Nik stared up at the ceiling, throat tight when he tried to swallow. I won’t use you, he’d said earlier. And here he sat, utterly useless. A burden.
Sasha would be better off with other wolves – with immortals like Will Scarlet, with a job, and a pack, and…
And away from Nik. Possessive, and needy, and standoffish.
“You’re thinking something stupid, aren’t you?”
“Mm.”
“Come on.” Warm, familiar hands touched his own, and Nik opened his eyes to see Sasha studying him with fierce tenderness, a wrinkle of concern pressed between his brows. “Let’s get to bed.”
Nikita stood, shakily, letting Sasha pull him upright. A sound built in his throat – low and distressed – and he swallowed it down. “I can walk.”
“I know you can.” But Sasha looped an arm around his waist and helped him along anyway.
In the bedroom, the small, dim lamp burned on the nightstand, the one that wouldn’t hurt his eyes too badly after feeding. Nik had hurried out of the room earlier, on the way to work, leaving his blankets in a crumpled heap at the foot of the bed. In just the last few minutes, Sasha had straightened the covers, folded them back neatly; had even emptied the ashtray, and left his smokes and lighter within easy reach. Beside the Sprite, and the crackers, laid out on a clean plate.
Nik shut his eyes, fighting a sudden, overwhelming urge to cry. He’d pushed Sasha away last night, and here lay such simple kindnesses; such automatic, complete care.
He drew in a shuddering breath.
“Lie down,” Sasha said, gently, voice right in Nik’s ear. He urged him toward the bed, and Nikita didn’t fight it this time. He couldn’t.
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. He ached.
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 him bratishka – 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.
Nikita moaned, and he lifted up into the touch, a full-body arch.
But a moment later he pulled off Sasha’s vein with a gasp. “Sasha–”
“Drink,” Sasha ordered. He pressed his hand down harder. “Please. Please–” His voice broke. “Nik…I want…” He panted into the collar of Nik’s shirt, not daring to pull back and meet his gaze, afraid of what he’d find there.
It was silent a moment save the rough scrape of their breathing.
And then Nikita sighed, and he nuzzled into Sasha’s throat again; Sasha felt the hot trickle of blood running down his neck, just before Nikita’s tongue traced the droplets back to the wound. He lingered there a moment, lips moving over the punctures: small, wet touches like a kiss.
Voice rough, wet, deep: “What do you want, lyubimyy?”
Sasha shivered. Tears slipped hot down his cheeks, and he pressed his face into Nik’s throat. “You. I just want you.”
Nikita purred a comforting sound. “Sweet baby, don’t shake. It’s alright.” He went back to the wound and started to drink again.
His arms closed more securely around Sasha, and he rolled them onto their sides. One hand smoothed down Sasha’s bare back, comforting and electrifying at once, a
nd kept going. Past his waistband, over his ass – Sasha shifted forward with a whine, wanting more – and down to his thigh, pulling his leg up and over Nik’s hip. He urged him in closer, and rolled his own hips.
“Like this,” he murmured against Sasha’s skin. “Move with me.”
Sasha gasped and kept gasping, head tipping back. He couldn’t breathe, and his heart raced, but he could move, and he did. Grinding his hips against Nik’s, forward and retreat. Even through their jeans, he could feel the shape and heft of Nik’s cock, pressed up right against his own.
Nik drank, and they moved together, and the air between them grew hot, and close. Sasha clutched at him; pushed up his shirt and passed shaking hands over sweat-sticky bare skin. Wriggled closer and closer until they were flush, too hot, too close for Nikita to keep feeding.
A high, keening whine left his mouth as he came, starbursts wheeling behind his closed eyelids, every nerve on fire.
“God, God, oh God,” Nik murmured against his throat, and kissed him there, smearing hot blood.
Mate, Sasha thought, mine. And lost consciousness.
5
The Lion’s Den had become the informal gathering place for their little group. Their pack, Alexei supposed. He wouldn’t let himself think family yet. Not when Nikita still hated him a little bit, and not after the fate that had befallen his real family, over a century ago.
It was a pub that managed to be both sprawling and cozy, full of nooks, allowing for privacy even on crowded nights. No one there cared that Nik smoked, nor that Sasha didn’t exactly look twenty-one in his fake ID photo. Alexei liked it – mostly because it was a place where he could go to keep company other than his own.
But some nights, he craved something a little different.
The fights broke up around ten-thirty – early for a Friday – and after there was the usual period of bets changing hands; Jamie’s hands had almost been too small to hold their night’s winnings.
Lanny had left to go see Sasha at the club for reasons he hadn’t wanted to relay to Alexei. Jamie had said something about a painting he was working on.
That had left Alexei alone. Not that he minded; he was overdue for a trip to Nameless anyway.
Because here was the thing: Alexei liked his new little pack. Truly he did. And he respected Nikita, even if the other vamp still mistrusted – and maybe hated – him. But Alexei wasn’t ready to commit to the kind of isolationist attitude to which Nik ascribed. Not quite yet. He still, occasionally, craved the company of those that haunted dark places.
The bar that he went to occupied a basement beneath a warehouse. You had to access it via a hatch, and a ladder, and once down had to pass the inspection of a hulking werewolf doorman whose name Alexei hadn’t been able to gain yet. The bar itself was mostly just that: a bar, poorly-stocked, a few scattered tables tucked along the cold, windowless concrete walls. It stank of spilled beer, urine, unwashed bodies, and immortals. It wasn’t called Nameless, exactly, but it had no name, and so everyone had to call it something.
It was crowded tonight. Alexei slid onto an end stool beside a female vampire who smelled like a fresh kill, and like a distaste for small talk. The bartender, a bound wolf, strolled over, expression bored.
“Vodka?”
Alexei was something of a regular. “Please.”
He turned around and put his back to the bar while he waited for his drink, elbows braced back on its edge, to survey the night’s patrons.
A surprising number of humans occupied the tables tonight – well, he thought a stranger might find it surprising. But the three men playing cards in the corner booth were regulars; one dealt blood slaves, Alexei knew. A human sitting alone at a table, staring down into a dirty glass of half-drunk beer, was a bounty hunter, one aided by the nose of a wolf friend who hadn’t shown yet, or maybe wouldn’t. A vampire named Dante held court in his usual booth, surrounded by pretty young mortal women who hung on his every word, blue light glinting off all the product he’d put in his hair.
Piss-poor company, all of them. But Alexei kept coming back.
The vampire beside him slid off her stool and headed for the door; Alexei released a deep breath that eased the tension in his shoulders.
Piss-poor company, and they made him nervous. But here he was.
A glass thumped down on the bar and he twirled back around to pick up his vodka. He met the direct stare of the bartender, and paused, glass held in front of his face, tension dialing back up again. “Something wrong?”
“There’s scent on you,” he said, flatly.
Alexei lowered his glass, slowly. “Yes. That’s how…scents usually work.”
The wolf’s nostrils flared as he inhaled, face blank, eyes shining like cold marbles. “I recognize him. One of your friends.”
For a moment, panic gripped him. Was this someone with a vendetta against Lanny? Surely not young Jamie, who’d never stepped a toe out of line in his life. Probably there was someone he’d brushed past at the fights tonight; he had to be wearing dozens of scents by now, from gamblers to the hotdog vendor he’d bought dinner from just an hour ago.
But the wolf said, “It’s that vampire that kills other vampires.”
Ah. Nikita, then.
“Don’t mind him,” a smooth voice said to Alexei’s right, and a vampire slid onto the now-vacant stool beside him. “Carey has a tendency to jump to conclusions.”
Alexei tried hard not to look startled as he turned to the newcomer. But then he felt his brows go up.
This wasn’t the sort of vampire who frequented a place like this. Finely dressed, he wore a sleek, fitted three-piece suit, with a wool topcoat draped over his shoulders. His dark hair, slicked back with a tasteful amount of pomade, spoke of the past century in a way that was an elegant throwback, intentional, rather than outdated.
He offered Alexei a fang-tipped smile, but made no move to shake hands – perhaps he could sense that Alexei wouldn’t be willing to touch him. “Good evening,” he said. “I’m Gustav. And this is my bar.”
“Y-yours? But you…” Alexei gestured toward his clothes.
Gustav laughed. “Doesn’t exactly seem to match my aesthetic, does it? But, yes, this is my place. I think it’s important that people like us have the chance to gather together in safety.”
“People like us,” Alexei echoed. His skin prickled, nerves awash with uneasiness, but he couldn’t say why. Certainly this Gustav was much more civilized company than Nameless’s usual set. But…perhaps Nikita was rubbing off on him. He was suspicious.
Gustav could probably tell, if his grin was anything to go by. “Immortals, of course. Though I’d say you’re of a totally different class, aren’t you, your grace?”
Alexei hissed in automatic reaction, and ducked low on his stool, darting a glance toward the other patrons. None seemed to be listening. “Don’t – no one calls me that. Not anymore.” And better yet, how did this vampire know?
Gustav looked surprised. “If that’s true, then you’d be the first person I’ve met who didn’t want to be treated like royalty.”
“I’m not royalty.”
“But you are the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, yes?”
Alexei gritted his teeth, and didn’t answer.
Gustav leaned in close, close enough for Alexei to smell another bound wolf on him, a female, and lowered his voice, conspiratorial. “Most of the immortals who come in here are young. Weak. Nobodies. But you were going to be the emperor of Russia.” His gaze shifted over Alexei’s face, searching, serious. “You honor us with your presence,” he said, sincerely, and sat back.
Alexei reached for his vodka and downed it all in one, long swallow. “Yes, well. Thanks.” He moved to slide off his stool.
Gustav halted him with a gesture. “Carey was right before. You do smell like Nikita Baskin.”
Alexei’s pulse jumped. But he lifted his chin, and drew on old courtly manners, responding coolly. “He’s a friend.”
“
A friend.” A single brow lifted. “One walking around with your family crest sewn to his jacket. Pretty bold for someone who made a career serving your family’s murderers.”
The words bit, quick and sure, like a serpent strike. They hurt. Alexei swallowed and said, “It’s more complicated than that. And, frankly.” He got to his feet. “None of your business.”
“You’re right, it isn’t. But I thought it prudent to warn you that, given his reputation, Captain Baskin isn’t welcome in this establishment. I’m sure you understand why, and you of course may come whenever you like. But.” He gave a close-lipped, apologetic smile.
“Of course,” Alexei said, woodenly.
Gustav produced a card, black with silver lettering. He offered it between his first two fingers, slick as any modern, mortal businessman. “Here. If you should ever find yourself in need of a friend.”
Alexei stared at it a long moment. “I have friends.”
“As you’ve said.”
Another beat. Then he snatched the card and turned for the exit.
Behind him, Gustav chuckled.
6
Sasha woke slowly, his body warm and relaxed beneath the covers. And beneath the weight of the arm thrown around his middle. A brief, fierce joy filled him. Before Virginia, and especially before Trina and Lanny had come into the picture, waking like this would have been normal. But it had been weeks, now, and he wanted to savor it for as long as Nikita would let him.
And then, like dawn breaking, he remembered what else had happened last night. He hadn’t forgotten it – he never would – but the sense-memory of it flooded his mind, and set his heart racing, and he opened his mouth on a silent gasp.
Nik shifted behind him, sheets rustling. Cool fingertips brushed Sasha’s hair aside, drawing a shiver, and then his face pressed into the back of Sasha’s neck, cold nose and warm breath.
Sasha held very still.
“Sashka.”
He closed his eyes. Just a moment. Took a deep breath full of familiar, well-loved scents: their apartment, this bed, the sheets that smelled like both of them. All of it undercut by the low musk of sex, dizzying and thrilling. And probably doomed never to repeat.
Golden Eagle (Sons of Rome Book 4) Page 5
