” I asked as I grated cheese. Viktor sliced the bacon strips into small pieces so we could add it to our makeshift pasta salad.
“I don’t get stuck like that,” he said.
“You can’t tell me accidents don’t happen around here,” I commented, stopping the chopping to glance at him when I asked.
He glanced at me. “If you learn to read the forest, you can avoid accidents, as you call them. The forest is alive, and you need to compromise with it. The way you do in any relationship.”
“You’re comparing your stay on the mountain to a relationship?” I asked, curious, resuming the chopping.
Viktor nodded at me. “And why not? You read your partner’s moods, don’t you? And you act accordingly. It's about give and take.”
“What do you give the land?” I asked.
Viktor pulled up his shoulders. “I let it be in peace. I live off what it has to offer, and I plant to replenish. In return, the land is kind to me.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “Did you grow up like this?”
Viktor stiffened. “Like what?”
“Alone in the mountains. Secluded from the rest of the world.”
He hesitated again before he answered. “I grew up in a small Russian town south of St. Petersburg. There was no mountain where I grew up.”
“How did you learn to live like this?”
Viktor shrugged his shoulders. “When you’re thrown into a swimming pool, you learn to sink or you swim.”
I finished the bacon and scraped it from the cutting board into a bowl. The pasta would take a while to cook since it had to cook in a pot over the fire outside. The only hot water available was rainwater, heated by a small solar panel in a sort of container outside, and it wasn’t drinkable. It was for showering only.
Viktor had retrieved the pot from underneath the sink for me and I put the pasta into it. “Come,” he said, and we left the cabin, walking to the fire pit.
I watched him start a little flame with twigs and a long lighter for grills. He kindled the flame into being, adding more sticks and larger pieces of wood to the pile until the fire burned strong enough to not be blown out by the strengthening breeze. I looked up at the sky. It was overcast now, but the clouds were a light grey. Still no sign of the storm Viktor kept referring to.
“So how exactly were you thrown into the deep end?” I asked.
Viktor grunted in response. He was so reluctant to talk to me about himself.
“Do you mean like when you moved to America?”
“And sometimes before. I travelled often.”
“For work?”
Viktor nodded again. He watched as the water slowly started moving in the pot, the heat causing it to mix and churn, steam starting to rise from the surface.
“What did you do?” I asked.
Viktor grunted again, visibly annoyed. “You ask a lot of questions.”
“And you refuse to answer them,” I replied hotly. “Why don’t you want to share anything about your life with me? What are we doing here?”
He glanced up at me, and his eyes weren’t kind.
The look he gave me fueled my ire, and my face was as unkind as his when I responded. “We’re not just fucking around, are we? Or is it just about sex? A romp between the sheets since you’re always alone, a reason to get off and that’s it?”
Viktor pulled up his lips in what looked like a snarl. “Are you suggesting I’m using you?”
“I’m suggesting it comes across that way if you don’t want to share a little about yourself with me.”
He looked at the pot, and I focused on the water swirling around, too, silently seething. He wasn’t obligated to tell me anything about himself. He didn’t owe me anything, did he? Bullshit. Of course he owed me something! He couldn’t just take my virginity, make me feel like a queen between the sheets, and pretend that what was happening between us didn’t exist otherwise.
The fact that he was so hesitant to answer made me suspicious. What was he hiding? Why didn’t he want to tell me anything other than where he was from? I felt like I had to play Twenty Questions just to get him to say anything at all, and even then, his answers were vague.
And after he’d questioned me like I was some sort of criminal when he lifted me out of mudslide.
How had he ended up here? Men who lived alone did so for a reason. What was he running from, hiding from? Viktor didn’t seem like the type that would run and hide from anything. In fact, with his face twisted in a snarl like that and his muscular build and large frame, he was the type of person people usually ran and hid from.
I changed the topic, saving my questions for later. My frustration was clear in my tone. “I need to go home at some point, you know.”
Viktor looked up at me and frowned. The water had started boiling, and he lifted the pot higher, effectively ‘turning down’ the heat. We sat together in silence, staring at the pasta boiling for some time. He didn’t answer me.
“Do you think the roads will be repaired so I can get back to Grizzly Falls?” I asked.
“Why?” he asked.
“I need to finish my last job,” I said. “And I’m sure my mother is worried sick.”
His scowl shifted and became less angry. If I didn’t know better, I would think he was worried.
“Then I need to leave
Grizzly Falls soon, too.”
Before Viktor could respond, a loud crack of thunder echoed around us. I looked up and noticed clouds coming from the mountainside, clouds so dark it almost turned the world to night. I hadn’t thought it would come so soon. I hadn’t thought it would come at all.
“It’s going to be a bad one, isn’t it?” I asked.
Lightning crackled across the sky, a crooked finger that scraped the rocks on the mountainside.
“Yes,” Viktor said. “This is pretty much done. We should get inside.”
He picked up the pot of boiling water, holding it by the handle as if it weighed nothing, and started toward the cabin. I followed, and the first raindrops fell onto the canopy of leaves above, making a pattering sound. The drops that broke through the leaves were fat, splashing on my skin.
We were barely inside the cabin when the rain fell so hard I could barely make out the other side of the valley. I watched as muddy rivulets ran down the side of the mountain I could see.
I wouldn’t be going home any time soon. I’d been here for three days. I had four left. Four days in which I needed to get home, pack my life, and leave Colorado. The text I’d sent to my mom hopefully calmed her fears, but she was probably terribly upset. I needed to push Viktor to get me to a phone.
Throwing the meal together was as simple as frying the bacon and mixing it into the pasta along with the grated cheese and pasta sauce. The meal wasn’t exactly good for my waistline, but holy shit, it tasted good when I tried a bite.
We sat at the little table, each with a mountain of pasta in front of us.
“Why are you leaving?” Viktor asked after a few bites.
I glanced up at him, swallowing my bite before answering. “So you get to ask questions but don’t have to answer them?”
He didn’t answer, just looked at me.
I sighed and rolled my eyes before answering. “I’ve lived here my whole life. It’s time to get out there, see the world. Start a new life.”
“What’s wrong with the one you have now?”
I paused to think about it. “Nothing’s wrong with it, per se. But I’m not going anywhere in it.”
“Where do you want to go?”
I chuckled. “You’re asking me complicated questions.”
“It seems to me that if you have a perfectly good life, you don’t walk out on it.”
I stilled, my expression stoic. “You don’t know any more about my life than I know about yours.”
Viktor nodded. “You’re right. I don’t. Tell me about it.”
I didn’t like that he wanted to know so much about me when he wouldn’t talk about himself. But instead of clamming up like he did, I found myself talking to him. I wanted to share with him. There was something about the way he listened to me – not just hearing, but really listening – that made me want to tell him the deepest things. Things I hadn’t told people in a long time.
“My dad was abusive,” I said plainly. “He beat my mom up pretty badly. And he hurt me, too.”
Viktor’s face darkened. “Where is he now?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. None of us do. One day, he just left.”
“Men who hit women are cowards,” Viktor announced. “And men who leave are not men.”
I swallowed a bite of food and shrugged. “I don’t know what was worse. The abuse or the rejection.”
Viktor frowned. “You are sad he left?”
I shrugged, sighing again. “Not sad, no. My mom wouldn’t have survived him. It was a blessing in disguise when he abandoned us. But to know you’re not even good enough to beat anymore… it can hurt more than the physical wounds do sometimes.”
“Your mother still struggles?” Viktor asked.
I nodded. “I’m leaving for her.” Viktor frowned. It sounded confusing, I knew. “She’s stuck in Grizzly Falls in a dead-end life. She won’t leave. But I can. I can get out and live the life that passed her by while she was waiting for a man who left bruises behind every time he touched her. Who accentuated the words ‘I love you’ with scars and welts.”
Viktor’s brows furrowed. “You’re not leaving for you.”
I shook my head, irritated. “It is for me. But it's for her, too. You won’t get it. This is about leaving my past behind. About starting over.”
How could I explain to him that thanks to my dad, my mom had missed out on her life? She had married a guy, young and in love, thinking she’d found her Prince Charming. Only to find out that he was a beast and there was no Prince waiting for her under the surface.
And after he’d left, she spent her life trying to recover from the damage he’d done, both physically and emotionally. How could she have lived her best life? How could she have found new adventures when she was so busy just trying to survive?
It was up to me to live my best life for her. She hadn’t had the chance to be free. It was up to me to take the opportunity to stretch my wings, even if it meant leaving the life I loved behind. I was doing this so I didn’t end up with regrets. Regret was the most dangerous thing to live with, she kept telling me. It was the sum of all your mistakes, and it became such a heavy weight to bear. It turned every good thing you faced sour. If you kept looking at your past, you missed out on the future.
It was up to me to do it right where my mom hadn’t been able to.
Viktor took a deep breath and let it out slowly as I returned to the present. “I understand more than you know.”
I wanted him to tell me more, but he didn’t. He took another bite of food, and for a while, we ate in silence.
“I really need to call my mom,” I told him. “It’s important to me that she isn’t worried, that she doesn’t think anything happened to me.”
“We can’t go right now,” he told me, glancing out the window at the rain pounding. “I’ll take you after the storm passes.”
I nodded, though I was unsatisfied with the answer. “I have to go back to pack and say goodbye to my mom.”
“It’s not safe right now, Malen kiy,” Viktor said.
I looked toward the window with the torrential downpour swallowing the world outside.
“No, apparently, it’s not,” I said with a sigh.
Viktor
The storm lasted two days. Two fucking days. Normally, it didn’t bother me so much. Mother Nature liked to rage from time to time, and honestly, I got it. I had those days, too.
But with Angela here, it changed everything.
On the one hand, I was happy about the storm. It was a reason to keep Angela with me, and she couldn’t fight me on it. She was getting antsy to get back home, and I didn’t blame her. But with the blip getting closer, and since she’d gone into town with me and introduced herself, told people she was staying with me, it was a risk I didn’t want to take, allowing her to leave.
It also made me feel less guilty about the fact that I hadn’t done anything about a date with her. Time was passing, but we’d had to stay in. So it made sense not to plan a night out. And that blip worried me, too. Going into town now would be like waving a red flag, saying “here I am”.
Speaking of blips, that was the part that pissed me off about this weather. I hadn’t been able to go back to the mountainside to check my equipment for movement. The plane had landed a day and a half ago, if they were headed here. It was dangerous as fuck for me to head out into the rocky terrain with the lightning dancing around the way it did. It was a good way to get fried, which wouldn’t do anyone any good.
I was getting anxious. That was a problem. I still didn’t know how the fuck they’d found me. Not to mention the fact that Angela was in trouble now, too. I didn’t want her to go, but I didn’t want her here either.
I was torn in two. Send her away and risk her getting hurt? Keep her here and risk them finding her when they came for me?
On a different note, we were running short of food. I’d stocked up for a long time. I went to town once every six months, usually, to load up on provisions. The
rest of the time I hunted, made it work with food straight from the Earth. But with Angela here, we were going through my food much faster. And with the storm, I wasn’t able to hunt. So the food went faster still as we dipped into my non-perishables.
By the end of day two, just before it started growing dark again, the rain eased up enough for me to want to risk getting out and taking care of a meal or two.
“What are you doing?” she asked as I shrugged into my hunting jacket and boots.
“I’m getting us something to eat.”
She looked horrified. “You’re going out hunting in the rain?”
“If we want to eat, yes.”
She stared at me for a second, then glanced out the window. “Can I come?”
Surprised, I lifted my eyes from my gun, which I’d been loading. “You want to come?”
She shrugged sheepishly. “I mean, I’ve never been hunting. Not sure I’ll like it, but I’m here and I’m bored. I might as well try something I’ve never done.”
I frowned, wondering if she’d could handle the actual killing of something, and I’d planned to use the free time to check my satellites again. In the short time since I’d checked, probably nothing had happened. I looked at her again, an unfamiliar grin on my face. She made me so fucking happy. Dangerously happy.
“Are you sure you can take it?” I asked her seriously. A flash of defiance in her eyes intrigued me. She was so strong.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m going to shoot an animal,” I told her, trying not to sound condescending and failing.
She snorted derisively. “I know what hunting means, Viktor. And I’d like to go.”
“Alright, let’s go.”
As she walked for the door, I grabbed her around the waist and held on tight, kissing her soundly on the lips. When she stepped back, we were both breathless.
She smiled sexily at me and murmured, “You’re very possessive.”
“Angel, if you saw yourself the way I saw you, you would be too.” I put my hand on her cheek, and when she leaned into my touch. Her positive response to me was all I needed. And I would keep her safe no matter the cost.
