Household expenses would again be on the rise, it seemed.
By the time we’d gotten out the front door, Pietr had changed back and slipped into his shredded pants, holding them together at his waist with a clenched fist. He didn’t say a word, just sat in the car, staring grimly ahead.
Max dug into the glove compartment and handed him a belt to twist through his tattered waistband.
We drove home in silence, each of us surely thinking of how we’d alone been responsible for our joint failure.
Pietr was brooding.
I was allowed no such luxury. Now was a time for action, not sorrowful introspection. If only I knew what action to take.…
Pietr was the first out of the car, throwing his door open with so much force its hinges groaned and Max shouted. We shadowed him up the stairs, onto the porch, and inside the house.
There, hidden from the potential curiosity of nosy neighbors, Pietr let loose.
He tore through the house, filled with a white-hot anger, kicking door jambs, punching walls, and cursing. Bilingually. Cat followed, a banshee wailing for him to stop—to think … I reached for my cigarettes and trailed them like a ghost.
What could I say or do? My grandfather’s science was what had brought us all to the realization that Mother was dying. And we couldn’t free her—couldn’t save her.
When Pietr cleared the small, marble-topped table at the sitting room’s edge, sending the pieces of the family’s matryoshka flying, Max took him to the ground.
Pietr snarled and spat, cursing beneath Max’s greater bulk. Quaking with rage he was as helpless as any of us—and as helpless as Jessie had been the day her mother burned to death in their family car.
When he turned his glowing eyes away from mine I realized he knew that, too.
I knelt beside Pietr.
“How long, Alexi?”
The breath thickened in my throat, wedged beneath a lump.
“How long does she have?”
“Pietrrr…,” Cat whined.
Max raised his chin and sucked his lips between his teeth, pinning them. His nostrils flared and he looked away.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Months?”
Pietr’s eyes squeezed shut. “Not even years,” he said, his tone clipped and brutal. He nodded. “Months.”
“Maybe less.”
He nodded again, taking it like a blow to the gut he’d somehow anticipated. “We’re not enough to get her out.”
Max grunted and, rocking forward, stood. His hand out to help Pietr up, he said nothing. His macho posturing was gone, deflated by fact. He did not bull his way through the conversation. Shoulders slumping, he pulled Pietr to his feet.
“What if there are more like us?” Max asked suddenly.
“What? More Russian-Americans in Junction?” Amy asked, rubbing her workout towel around her damp ponytail, fresh from a run. “Shi—oot. What happened here?” she asked, her eyes shooting from the wreckage of the room to each of our faces—masked against emotion as they were.
“Da,” Max whispered, dragging the syllable out, turning so his eyes latched onto mine. “Da. Russian-Americans in Junction. Near Junction.” He gathered Amy to him, linking his arms around her and sighing as he buried his face in her hair.
“Dude!” she protested, wriggling out of his grip. “I’m soaking wet, like gross beyond belief.”
He shook his head, sighing. “Nyet. Come here.”
Some force between them, like an undeniable gravity, pulled her back into his arms, and they both relaxed.
I returned to the question. “In Junction? We would know.”
“Yeah,” Amy agreed. “You guys are hardly subtle. You’d be easy to spot.”
Pietr nodded. “Da. She is right.”
“Near Junction…” I tried to imagine another pack close enough to make a difference. “How near is near?”
Max’s eyes narrowed and he snorted. “Good question.”
Amy again wormed free and started helping Cat pick things up. “Seriously,” she whispered. “What happened?”
Cat just shook her head.
Amy paused a moment, watching Cat’s body language—a victim trying to recognize another victim and not coming away with an easy answer. Straightening, she looked at Max as he and Pietr spoke Russian in low tones.
For a heartbeat it seemed everything was open to interpretation and Amy wasn’t sure if she’d been overlooking a danger just like the one she’d so recently escaped.
She exhaled, finally determining the danger she had known was still worse than what was before her and unknown. Max needed to tell her the truth soon or risk losing her forever because there was no other way to truly understand my family.
“Perhaps we should try to find them?” Max again turned to Pietr and me for input.
“Too many of us in one place makes things difficult.”
Max glared at me over my use of us, but kept quiet.
“There ain’t room enough in this here town for a new bunch of Ruski”—Amy blinked—“Russian-Americans,” she said, lightening the mood.
Max snorted.
Though she had no idea just how right she was, Amy’s words gave us pause. Oboroten were territorial. We were a small family—a small pack—at best. Inviting another pack in was asking for trouble. Trouble we had plenty of. We needed allies.
And trustworthy allies for a group so often hunted and so eagerly wanted under control were hard to come by.
CHAPTER SIX
Jessie
“It’s good to see you, Jessica,” Dr. Jones said.
I refused to pay her a similar compliment.
She flipped back a few pages in the set of papers curled around the clipboard’s top. “Fred and Jeremy reported that you’ve had an unapproved visitor several times.”
“Fred and—?”
“Jeremy. Your guards.”
“Thing One and Thing Two? Wait. They’ve”—I air-quoted—“reported to you. Huh. I was seriously starting to doubt they were capable of speech.”
Her pen scratched out something else. “The boy who insists on visiting you is putting himself in danger.”
“I know. I told him to stay away.”
She peered at me a moment. “You told him…”
“Wrote an insistent note,” I clarified. “I want Pietr safe way more than I want Pietr here.”