I can’t believe how erotic it is to tussle with a girl who can fight back. I have to work to overpower her, I have to exercise a level of aggression I never thought I’d use on a woman.
My cock is iron, red-hot even in the cold water. It throbs when her leg presses against it.
Nix dunks me and then I dunk her, until we’re both choking and sputtering and laughing.
She dips her chin under, deliberately swallowing a mouthful of water.
“Are you drinking that?”
“I’m thirsty! Anyway, running water’s clean,” she says.
I’m thirsty as hell myself. Trying not to think about dirt or bugs, I swallow a mouthful. It’s cold and clean, with a faint mineral taste.
Nix dives and swims across the pool, her pale figure undulating beneath the dark water, her bright hair floating in a cloud around her.
Russian mermaids are called rusalki. They’re the malevolent spirits of girls who die near water. Perhaps they leapt in a river to escape an unhappy marriage, or they might have been forcibly drowned by a father who discovered his daughter pregnant with an unwanted child. They haunt waterways, luring young men into the deep where they entangle their prey in their long red hair and drag them down.
It’s said that the rusalki can alter their appearance to match the tastes of the men they intend to seduce.
I never believed in such a thing . . . until this moment.
Nix hauls herself up on the rocks, her back arched, her long legs outstretched, her skin slick and glistening.
If ever a figure had been formed to suit my preferences, it would be hers . . .
My cock is raging hard below the water. I press on it with my palm, trying to stifle its stiffness, only succeeding in sending a sickening jolt down my legs.
Nix stretches luxuriously on the moss, pointing her feet all the way down to the tips of her toes, hands clasped over her head. Her nipples jut upward, hard enough to cut glass.
My mouth is watering, my heart pounding.
Tearing my eyes away, I mutter, “Don’t you want to swim anymore?”
“Of course I do!” Nix says, rolling back into the water.
Thank god.
She paddles around, agile as an otter. At home in the water.
I feel a stab of longing, remembering endless summer days in the warm turquoise ocean around Syros. Easier times. Better times.
“I wish all our classes were outside like Marksmanship,” Nix says. “I hate being cooped up indoors.”
“Right now I agree with you,” I say, looking around at the sun-dappled ground and the thick pads of green moss blanketing the rocky pool. “You may change your mind come winter.”
“I grew up in Kiev,” Nix laughs. “I doubt it will bother me. A walk-in freezer seems balmy by comparison.”
I open my mouth to say that St. Petersburg is nearly as bad, and then I snap it shut again, realizing my idiocy. I haven’t had a near-slip like that in a long time—not since I fought Dean and lost control of myself.
Keeping up the front with Nix is even harder than with my friends.
She’s too blunt, and the flow of the conversation is too rapid. I can’t predict what she’ll say next, so I can’t plan my responses.
I was wrong about her, I can see that already — her candor is no act. She’s not trying to manipulate me, not trying to appear as anything but herself. She embraces what she is, even when it doesn’t align with what her father wants.
She’s more honest than I’ve ever been, even before I had to take on this identity.
“We should head back,” I say. “It’s gonna get dark. I don’t want to have to run all the way back.”
“Sure.” Nix shrugs easily.
She climbs out of the pool, water streaming down her body, flesh paler than ever from the chill. Her soaking wet underwear might as well be painted on—I can see everything. I’m hit with another hot, raw flush of lust, and I grit my teeth, turning away.
Nix dresses quickly, pulling her clothes on without bothering to even shake dry. Her curls are already springing up again in wild, tight corkscrews that point in every direction.
We’re quiet as we walk back through the woods in the direction of the school. I don’t think Nix is tired—I’m not sure what could possibly tire her. But she seems calm. Peaceful. Her red hair flares brightly every time we pass under a patch of late-afternoon sunlight. She tilts her face up into the sun, absorbing every last bit of it.
I can’t stop watching her.
11
Ivan Petrov
St. Petersburg
Twenty-nine Years Ago
Dominik asks me to meet him in the War Room of the monastery, which was once the chapel where the monks knelt in prayer—or whatever they were actually thinking about. The church is a power structure like any other, and the similarities between my brotherhood and theirs are no coincidence.
This monastery has been in our family for generations. The Petrov motto is carved in stone over the gates:
Fides Est In Sanguinem
Loyalty In Blood
My brother is the only blood left to me. Our mother has been dead a decade, our father passed last year. I might have killed him, indirectly, with the stress of my takeover. It wasn’t my father I had to subdue—it was his unruly and disloyal army of soldiers, who had no respect for him, and were just as much a danger to us as our enemies. Maybe even more so.
I killed Rurik Oblast the night I was released from prison.
He knew it was coming, and he tried to flee to Kotka. I cut off his hands, the old punishment for thieves, and drove a dagger through his spine at the base of his neck, the penalty for traitors. I sent a finger to his family so they’d have something to bury. The rest of him I burned.
Oblast’s friends tried to launch a mutiny amongst my men, but I expected that. Marko, Dominik, and I slaughtered everyone that dared to raise a hand against us.
Then we turned to my enemies.
Every family in St. Petersburg that was supposed to pay homage to the Petrovs was brought to heel. I rained down terror on their heads, forcing repayment of every last ruble that should have been turned over to my father’s accountants as our tariff on the whorehouses, the gambling rings, the drug dens, and the extortion rackets within our boarders.
And then, I began to expand.
I took back the territory that had been stolen from us. Then I took more in reparation. I brought family after family under my boot: the Sidarovs, the Veronins, the Markovs.
My father ceded the position of Pakhan as soon as I was released from the prison camp. But he did not approve of my methods or my ambition. He particularly hated my alliance with Marko Moroz, a Ukrainian with no ties to the Petrovs, or anyone else we respect.
“Our allies stood by and did nothing while the vultures picked our bones,” I told my father.
“You ought to turn to your uncles, your cousins . . .” he pleaded with me.
I kept the best of my relatives: Efrem, Oleg, Maks, and Jasha.
But the others—those who stole from us, those who lied to us, those who conspired with our enemies—those I drove out into the winter snow like they were strangers to me.
“I’d rather have a true friend over false family,” I told my father.
Now the men that live in the monastery are my hand-picked soldiers. Those I know and can trust with my life. Whether I recruited them in the prison camp, on the streets, or from the ranks of distant relatives, it makes no difference. I promote off merit, not blood relation.