“I can’t wait for you to meet them. Especially Red and Snowy. They’ll be older now, but they’ll remember.”
Home is all he ever wanted. “I’m looking forward to meeting them.”
“I’m surprised they’re not here already. They’d be here if the helicopters weren’t up there.”
“What if they never give up on finding you?”
“They always give up on finding me,” he whispers.
There’s this silence where my mind spins with all of the sadness of that statement.
He pulls me to him more tightly. “I can hear you thinking.”
“No you can’t.”
“Your breathing changes when you’re thinking in dark pictures. It always has.”
He’s right, of course. “You think you can read minds now?”
“No. I can read your body. Even at the institute. All I had was to watch you. Think about you. You know when I first knew you were special?”
“When?”
“It was The Hulk. When you made a joke about The Hulk.”
“Oh my God. I knew you tracked it. Your lips moved, and your eyes were like, so there for a second.”
“You surprised me.”
“Yeah, and you pretty much gaslighted me. I knew you were aware. God, everyone made me think I was crazy. Including you.”
The helicopter comes over again, flashing its light down the shore. We still; we don’t even speak, like the helicopter might hear us.
“The Hulk and I go way back,” he says after a spell. “When my dad would lock me in the root cellar, The Hulk kind of saved me. The villains would hurt Bruce Banner and put him down so much, and then when he’d get mad enough, angry enough, he’d turn invincible. It was a powerful tale to a young boy in a root cellar.”
I know he’s probably only telling me more of his story because he knows that hearing stories calms me, but I listen eagerly.
He talks about how he’d imagine scenarios of himself as The Hulk, bursting out of there.
“It came true a little bit,” I say sleepily, nestled into his chest.
“I’m nowhere near The Hulk.”
“In comparison to others, you are.”
A rumble in his chest. He’s not like The Hulk right now. He’s badly concussed. Probably dizzy, judging from the way he looked on shore. He takes a curl in his finger, the way he loves to. “And then you came like a beautiful angel, and you asked if I turned into The Hulk to escape. And I wanted you more than anything.”
More than his freedom, even.
The drone of the helicopter fades away, and it’s just the soft waves lapping at the bottom of the canoe, and us alone under the stars.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Kiro
The next morning, we trek through the forest. Midmorning. I should feel happy. Every turn is familiar. Every view. I’m nearly home. But everything’s wrong.
I told her the helicopter scared off my pack. But if Red or Snowy or the others were anywhere near, they’d scent me. They’d come.
“Our den was just over that hill,” I say, with a mixture of excitement and dread. “It’s possible they’re not here for the winter yet, and that’s why they’re not out to greet me.”
A lie. They should be here. They would be here.
My heart pounds as we get to the peak of a hill overlooking a valley that’s lush with reds and oranges. A stand of green pines pointing up to the sky like feathers.
“It’s beautiful,” she says.
It is. And it’s all wrong.
My eyes aren’t on the panorama. They’re on an outcrop of rock and two huge downed trees midway down the hill. You wouldn’t mark it as a home by looking. But it’s a home.
Or was.
I feel her eyes on me. “Kiro?”
The world sways. It’s not my head.
I start down toward the den, then break out in a run, not wanting to get there, yet needing to get there with every fiber of my being. I stumble once but keep going. I round the boulder and duck in under the massive downed trunk like I did so often, so deeply familiar.
I move into the cool shade and protection of the den. A wide space. Not so tall. Not tall enough to stand.
I scent him before I find him. I go cold. No.
With shaking hands I slide aside the leaves and decay, and there it is—a slash of white that shouldn’t be there. A half-buried skull. Red—I know it’s Red by the scent. Bones still carry the scent of the animal.
I unearth it a bit more and press my hand against what would have been the side of Red’s head, breathing hard, unable to believe that this bump of bone was once my friend.
I press my forehead to the side of his head, like I used to when he was alive. When we would sleep side by side. Red. So loyal. All the misery and loneliness of those years of being trapped crashes through me.
It’s then I scent Snowy. I’m heaving in gulps of air. I scent Ghost, another of the older ones.
I scrabble around in the dried leaves and dirt, finding the bones.
Three dead. Shot in the den. Or maybe outside of it, and they crawled in. Were pursued. Two years of dirt layered over them. It would have happened soon after I left.
My family. My only true family.
I collapse in the gloom of the enclosure feeling as dead as the dirt. These wolves weren’t just my family, they were my anchor, my sanity. Bright spirits in a dark world.
I lie there drifting, lost in a sea of misery, pulled under by it, unable to breathe, to see, to think beyond this moment.
I’m only dimly aware of Ann’s hand on my back.
When did she come in?
She stretches out next to me, rubbing my back.
I’m not sure how much time passes. It’s possible that I sleep. Maybe I pass out. That has happened since I hit my head. The next thing I hear is Ann’s voice. “Tell me about them, Kiro. Tell me another story about Red.”
I turn to her, there in the den, in the bed of dry leaves next to the half-buried bones. Something wells up in my chest, like a bubble made of stone, filling me, choking me. I can’t speak. I don’t want to speak. I rise up and heave myself against the side of the enclosure. Years of debris falls onto our faces. I kick open the side.
“Hey!” She scrambles out as I smash the den apart, pushing the accumulated branches and leaves and debris this way and that. I go up on the top and stomp on it, smashing it. The years of stuff trapped and cemented in by snow and moisture and sun breaks apart. I destroy it all, flattening it, crushing it into a heap.
When it’s utterly destroyed, I collapse on top of the rock outcrop next to it, face wet in the sunshine.
Again Ann is there.
She doesn’t fool me. I’m her captor. She’d leave if she thought she could. She only truly wants to be with me when I make her beg, or when there’s danger.
My pulse races. The world seems to spin. “He was family. They were my family. Even at the darkest in the Fancher Institute, they were there with me.”
“You loved them,” she says.
I reach up and touch her cheek.
She searches my eyes like she does when she’s trying to understand things about me.
And right then I think, I love you. It fills me with even more despair. She, too, will leave.
“Tell me about him.”
I tell her one thing, simple and small. About how upset Red would get when I’d climb a tree. He’d be at the bottom, jumping.
She soaks up the story. It’s always stories with her. I’m a story. It seems dangerous to love her when I remember that.
“The other,” she says. “Tell me about the other one. The female. What was her name?”
“Snowy.”
She makes me tell stories. She urges me to move away from the den and up onto the sunny part of the bluff. We sit in the sunshine in the tall grass. She has some sort of dried meat that she shares with me. “What about the rest of the pack? Are you so sure they won’t come back?”
“The
three strongest, oldest wolves were shot,” I say. “It would have left the younger members vulnerable, in disarray. They would’ve scattered. They could be dead. They’re probably dead. If the hunters got the older wolves, they would gotten the pups. Red’s pup…” I close my eyes, remembering him, a nipping ball of fur. “Those pups would’ve been too vulnerable to survive being hunted after something like this.”
I imagine the pups out there alone without the elder wolves. A few were almost a year old, but still. “If we looked hard enough, we’d find the bones of the younger ones.”
The idea fills me with despair.
“Hey,” she says softly, sliding a finger over my beard the way she likes to.
The sun has been climbing. It’s afternoon.
“I imagined them so fiercely when I was lying there in bed. They felt alive. I can’t believe they were dead all that time.”
“You kept them alive,” she says. “You’re keeping them alive now.”
“Just words.” I shove my hand in my pocket and pull out the wolf keychain. Something flip-flops in my stomach. The little wolf looks so much like Red.
I tighten my fist around it, like it’s my last link to my old friend. But it’s just plastic. Not real. I throw it into the grass.
“Hey!” She starts after it, but I grab her arm. I don’t want her to leave me.
She stays half standing, searching my eyes. “They’re not gone, Kiro. They still live inside you.”
Words. I hold her arm, feeling so alone. I need to not be alone.
I know what I am to her—I’m her captor, her enemy. Still she feels like life to me, and I hold on to her.
She gives me a strange look. Gazes into my eyes. She kneels on the grass and pushes me back, coaxing me to lie back on the rough warm grass. “Just lie there. Stay like that.”
I allow it, keeping hold of her.
She climbs on top of me, sits on top of me. Her peanut butter-colored hair hangs down on either side of her head. The brilliant blue sky behind her is dotted with cotton-ball clouds.
But nothing’s so beautiful as Ann.
She places her hands on the grass on either side of my head. I let her go, unsure what she’s up to. Then she lowers herself down and she kisses me.
Her kiss is tender. Her tenderness breaks something in me.
She sits upright and moves backward down my legs so that she’s sitting on my thighs. I watch with amazement as she presses a hand over my cock, making it harder. She leans over and kisses it through my pants.
I shove my hands into her soft hair. I’m her captor, her enemy. Her actions make no sense. “You want me to fuck you?” I ask incredulously.
“No.” She stands over me and takes off her shirt, unbuttons her pants, and pulls them down. I watch in wonder as she steps out of them, out of her boots. Naked. She looks like a goddess.
She kneels back down and frees my cock, bares my groin, eyes holding mine.
I can barely breathe.
She crawls back up over me. She takes hold of my cock and guides me to her hole.
“What are you doing?” I ask. It’s obvious, but I don’t mean it that way, and she knows it.
“You’re mine,” she says.
I clutch onto her and still her. I don’t want her like this if she doesn’t mean it. I don’t mind words that are lies, but I can’t take this if it’s a lie.
She grabs my hands and threads her fingers into mine, holding my hands and my eyes as she lowers herself down over me, guiding me into her. It seems like a dream. Another reality. She’s fucking me, fucking all of me. I hiss out a breath as she takes me into her, warm and tight.
Ann is with me. I grab her hips and begin to move, needing her like I’ve never needed anything.
I look into her eyes as she fucks me. Because she wants me. Because I’m hers.
She says something I don’t get. I don’t care. This is everything—her coming to me.
I’m lost inside her. The whole world is spinning wrong. But she’s right. She’s the still point at the center.
“I’m here,” she says.
And I know that she is. I fuck her and watch myself inside her, watch the way her eyes change as we move.
I get enough of her on top. I roll us over, roll on top of her. I push into her, fucking her, kissing her sun-warmed face.
She rolls off me afterwards. We lie in the sun, watching the sky.
“You’re a good mate,” she says.
“I didn’t even feed you.”
“You don’t always have to feed me.”
“I should feed you. I should fish before dark.”
“That would be good. Can I come along?”
“I’m faster without distraction.”
“I want to go with you,” she says. “And I still kind of can’t believe you catch fish with your bare hands.”
“You’d question me at a time like this?”
“Who catches fish with their bare hands?”
“What do you think I use?”
“I don’t know. Sticks? A net made from a sock? I’d believe almost anything before your hands.”
I frown and rub my face. “Come on, then.”
She trails along behind me to the stream, a speck of light at the edge of my dark world.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Ann
The river flows through a bed of rocks and boulders in the shade of a huge limestone ridge, which stands like a dark sentry above us. Kiro leads the way, picking along stones and spots of dry ground until we hit a downed tree whose fat limbs stretch out over the river like a giant’s hand.
“This was always the best place. This tree. This shade.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
He regards the mighty downed tree for some time.
Kiro has a powerful imagination for putting himself in the past—he told me that he’d lie in that institution bed imagining himself free and wild. I know he’s thinking about his pack.
I don’t want him to stop thinking about his pack, to stop honoring them with memory, but I hate seeing him in pain. “What now?”
“I catch the fish. This is going to be boring for you to watch.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I say. “Considering it’s pretty much an impossible feat.”
He climbs out onto the tree over the water and stretches out on his belly. Then he sticks a hand in the water. And waits.
And waits.
“That’s what you do?”
“Shhh,” he scolds.
“Are you shitting me?”
“They think my hand is part of the tree. I grab them.”
I cross my arms. “You wait for them to come to you. Like the rabbit.”
He turns his gaze to me. Yes. He doesn’t have the speed or claws of other animals. But he has stealth.
I see a silvery flash go by. I point. “Kiro!”
He gives me a look. “You scared it.”
There’s another. It’s kind of exciting.
He pulls his hand out of the water and comes back to shore. “I’ll teach you. Come on.”
Part of me wants to say no—I won’t learn. I won’t live here—surely he’s not imagining it anymore. But he’s teaching me things, starting to trust me. It means something. “You think you can teach me to fish with my hands?”
“It takes patience, that’s all.”
He leads me out, helping me balance on the massive trunk as we go a ways over the rushing water. He shows me where to stretch out, shows me a limb to hold on to. I go onto my belly and lower my hand in. It’s cold.
He goes farther out on the same limb and lies in the opposite direction, so that we’re facing each other, our hands dangling in the cool flow of water. “If your fingers get too cold, pull them out—slowly. Or switch hands.”
You can see all the way to the gloomy depths. Fish flash by. Sometimes big ones—trout, maybe? I have no idea.
“Is this how bears catch fish?” I whisper.
“They more scoo
p. They have speed and claws.”
“How are you doing?” I ask.
His hand is a sinewy blur in the water. “The dizziness is gone.”
“I don’t mean that.”
He’s silent for a while. Then, “I can’t stop thinking about them.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s hard to stop thinking about a thing.”
His gaze meets mine. “Like the kitten.”
The cold water gurgles by, flowing through my fingers like cool velvet. “Yeah.”
“I spent a long time puzzling about the kitten,” he says. “When I was lying there.”
I actually stopped thinking about the kitten for a while. Free of the fucking kitten. I don’t want the kitten back on my mind.
“You said it cost you everything. I spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling, wondering what it meant.”
“The kitten isn’t important.”
“Did it die?”
“No.”
“You always said you lost everything because of it.”
He remembers. Of course.
“Why did the kitten cost you everything?”
I’m about to remind him I don’t talk about it, but I look up and meet his gaze.
Kiro. He acts like such a brute, such a savage, but at this moment, he’s more achingly human than anyone I’ve even known. Needing to connect. Like his life depends on it.
“What did you lose?”
Am I really going to do this? To tell him? “Just my career,” I say. “I guess it shouldn’t be that big of a deal—”
“Your career is a big deal for you.”
“It is. Was.” I swish my hand in the water, and suddenly I’m telling him how I used to be so badass. I tell him how I was on top of my game in the journalism trenches. “It’s different from the kinds of reporters you met. You know what long-form journalism is? It’s where you write articles that are way longer than…they’re just long and hopefully thoughtful. Anyway, I’d pitch stories to good publications, and they’d bite, sending me to far-off locations. They’d know I’d get the story I promised or a better one. I have a nose for a story.”
“Like with me.”
“I was right, wasn’t I?”
I feel the quicksilver slide of a fish against my fingertips, and I grab for it. I have its tail for a split second, then it slips through.
Savage Mafia Prince: a Dangerous Royals romance Page 25
