From Russia With Fangs Read online

  “Hey,” Ivan breathed as he gave her one last squeeze, ignoring the wrinkles to his crisp dark suit. “How are you? I went to the funeral, but by the time I arrived, you’d made a hasty exit.”

  “I’m fine,” she promised. “Really, I’m doing better every day. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m being rude. Ivan, Viktor Zhukovsky. Viktor, this is Ivan Levinsky. We work together at the shop. He can sell you a refurbished set of art deco hoop earrings and convince you they belonged to Catherine the Great.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Viktor said, though he sounded anything but.

  “Is he here to fend off Mama Anya?” Ivan asked sotto voce.

  “I’m here to make sure Mrs. Volkov is protected,” Viktor informed him. “No matter where the threat comes from.”

  Ivan’s brows rose. “Well, I’m sure she feels very, um, safe.”

  A long, awkward silence followed, in which Viktor and Ivan seemed to be sizing each other up. And squinting. There was a lot of squinting.

  “Ivan, is everything okay at the shop?” Irina asked to break the weird tension.

  Ivan rolled his eyes and reached for his heavy-duty shoulder bag marked with the Red Crown Jewelers logo. “I am a sales genius,” Ivan said. “But I can’t repair worth a damn, and neither can that idiot apprentice you hired, Irina. Vlad is a perfectly nice boy, but he almost soldered himself to the worktable this morning. And this is Mrs. Tanin’s favorite necklace. You know how she is about this thing.”

  “It’s a family heirloom, I couldn’t dream of replacing the clasp,” they chorused together in a falsetto northern Russian accent. Viktor growled again, for reasons that escaped Irina.

  “I need your magic hands,” Ivan said, raising a maroon velvet pouch in one hand and her mobile tool kit in the other. “You’re the only one Mrs. Tanin trusts to repair it. I called ahead and cleared the visit with your father’s office. I’m not violating any sort of mourning etiquette.”

  Irina shook the antique gold locket into her hand. The oval pendant was a bit too stylized and over-worked for her taste, but Mrs. Tanin was sinfully proud of the heirloom, sharing the story of how her great-great-grandmother smuggled it from Odessa through Ellis Island, sewn into the lining of her dress, along with her family’s other valuables, every time she brought it in for repair. And given the age of the chain and clasp, that was pretty often. Irina could replace the ancient clasp ring with something more modern and secure. She could even weather the metal to match the rest of the piece, but Mrs. Tanin insisted on keeping all of the original parts. And since Mr. Tanin, a high-ranking lieutenant in Papa’s circle, regularly bought Mrs. Tanin large, expensive, “I’m sorry I forgot our anniversary/birthday/vow not to cheat on each other” presents at Irina’s store, Irina did what she could to keep Mrs. Tanin happy.

  “I can fix it, again,” Irina said, inspecting the failed clasp. “But we’ll need room to spread out my tools. We can go into Sergei’s office. Viktor.” She turned to find her werewolf bodyguard standing close enough that she practically buried her nose in his chest. Her face flushed and she took a step back. “We’ll be in the office if you need us.”

  Viktor gave Ivan a stiff nod, followed by a look that said, “Rest assured, I could murder you with a pencil sharpener.” Irina rolled her eyes. “Stand down, Viktor. I couldn’t get along without Ivan. He’s my right-hand guy.”

  “You must be a busy man,” Viktor said, dryly.

  It took Irina a moment to realize Viktor might be referring to the shower incident.

  Oh, no, he did not.

  Irina shot Viktor a furious look. But before she could maim him with several sharp implements, Ivan looped his arm through hers and led her away. He said, “So, the Krenski shipment came in and needs sorting. And your father wants an update on the monthly intake, but he only trusts you to do it. So if you could just get through this whole mourning your dead husband thing and get back to work, I would appreciate it.”

  Irina smiled at Ivan, who’d been witness to several of Sergei’s less than romantic visits to the shop to pass messages from her father. If Sergei treated Irina badly, he treated Ivan like gum he couldn’t be bothered to scrape off his shoe.

  “I really appreciate you taking care of everything while I’m out,” Irina told him as they spread the array of tools on the supervillain chrome coffee table Irina had been unable to donate to charity. With its collapsible joints and super-sharp corners, the Salvation Army collectors had called it a “death trap.”

  “What are friends for?” Ivan nudged her with his elbow. “But please, come back to work before Vlad manages to dissolve himself in some sort of acid.”

  It took Irina all of twenty minutes to finish the repair. And with Viktor hovering near the office door, Ivan was too uncomfortable to stay for a long visit. Ivan packed up the tools and skedaddled, promising to keep Irina informed of any important developments at work. Irina washed her hands thoroughly and dabbed antiseptic on a tiny abrasion she’d given herself on a sharp edge of the broken fastener.

  The moment Ivan was gone, Viktor took Irina’s hands in his and examined the network of tiny marks all over her fingers and palms.

  “Is that where all of the scars come from?” he asked.

  Irina instinctively pulled her hands away, but Viktor held fast.

  “Yes,” she said. “The workshop is a dangerous place. Hot tools, boiling treatments, molten metal. Accidents happen.”

  “I thought—” He stopped and let a long, angry growl roll from his throat. “The first time I saw your hands, I thought your husband had done this to you.”

  Irina scoffed. “Oh, no, Sergei found much more inventive ways of going about it.”

  Viktor scowled, but he didn’t ask more questions. “About this morning, Irina—”

  “I owe you an apology,” she interjected before he could actually talk about overhearing her shower activities, forcing her to melt from shame. “I’ve been avoiding you. And it was immature and silly of me. We’re both adults. We can interact in a civil manner, yes?”

  Viktor nodded.

  “Good, and for the record, I do feel safe with you,” she said. “You’re the first decent non-family member I’ve met in a long time. I’m sorry that everything keeps getting all…confused between the two of us.”

  “‘Confused’ is a good word for it,” he said, dropping her hands. “I’m not a decent man, Irina. I’m anything but. I’ve done things I couldn’t even tell you about. I know you’re not naïve, but you’re a good woman, a woman who deserves to be with someone who won’t hurt her. I can’t touch you like that again, as much as I might want to.”

  She was really getting tired of people telling her what she did and didn’t deserve.

  “You can’t touch me like that again because you work for my father and he would kill us both,” she said plainly. “Any other excuse is bullshit.”

  Viktor’s eyes went wide at her rare show of profanity, but Irina’s smile was crisp and sweet as cider. “So, truce?”

  He extended his hand warily and shook hers. “Truce.”

  “Great. So, how did you end up working for my father?” Irina asked, climbing onto her counter and opening a plastic container of Magda’s special spice cookies.

  Viktor leaned against the kitchen table, accepting a cookie when Irina offered him the container. “My father owned a small bookshop in Little Odessa. The shop was under Ilya’s protection and served as a sort of card club and meeting place for him and his associates. I started doing small jobs for him when I was still a kid, fetching his favorite sandwiches from the corner deli, running payments to the people who placed bets with my father, that sort of thing. He was always good to me, your father. He always had a kind word, an extra twenty in his pocket for me for an errand well-done. So when I got out of high school, something my own father insisted on, I went to work for him full-time.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Let’s just say the errands involved more hitting and less running,” he muttered
around his cookie. “I was a general dogsbody. I did the jobs that no one else wanted, protection details, collections, enforcing. And then I got the jobs that the others actively avoided, most of them connected to your brother. About ten years ago, Alexei came into town and your father didn’t trust him to spend the weekend alone in New York. Ilya asked me to act as a driver for Alexei, keep him out of trouble and report back to him if there were any problems.”

  “But of course, there were problems,” Irina interjected. When Viktor shot her a questioning look, she added. “I’ve heard this sort of Alexei story before.”

  Viktor shrugged, taking her hand in his, and threading their fingers together. “The night actually went pretty smoothly at first. It was the usual strip-club-and-borscht-joint tour of the big city, until Alexei tells me that he needs to make a stop at a friend’s place to pick something up. I figured the worst he could be picking up would be some weed, maybe even some coke. So while he runs inside this dive human bar on 53rd Street, I wait out in my car and call your father to let him know what’s going on.”

  Irina winced. “You drove your own car?”

  Viktor looked sheepish, which was a pretty difficult feat for a Beta werewolf. “I figured it would be easier than renting one. Too much paperwork. Plus I had a pretty nice ride.”

  When she made a wincing face, he added, “I was young and stupid. So I’m on the phone with Ilya, telling him everything was just fine, and the next thing I know, Alexei is running out of the building with blood all over his shirt.”

  “That also sounds familiar,” Irina said dryly.

  “He told me he’d gone into the bar to collect a gambling debt, some friend of a friend who bet against the Knicks on the wrong damn game. The friend of the friend pulled a gun on him when he asked for his money.”

  Irina hopped down from the counter and poured them both cups of coffee. “I’m sure he asked very politely.”

  “Well, however he asked, a fight broke out. Alexei got jumped and fought his way out. Five people, including an off-duty cop working quote/unquote ‘security’ at the bar, died from the injuries he inflicted. The waitress, the only one he didn’t leave with fatal injuries, was too fucking traumatized to give any sort of witness statement to the police. And the one witness outside the bar could only tell the cops that he saw a man in a black leather coat come running out of the bar and jump in my car. He wasn’t quick enough to see which door Alexei opened, but he got a pretty good look at my license plate.”

  Viktor paused to dunk his second cookie in the coffee. Irina shuddered. “Oh, come on, you’re a dunker?”

  Viktor smirked at her. “You should see me with a bag of Oreos.”

  Visions of watching Viktor’s long, capable tongue lick the cream from an entire bag of chocolate sandwich cookies danced in Irina’s head. She steadied herself against the counter with her hand and her knees seemed to melt into goo.

  You’re a jerk, she told her brain.

  Her brain wasn’t sorry.

  “I’ll put them on the shopping list,” Irina muttered into her coffee.

  “Anyway, by the time the cops caught up to me, it was all settled. Ilya asked me, very politely, to take the fall for what Alexei had done. I’d serve his time and he would make sure my father was taken care of while I was inside.”

  “Why didn’t Papa just cover it up? Buy Alexei’s way out of it. It wouldn’t have been the first or last time he’d done it.”

  Viktor frowned into his cup. “Alexei beat an off-duty cop to death. Someone had to pay for it.”

  “But, in a human prison? How did you survive that? The full moons, the urge to shift must have been hell.”

  “Your father did have enough influence in the prison to get me assigned to a solitary cell on full moon nights, extra food, that sort of thing.”

  “How long were you in there?”

  “Six years. It was long enough for the public outcry against me to die down and for my parole paperwork to be ‘accelerated.’ I was quietly released and moved out here with my parole officer’s blessing.”

  “I can’t even imagine that,” she said, shaking her head. “My brothers, and Galina, for that matter, would have lost their minds.”

  “It wasn’t easy. But what about you? I don’t know of any humans that have been adopted into a werewolf family and lived to tell the tale. Married into a pack? Yes. But what was it like, growing up with the Sudenkos?”

  “Like I was a small child sitting at the adult table,” she said, shaking her head. But she was smiling, and to her surprise, Viktor smiled in return. An honest-to-God, non-mocking smile. And it was a beautiful thing. “Sometimes, I’m surprised my father doesn’t spell the big words around me.”

  Irina grabbed another cookie. “My family, even my sister, assumes that I’m weak, that I can’t handle the things that they do. And for the most part, I suppose that I’ve proven them right. I have been weak. I kept quiet when I shouldn’t have. I made compromises when I shouldn’t have, to keep the peace or because I thought it would be ungrateful to disagree. Well, that’s not fair. Galina and Nik, they’ve never asked me to make the hard choices, they’d never be able to. But Papa, sometimes I have to manipulate him just to get him to behave in a way that’s reasonable. It’s a shameful way to try to maintain control of my life, and I hate myself for it, but if I don’t, he makes decisions for me that are…hard to accept.”

  “Nik told me,” Viktor said. “About what led up to your wedding.”

  Irina’s brows rose. Over the years, Nik had learned to play everything close to the vest. For him to share any story featuring Papa’s weakness with someone outside the immediate family, Nik either trusted Viktor quite a bit, or her brother was trying to warn him in some way.

  “Why do you stay?” he asked. “You could walk away, live a normal human life, make your own choices.”

  “Because it’s all I know,” Irina said, shaking her head. “Papa, Nik, Galina…Alexei—they’re the only family I’ve ever known. When he took me in, Papa rescued me from the kind of life I don’t even want to imagine, living with a father, a sperm donor who was willing to bet me on a hand of cards. He saved me, Viktor. He loved me and gave me the only home I’ve ever known. And I can’t repay him by running away or rejecting what he gives me. I never want to seem ungrateful.” Irina toyed with a dishtowel, twisting it between her hands. “Besides, it could have been worse.”

  Viktor waited for a long moment before saying, “Most people add something after that statement.”

  Irina chewed her bottom lip. “I’m trying to think of something worse than being married to Sergei. Give me a minute.”

  “Leprosy?” Viktor suggested.

  Irina pursed her lips playfully, and shook her head. “No.”

  “Pestilence and famine?”

  “No.”

  “A non-stop Andy Dick movie marathon?”

  “Has he made more than one?” she asked. “Either way, still no.”

  “Wow,” Viktor marveled. “You have suffered.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  6

  Extreme Make-Over: Creep Edition

  IT TURNED OUT THAT not actively avoiding a person who was living in your home made living there much easier. And that might have led to Irina dropping her guard a little too much.

  One morning, near the end of her seclusion, Irina was walking toward Viktor’s guest room with a stack of freshly folded towels. Just as she passed the bathroom, the door swung open and steam billowed into the hallway like something out of a Whitesnake video. There stood Viktor, with a white towel slung low around his hips and water droplets clinging to his skin.

  Irina stared, her whiskey eyes wide as saucers, a distressed little squeaking noise escaping her throat. Her eyes traced the network of black tattoos that covered his skin, but she couldn’t process any particular symbol. She was too distracted by the descent of the water, trickling down the contours of his ribs to the pronounced V of muscle cording over h
is hips. Irina’s breath stuttered and the towels tumbled out of her hands.

  Chest heaving, Viktor’s mouth was wet and open as his eyes followed her every movement, the line of her neck, the way her hands curled around the terrycloth. He licked those lips and Irina felt something give in her knees. As Viktor took a step toward her the front door burst open.

  “Irina!” an all-too-familiar voice boomed from downstairs.

  Viktor was in the hallway in an instant, putting himself between Irina and the unknown threat.

  “Irina, darling, where are you? You don’t greet your big brother at the door?”

  “It’s Alexei,” Irina hissed into Viktor’s ear.

  He flinched at her proximity and whispered, “Stay here.”

  Viktor leapt into the guestroom and shut the door quietly. He was either throwing on clothes, or he was going for a gun large enough to distract Alexei from his towel-clad state.

  “Irina?” Alexei yelled again from the kitchen, his tone becoming impatient. “Where are you?”

  Irina wrung her hands, her head snapping back and forth between the stairs and Viktor’s door. She did not want Alexei to storm up here into her private space, with Viktor all naked and vulnerable. So instead, she tossed the towels into the guest bathroom, straightened her mussed curtain of hair and trotted down the stairs.

  “Alexei,” she called. She found him leaning against her kitchen counter, sniffing a gray powder from a tiny black enamel spoon. An enormous bouquet of roses rested on the counter next to him. Red roses. She hated red roses. Every woman she knew, save Galina, seemed to think of them as the ultimate romantic gesture, but to Irina, they were such an impersonal cliché, requiring no thought from the giver whatsoever. She preferred fragrant flowers with lots of color, the waxy pink of tulips, the soft yellow of snapdragons, the brilliant purple of anemones. It was something neither Sergei nor Alexei had picked up on over the years.

  Alexei straightened immediately when she walked into the room, dropping an enamel vial into his jacket pocket and shooting the cuffs of his exquisitely tailored black silk shirt. Alexei was twitchy and glassy-eyed, as if his skin was too tight to contain him. How much Bullet was her brother using, to look so strung out at nine a.m.?