I shouldered the laptop and my backpack and stepped into the office, triggering a bell. A moment later a woman in a headscarf and a cardigan came rushing from the back room, a huge grin on her face.
“Yes?” she said, clapping her hands together. I just stared—she looked like she was out of an old comedy sketch. Her face was a network of burst veins, her nose was knobby, and the whole image was of someone’s kindly grandmother welcoming you to the mother country.
“I…” I composed myself and returned her smile. “I need a room.”
“Yes?” she said. Perfect. She was the kindly grandmother who doesn’t understand a damn thing you say.
“Dmitri!” I hollered.
He came in, doing the same double-take I did when he laid eyes on the motel owner. He told her we needed a room, with his best charming smile.
“Two beds,” I hastened to add. Dmitri paid in cash and exchanged more chatter with the woman in Russian.
“She says there’s nothing here except the tire factory,” he said. “Nowhere disreputable.”
“Disreputable?”
“Hey, that’s how she put it,” he said. “Come on, she gave us the quiet room, away from the road.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thank the gods we’ll be away from the constant din of passing donkey trucks.”
“Hey, this place is a lot like where Olya and I grew up,” Dmitri said as he unlocked our room. “Don’t knock it.”
“I can see why you got out,” I said.
“We didn’t have a choice,” he said. “My father was killed in a factory accident and my mother sent us to live with the pack elders in Kiev. After that, you know the whole sordid story.”
I flicked on the lights and sighed when I saw a single queen bed made up with a spread in a shade of bilious green that I’m fairly sure the FDA had outlawed as a fire hazard in America.
“Dammit, two beds,” I said. “What’s wrong with that old woman?”
“I don’t know.” Dmitri shrugged. “Guess she’s a little hard of hearing.”
I slung my bags onto the bed and flopped down. “If this is your cockeyed way of seducing me…”
“Sweetheart, if I wanted you, you wouldn’t be fighting me,” Dmitri said.
I sat up straight, folding my arms. “Oh, is that right, sweetheart? ”
Dmitri smirked. “That is correct.”
“You’re an asshole,” I said. Dmitri smirked again, setting down his bag and moving toward me.
“Yeah, sweetheart, but I’m your kind of asshole.” He pinned my legs against the mattress, leaned forward and inhaled my scent, his breath tickling my ear and behind my neck, something he’d loved to do before.
“Dmitri…” I warned. “That’s far enough.”
“Come on, Luna,” he said. “That human can’t give you what you want. I can.”
“Dmitri, this isn’t you,” I said. I couldn’t see his eyes, but the sibilant echoes in his tone were familiar. “Stop it now, before I have to hurt you.”
“I want you to hurt me,” he hissed. “Like you hurt me before, because then I can hurt you. I can hold you down and make you scream how sorry you are, over and over again.”
The click of the Walther’s hammer was the only sound in the small, stuffy motel room. I pressed it into Dmitri’s temple, hard enough to leave a mark like a kiss.
“I know how much fun you’re having,” I said. “But I’m telling you now that you either leave Dmitri out of this game until we find his daughter or I’m going to blow holes all through your shiny new toy.”
“You turn me on when you threaten me,” Dmitri murmured. “Do you remember how we met? You pointing a gun at me. Begging with that body of yours to be taken down a peg or two.”
“I mean it,” I said. “I’m not so sentimental that I wouldn’t kill a man who’s basically dead already just to shut up your incessant yapping, Asmodeus.”
I was that sentimental, but Asmodeus didn’t know that about me. He hadn’t exactly seen my soft side.
After an interminable moment, Dmitri released me. I shoved him away and stormed out the door before he came back to himself and I had to explain what had happened, again.
Shoving the Walther into my waistband, I stomped across the parking lot toward the back of the hotel. Asmodeus had a lot of nerve screwing with me this way. I wasn’t some plaything on a string that could be jerked back and forth at will.
I was around the corner, out of sight, and I dropped down on the curb, putting my head in my hands.
Biggest mistake of your life, Wilder. How could I have thought that helping Dmitri was the right thing to do?
The sensible thing? I could be home with Will now, safe, warm, and not trapped in a motel in Kazakhstan with my possessed ex.
Crying caught my attention, from beyond the cluster of trash cans. I stood up, moving toward the sound.
“Hello?”
The crying stopped abruptly, and I heard breath and a heartbeat. “Everyone okay back here?” I said, dropping my hand to my gun.
I peered over the cans and saw a pudgy girl with her knees pulled up to her chin, tears running down her reddened face. “What’s up?” I asked. “You don’t look too happy.”
She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, hair dyed shocking purple at the tips and grown out to mousy blonde roots. I saw pink indentations where piercings had sat on her lips and nose, but no jewelry. Her dress was thin cotton and she was sporting a heavy cardigan, like the woman in the front office.
“I know you can understand me,” I said. “I heard you stop crying as soon as I said something.”
“I can’t talk to you,” she hissed. “If I talk, the missus will get me into trouble.”
Her accent was thick—Scottish, I thought—and she flinched away when I crouched down beside her.
