Beauty and the Bounty Hunter (26 page)

When she was through, she tucked him beneath the covers. He continued to shiver, thrash, and mutter. She sat at his side and reached for his hand. At her touch, he reared up, gasping as if he’d been held beneath the water until near drowned. He dragged her across the bed, across his body, his fingers digging painfully into her arms.

“
Ne trogaite menya,
” he said, voice deep and menacing, eyes staring into hers, though he did not see.

“Alexi. Wake up.”

“
Ya ne budu.
” His grip tightened.

“Fedya!”

Big mistake. He shook her once, so hard her head snapped back and then forward, nearly colliding with his before she could stop it. Now he seemed to see, and what he saw he did not like.

“
Svin’ya,
” he spat. “
Sobaki!
”

How could she reach him? She didn’t know any Russian.

Or did she?

Cat began to recite all the words he’d said to her that had sounded remotely like his native language, and as she did so, he quieted. His fingers loosened, his eyes slid closed. He began to breathe less harshly.

The final one she remembered, because he had used it not an hour before, was—

“Durochka.”

He opened his eyes. Clear blue and lucid, they stared into hers. “Why are you calling me a fool?”

“Fool?” she repeated. “You called me a fool?” What else had he been calling her when she thought he’d been murmuring endearments?

“Sometimes I must.” He glanced around the room, then back at her, seeming to realize he was naked, in bed, with Cat on top of him. He ran a hand over her ass. “In order to do this right, you need to remove all those clothes.”

“Shut up.” Her tone was light; he was fine.

However, when she began to roll free, he stopped her. “Stay. Please. I’m—” His voice broke. “Cold.” And as if to emphasize how cold, he shuddered.

Since he’d scared her—badly—and she was so damn tired, Cat relented. “Let me take off my boots.”

He released her; she sat on the edge of the bed and removed them. When she glanced at him again and saw he’d pressed his lips together to keep his teeth from chattering, she took off everything else—as he had done when she’d been shivering in Indian Territory—then slipped in beside him.

“What are you doing?”

She set her head on his chest and wrapped her arm across his belly, pressing the length of her body to his. “You said I needed to remove my clothes.”

“I—um—I don’t think I can.”

“You don’t need to. I already removed yours and mine.”

“I mean, I can’t perform. I’m—”

“Shh,” she murmured, stroking his chest. “You’ve performed enough for one lifetime.” He stiffened, and she wanted to call him a fool again. Instead, she whispered: “Tell me.”

He gave a shudder so deep it had to be painful. “Tell you what?”

“Whatever you want to.” She paused, letting her hand rest atop his heart. “And I think, mostly, what you don’t want to.”

Alexi didn’t answer for so long Cat thought he’d
fallen asleep. She tilted back her head; he stared at the ceiling. Perhaps he needed some direction.

“What happened tonight?”

He continued to stare upward. He didn’t blink. Cat considered shaking him as he’d shaken her, or at least calling his name. But which name? She was still debating when he spoke.

“I shot him.”

“He deserved shooting.”

“What?” He lowered his gaze, the confusion quickly replaced by comprehension. “Oh, him.”

“Who were you talking about?”

He took a deep breath, his chest rising, then falling beneath her palm. “Mikhail.”

C
at stiffened in his arms. Alexi waited for her to pull away, to leave—his bed, his room, his life. He’d be cold again, but that was nothing new. He’d been cold since…

He could not remember ever being warm. Not like this. Both outside and within. Every time a shiver escaped, Cat would move closer, press herself more firmly against him, flex her fingers, and pet him like a…

“Mikhail’s fine.” She rubbed her cheek against his chest, arched her back, practically purred. Strangely, the movement did not make him want to toss her onto her back and plunge into her again and again and again. It made him want to—

He tightened his arm around her shoulders and gently, so she would never know, pressed his lips to her hair.

Alexi didn’t want to tell her. She would never lie next to him like this, or any other way, again. But after what had just transpired, he thought he must. He returned his gaze to the ceiling. “Mikhail will never be fine again, thanks to me.”

“Mikhail adores you. He’d do anything for you.”

“I know,” Alexi whispered.

“Are you brothers?”

“No. Yes.” He sighed. “It’s confusing.”

“Maybe you should start at the beginning.”

“The beginning,” he repeated. “Yes.” Then he tried to decide when, exactly, that was.

“Mikhail said he’s known you as long as he can recall.”

“That’s true. Except
when
he can recall isn’t quite the beginning.” The beginning was somewhat earlier. “I told you about Ethan, the war, Castle Thunder.”

“Some,” she agreed.

“Where did I stop?”

He knew damn well where he’d stopped. He just needed a minute to breathe.

“You and your scout—Mikhail—were captured and sent to Castle Thunder.”

“Ethan arrived ahead of us. Mikhail found him.” Alexi’s lips curved. “Ethan had already set up a surgery, started helping people as best he could with what he had. Wasn’t much. We were captives in one of the most brutal prisons of the South. Medical supplies, if there were any, went to the Confederate soldiers first, then the Confederate prisoners. What was left, they gave to us.” He shook his head. “Ethan did amazing work in horrible conditions with little but his hands and some hope.”

After a while, the hope had been in even shorter supply than bandages.

“What went wrong?” she asked.

“It was prison. What could possibly go right?”

“I mean between you and Ethan. When you speak of him now, you seem to admire him. When you spoke to him in Freedom, I thought the two of you might come to blows.”

“I do admire him. He’s a brilliant doctor.”

“Why do you dislike each other?”

“He dislikes me.” With good reason. “I…” He paused and considered his feelings for Dr. Walsh. They were too complicated to explain now. Perhaps too complicated
to explain ever. Best just to go on with his story.

“In prison,” Alexi continued, “the days were long, the nights even longer. Surviving on nothing takes stamina, intelligence, and a good dose of ruthlessness.”

“Which explains why you’re still here.”

“Spasibo.”

“English.”

“Thank you.”

“Tell me about the languages,” she said.

“In good time. Beginning to end. Lest I forget—” He stopped. He would not forget. He only wished that he could. “Because the days were long and the nights longer, nowhere to go, nothing to do but die…” Cat stiffened in his arms. He began to pet her as she had done him. “The guards made up games.”

“Poker? Brag?”

“No,
m’anam;
those games were already well known. Our captors thought up new ones, and they made us play.”

“Why would they have to make you? If you were so bored, wouldn’t you want to?”

“Not these games.” Alexi was putting off what he did not want to say. He knew it; she knew it. But she let him. “One of their favorites involved feeding tainted food to the most starving inmate; they would place bets. Could the victim be saved or couldn’t he?”

Cat’s breath caught, but he tightened his arm about her, and she remained silent. He wanted to tell as much of this as he could, while he could.

“They liked to use a prisoner’s talents against him. Prove he wasn’t as able as he thought. Every time a patient died, Ethan mourned, and the guards never let him forget how worthless he was at his job.”

Alexi paused, uncertain where to go next. The languages
now? Or the make-believe? Anything to postpone the story of Mikhail.

“We devised games of our own to keep us sane. To take us away from that place, if only in our minds. There were so many immigrants who had sold themselves into service, like me. Also those who had been born here but whose parents had not been, and the array of languages was astounding.”

For a moment Alexi could hear the voices all blending together in the close confines of Palmer’s Factory. Then, when night would fall and the silence became far too loud—

“We started throwing out words in English, discovering how many languages we might turn them into. Someone would say an expression in Spanish, Italian, German. Whoever translated it into something else won.”

“You always won.” It wasn’t a question.

“I am good with languages,” he agreed. “But eventually that game wore thin, and we needed another. As a child, I’d often pretended to be someone else.” It had helped when being himself was too damn awful.

“You taught your fellow prisoners to step out of themselves.”

“We became so proficient, the guards would watch our performances. If we were convincing enough, our game went on and theirs did not begin.”

“No wonder you’re so good at being…anyone.”

“
Oui,
” he agreed.

“And you learned that becoming someone else helps you leave the broken one behind.”

“We never leave the broken one behind,
chaton;
we only step away and allow him or her time to heal.”

“You healed me.”

“Not yet.” If he had, she wouldn’t still be asking her question and telling her lies.

“You saw my pain,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “And you helped me.”

“My motives were not unselfish. You wanted something from me; I wanted something from you. It was a bargain on both our parts.”

That bargain had changed somewhere along the way, though Alexi wasn’t sure how, or why, or to what.

“Perhaps,” she allowed. Then, as if she couldn’t bear to examine where this strange intimacy between them was going—or where it had already been—she returned to his story. “You pretended you were someone else to survive the games the guards played; you occupied your minds sharing languages.”

“We did.”

“And then?” she prompted.

“We went mad; we died.” He plucked at the covers. “We killed one another.”

She shifted so she could see his face. “You were on the same side.”

“Too many men shoved into too small a space with barely enough food to feed even half of them. The majority of those incarcerated in the Palmer’s section of Castle Thunder were deserters. They felt allegiance to no one but themselves. In a very short time, the only side anyone had was their own.”

“All right,” she said. “I understand. Go on.”

“Go on? Isn’t that enough?”

“You’re stalling, Alexi. This all began because you shot someone and puked. You, who claim to have been the best sniper in the Union. So good you were sent to kill the two most important men in the Confederacy.”

“I didn’t,” he muttered.

“You would have.” He shrugged. “And I doubt you would have thrown up when you were through. Which means something happened between then and now to
make you not only shiver and shake after firing a gun but to make you carry empty weapons so you don’t shoot anyone at all.”

“Just did.”

“My gun,” she pointed out. “What happened?”

Still he hesitated. He had not spoken of this since it had occurred. Why bother? What was done was done; those who were dead were dead, and while one might hope to get them back…

Miracles didn’t happen. At least not for him.

“They knew why I was there, what I had done.”

“You didn’t do it.”

“Not the mission I was caught during, but all the others…” He rubbed his burning, too dry eyes. “Every person there had a story of someone they knew who’d been shot by a sniper. After a while, each one of them had been shot by me.”

At first he’d thought that might be why he’d been brought to Castle Thunder and not killed outright—to give the guards someone to blame, to torture, to pay for what had already been done. And that might have been part of it. But, as always, what appeared on the surface was not what lay beneath.

“That’s not fair,” Cat said.

“Fair?” Alexi let out a short huff of breath. “In a war, there’s no such thing. The guards considered it justice to make me perform greater and greater feats of marksmanship under worse and worse conditions. Nothing and no one could stop them.” Certainly not him.

Cat did not beg. But Fedya had. Many times.

“You shot Mikhail during one of their…games?”

“Yes and no.”

“Alexi,” she began.

“I didn’t shoot
Mikhail.
”

“But you said—”

“Then again, I did.”

She groaned. “Say what you mean.”

“I was captured, along with my scout,” he repeated.

“Mikhail.”

“Back then we called him Mikey.”

“That’s what—” She paused and drew back to look at him again. “That’s what Ethan called him.”

“Mikey was Ethan’s brother. He was younger, but so much bigger and stronger. He had a knack for finding things. When they were children, whatever became lost, Mikey found. When they hunted, Mikey led. He could track anything.”

“You’re talking about them like they’re two different people.”

Alexi sighed. “They are.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Tell it to Mikhail. He doesn’t remember Mikey; he doesn’t remember Ethan.”

“But how—?” she began and then stopped, eyes widening. “The game.”

Alexi rubbed his forehead as an ache began in the center. “It started out simply enough. There was an enclosed yard between the buildings where they meted out punishments. Lashings. Executions.” He closed his eyes.

Blood-drenched soil dotted with stained tufts of grass. The sound of the whip whistling through the air toward—

Alexi’s eyes snapped open. “I would shoot cans or bottles from farther and farther distances. I never missed. I can understand how that would become boring. So they began to set the cans and bottles on people’s heads. Much,
much
more interesting.”