“Don’t even try it,” Sasha huffed.
“I wasn’t gonna! Man, you’re wound tight tonight.”
Sasha gave him a look.
“Yeah, yeah.” Lanny pulled out his wallet and slid his card over, gaze drifting back to the dance floor. “Where’s your man?”
Sasha’s stomach did a little flip. Lanny talked about them like…well, he was still so freshly human. He dismissed the supernatural elements of immortal relationships, looking at it instead with human frankness. When he referenced Nikita and Sasha, he didn’t speak about them as vampire and Familiar; didn’t revere the ancient kinship of wolves and vamps born on the banks of the Tiber when the she-wolf nursed Romulus and Remus. No, he acted like they were just friends…or something more. A teasing light glinting deep in his eyes, a suggestive edge to his smirk. It wasn’t mocking, not really, but it was something. And it made Sasha’s palms sweat.
As if he could sense Sasha’s sudden discomfort – and he could now, since his turning – Lanny shifted back toward the bar, smile smug. “Uh-huh.”
Sasha drew up to his full height, jutting his chin out stubbornly. “This is important. If you’re just going to make jokes about us, you might as well go back to the gym.”
“Home gym,” Lanny corrected. “And no, no, I know.” He let out a breath and sobered. Cocked his head and fixed Sasha with the kind of gaze that reminded Sasha that Lanny was a detective, after all. And a good one, according to Trina. “You didn’t see him after you got snatched. Dude was freaked out.” He lifted his brows for emphasis.
Sasha sighed. “I know.” Nik was still freaked out; Sasha could feel the guilt and fear buzzing under his skin when they touched.
“No,” Lanny said. “I don’t think you actually do.”
Sasha bristled. “What–”
“Nik hated being a Chekist, right?” Lanny pressed on. “That’s what Trina said. That he was just pretending, and he felt shitty about all the awful things he did, and he hated Stalin, and all that?”
Sasha snorted. “More or less.”
“Well, he didn’t seem like he hated it when he was shooting everything that moved and choking little kids to death and being a walking nightmare in general.”
A low buzzing started up in Sasha’s ears. “What?” he asked, voice faint and cracked.
“You were pretty out of it when we got you back, but you saw the jacket, right?” Lanny shook his head. “All his lecturing about drinking from humans, and then he did it himself. He initiated it. Because he needed to be strong enough to get you back. He compelled people, and killed people, and drank from people – to get you back. Dude, we went all the way to Buffalo and he met his whole entire family, and all he cared about was getting you back, even if he got himself killed in the process. However he’s acting now, whatever kind of upset you’re seeing? It’s not even close to how fucked up he was before.”
Sasha whimpered in the back of his throat before he could catch himself, then tried to cover it with a cough. “I…I know he feels…guilty…”
“Hey, look.” Lanny’s tone softened. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad. But I thought you ought to know that he was pretty bad off…seeing as how you guys are co-dependent soulmates or whatever.”
Co-dependent. Yes, they were that. But it felt one-sided lately.
Suddenly, all the fretting and the stilted conversations and the avoidance caught up with him. He felt his eyes burn and looked down at the bar top, blinking away the shameful evidence of emotion. He was a pack animal, and he hadn’t been able to act like one lately, his packmate holding him at arm’s length when he most needed to reestablish bonds and intimacy.
Ordinarily, he wouldn’t confide in Lanny – in anyone else – but he’d reached a breaking point. “I,” he started again, halting, and then the dam burst. “I’m so worried about him. I can’t get him to feed, and he doesn’t want to eat, and he doesn’t laugh anymore, and he pushes me away, and I just…” He gasped a few times and then pulled himself forcibly together, looked up at Lanny miserably through a screen of hair that had fallen over his face.
Lanny said, “You mean he actually laughs?”
“He laughs a lot.”
“I don’t believe that for a hot second.”
“Sometimes,” Sasha amended. “He laughs sometimes.” When it was just the two of them.
“Do you want me to talk to him?” Lanny asked.
“Please.” It hurt to say, but he was desperate.
And Lanny, thick as a slab of beef most of the time, seemed to know it. He offered a crooked little smile. “First time for everything, huh?” Because it was the first time in their seventy-seven years of cohabitation that Sasha didn’t know how to reach his best friend. “Sit tight. Where is he?”
“Table duty, up on the mezzanine.”
Lanny threw back the last of his fourth drink and slid off the stool, melted into the crowd.
By the time he was out of sight, someone had taken his place on the stool. A female someone.
She smelled of perfume, sweat, deodorant, and the sticky-sweetness of alcohol – not in an unpleasant way. She propped her elbow on the bar, slid the dregs of her pink cocktail toward Sasha, and smiled at him. One of her dress straps slipped a little down her shoulder. Her hair was black, black, black, her lips the pink, pink, pink of ripe grapefruit.
There was a part of Sasha that would always feel like the blushing boy Ivan had dragged into a prostitute’s home back in Moscow. But he’d had plenty of years fielding advances at this point; just because he’d never done anything about his interest in sex didn’t mean it wasn’t there, lurking warm and insistent beneath his skin.
“Hi,” she said, voice pitched soft enough that he wouldn’t have heard it above the crowd if he wasn’t a wolf.
“Refill?” He scooped her glass up as she nodded, but he hesitated. Just a second. Her eyes were fixed to him in that way that spoke of laters and hotel sheets and fingernails digging into skin.
“Thank you.” She made a point of brushing her fingers over his when he passed her a fresh glass.
He knew, in that moment of skin on skin contact, that if he asked for her number, she’d give it readily. And not because he’d compelled her – he couldn’t do that. But because his too-long pale hair and wasp waist did something for some women. “Boy toy,” one customer had called him before.
This customer bit her lip. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” he said, because he couldn’t reasonably pretend to be much older than he looked. His ID said 21, anyway.
“Hmm,” she purred. “You busy later?”
The thing was…Sasha wasn’t made of stone. He wasn’t immune to the promise of sex, the heady idea of it, of being, the way he’d always craved, with another person, and not just his hand and a few vague fantasies.
He just didn’t want to have sex with her.
But…
His gaze dropped to the bar, to the section where, beneath, in a plastic bin, he collected cocktail napkins with women’s numbers. And he thought of Nikita – spike of pain in his chest, shortness of breath – and the way he hadn’t smiled in the weeks since they’d returned from Virginia.