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“We had been recalled,” I finally told him, though even now, the details were foggy. “We were told about the treaty, that the front lines were being abandoned. I was too afraid to believe it, but my team and I got there, and it was empty. I told them to go on ahead,” I added, then laughed because even now I had to wonder, if I hadn’t lingered… “I was too busy believing that it was really over to notice someone was there with me. I never got a good look. They hit me with gas first, and then with a sedative. The next thing I knew, I was in the lab.”
“Blind?”
I shook my head, my smile more of a grimace, but I appreciated that he didn’t tiptoe around my reality. “I could see. I was drugged beyond reason, but I remember what the tech looked like—the first one who put a mask over my face and forced me to breathe in…” I stopped, because I never did know what chemical it was they used against us. “My sight started to fade sometime after the second full moon, but I wasn’t conscious often enough to know how fast it progressed.” Sitting up, I opened my eyes and tried to guess where he was sitting. “Do they look…” I stopped and forced my breathing to even out. “Can you tell that I can’t…?”
Misha was quiet a moment. “I could tell.”
I closed them again and squeezed my lids tight, but there were no sparks this time. Just endless nothing. “How?”
“Your pupils are dilated, and they didn’t react to light when I put my flashlight on you. I can see a little bit of the yellow in the iris though. That’s how I knew you were an Alpha.” He stopped for a moment. “There wasn’t much, but they were glowing.”
Bowing my head, I let myself feel the anxiety and anticipation—the furious desire to force my body to heal. When I could shift, the world would make sense again, but my wolf wasn’t close enough to the surface. “Are you afraid, Misha?” I asked him again.
He made a soft, considering noise, and I heard him shift, felt it in the way it buzzed along the floorboards. “Shit-scared,” he said, and I couldn’t help a dry, rusty laugh because I felt it too. “I’m terrified that the Wolves are going to kill me for being what I am.” I heard the tremor in his voice but couldn’t offer words of comfort because they might, and there wouldn’t be shit I could do to stop them. Not like this. “I’m terrified that my father did something to me that’s going to break me—and that your people won’t be able to fix it.” He was quiet again, and I cursed my inability to see him, to read his body. When he spoke again, his voice was a faint whisper. “I’m scared they can, but they won’t.”
I wanted to make him promises, because it seemed only fair. If he was yet another captor, he was kinder. And maybe that should have been worse, but my stomach was full and my body was resting. I was being allowed to heal, to reach my power again—and it counted for something. No one should have to live afraid the way I had—the way Misha had.
But I had no say. Not like this. Not without knowing where those who fought beside me stood.
“When I was little,” I said very softly, my throat still a little dry, “I knew I was supposed to be angry, but I didn’t realize life was bad. My mother was… dejected.” I leaned my head back a little farther into the sun, but the heat of it was fading, like maybe clouds had appeared. “I remember her talking to my aunt and uncle late at night, I remember them wondering if things would ever change. I didn’t understand her fear. Not until the war.”
Misha blew out a puff of air, then I heard him stand and walk in the direction of the fire. There was a thud and a crackle—more wood being added—and he was still across the room when he spoke. “We were already at war when I was born, but I don’t know when I really became aware of it. I went to a private school. Most of the humans did.”
“The affluent ones,” I corrected, because I had far too many memories of raiding small towns and seeing the desolate left behind like fodder—as though we’d distract ourselves and gorge on the richer humans’ sacrifice of their own kind. We always left them alone, but I couldn’t be sure other companies of Wolves had done the same.
“I didn’t know,” Misha said. “Not until I got older, and by then, it was no surprise that humans have behaved this way since the dawn of time.”
“And what about Wolves?”
There was something that sounded like a smile in his voice as he got closer. “That was part of my dissertation, trying to pinpoint the first time Wolves were introduced into the gene pool. I mean, it was probably something along the evolutionary line—something that split off from the Neanderthal. The adaptation to the cold—to an environment that would have taken homo sapiens out of the running…” He stopped abruptly, and my eyes rose as he gave a little cough. “Sorry. God, this is no time to nerd out on this shit.”
I felt something warm in my stomach, something soft. It was unwanted, and yet I clung to it because I had been deprived of anything good for so long. I reached out, and I felt a rush of air like he nearly took it. “Don’t stop.”
“Kor…”
I shook my head and leaned forward, reaching farther until I felt the pass of warm skin against my palm. His wrist, I realized as my hand closed around it. I felt his fragile bones, his pulse that was going too fast for a man like him, though he was surviving. His body reacted like he needed it. “No one has spoken to me in months.”
“None of this is important,” he protested weakly.
I let out a small snort. “Isn’t that one of the first things they teach you about history? That forgetting it leads to shit like this?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” he said softly, but his pulse calmed just a little, and he didn’t draw his hand away.
I was grateful for the touch. I was lost out in the black void, and being unable to tell how big the space was, where the vulnerable points where, how to exit in a hurry if we needed to was clawing at the edges of my sanity, which was still desperately fragile. I avoided the strange bond between us, but the touch was enough.
“But I’m not entirely wrong,” I pressed, and he finally laughed.
“No, you’re not entirely wrong. I was though.”
My fingers spasmed on his wrist, and I felt him tense, felt his heart jump out of fear, and I pulled back. It wasn’t my intention, but it was easy to forget right then that I was still more powerful than him. He was alive by sheer courage and my good graces, and knowing that gave me a rush I desperately needed.
“Explain,” I said, and he scoffed at me.
“Well, your highness, it’s a little bit mortifying.”
I drew my legs closer to my chest and let my arms rest loosely around them. It felt like paradise, to be able to sit casually and not fear more pain. “You saw me strapped to a table, pissing and shitting into bags, having pieces of me carved away.” I tugged at the edge of the sweatpants Misha had left me, then let my hands drop. “I don’t think it gets more humiliating than that.”
He was quiet a long time, and I thought maybe I’d gone too far. Then his body settled next to mine, and I tried to hide the fact that I hadn’t heard him—that I hadn’t noticed. I had to give myself time to regain all my senses, but I was going to go insane soon if things didn’t change.
