“Bloody hell, woman,” he managed to say, heart pounding. “The mouth on you . . .”
She regarded him coolly, as if they hadn’t just nearly ravaged each other against a deck railing. “I don’t want to talk.”
He could still taste her, like the icy burn of vodka electric in his throat. “I don’t either.”
They dragged each other back to the tiny cabin booked in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Graham, which Ian hadn’t set foot in. Is this a good idea? he thought.
No, he answered himself promptly. But I don’t give a damn. Banging the door shut, he picked up his wife and kissed her again.
“Chyort,” she muttered, wrenching at his shirt as they toppled onto the bed. “What are you doing?”
“Confiscating your weaponry.” Ian tugged the razor out of her boot top. “I know better than to take an armed woman to bed.”
“You have to fight me for it.” She gave a mock snarl like a wolverine, her strong limbs coiling and twisting through his. She was half laughing and half angry, at herself or at him he didn’t know, but she was nearly throwing off sparks of heat and fury as they kissed and struggled and clawed to get closer. There were enough buried sparks of his own anger to meet hers, the banked antagonism of the quarrel in his office flaring into a different kind of fire as he roped her hair around his hand and pulled it tight, and she left the marks of her teeth in his shoulder even as she wrapped her legs around his waist. The razor came partly unfolded and nicked Ian’s arm before he got it away from her.
“I know how to fight, you Red Menace.” Ian hurled the razor across the cabin and kissed her again, drinking down her bone-buckling taste of ice and arctic wind, blood and sweetness. Her nails raked his back, and he sank into her like he was sinking into a headwind, blown and tossed and dizzied by chaos.
The first thing she said afterward was, “We still get divorce.”
Ian burst out laughing. They were both still breathing hard, sweating, sheets and skin lightly dappled with blood from the cut on his arm, which he still didn’t feel even remotely. “I’d say this rules out nonconsummation as grounds.”
“This is—” Nina hunted for a word, muttered something in Russian. Squirming away from his side, she set her back against the foot of the bed facing him, scowling. Ian’s flare of anger had burned out, but she was still crackling and sparkling, all wary prickles in the dark. “We’re on the hunt. We search, we fight, the blood is up, we screw. Is all it is.”
Ian leaned forward to run a hand over the smooth curve of her leg still tangled with his, down the strong arch of her calf. She had a tattoo on the sole of her foot, he saw with fascination; some spiky Cyrillic lettering. Шестьсот шестнадцать. The visceral tug toward his wife that he’d felt at the deck railing hadn’t gone out, it had only gone deeper. He curved a hand around her ankle. “If that’s how you want it, comrade.”
“Is.” She looked fierce, and he wondered what she was remembering. What memory she’d pushed down when she dragged her eyes away from that quarter moon and dragged him down for a kiss instead.
“Who were you thinking of when you kissed me?” he asked, running his thumb over the Cyrillic on her small foot.
She looked him in the eye. “No one.”
Liar, Ian thought, even as he tugged her back toward him and kissed her scowling mouth. What’s going on in that head of yours, Nina? Who are you? He still had no idea, only that the answer was growing more complicated rather than less.
Chapter 24
Nina
January 1943
North Caucasus front
This makes thirteen,” Yelena called on ascent. By now they were accustomed to deciphering each other’s words through the tinny interphones. “Take the stick.”
Nina took over, shivering even in furred overalls and mole-fur flight mask. Nothing kept you warm in an open cockpit under a frozen moon. Better than the armorers, Nina told herself. They worked bare-handed even in the dead of winter; they couldn’t attach bomb fuses through bulky gloves. They were losing fingertips, laboring with blank, stoic faces and bandaged hands as blue as wild violets, but they weren’t slowing down. With more than six months’ practice under their belts, the regiment had turnaround down to an art: a U-2 could land, fuel, rearm, and take off again in less than ten minutes. “It’s counter to regulations,” Bershanskaia had admitted, “but it’s our way and it works.”
Nina saw Yelena’s head loll in sleep, up in the front cockpit. In these long winter shifts where eight runs per night stretched to twelve or more, all the pilots and navigators had started sleeping in shifts. Generally Yelena dozed on the way out, and Nina on the way back. Better that than risk us both dozing off at once. Sleep was the enemy on the long winter nights; sleep the seducer luring you to doze off and fall out of the sky.
Nina battled yawns until the target showed below. “Wake up, rabbit,” she called to Yelena, rapping gloved knuckles on her pilot’s head. “Dusia’s lining up.” Bombing headquarter-designated buildings was always hell; the searchlights and the ground fire were twice as fierce.
“I’m awake.” Yelena shook her head to clear the cobwebs, then took control again and dropped them neatly down behind Dusia’s U-2. Nights like tonight they flew in pairs: Dusia would blaze through first, flinging herself sideways as shells ribboned into the sky in pursuit . . . and the Rusalka came floating silently behind while searchlights and guns were busy. Yelena slid the Rusalka neatly under the one questing searchlight that didn’t dive after Dusia’s U-2, lining them up in perfect darkness. Nina triggered the bombs, and Yelena looped around.
“Nod off, Ninochka,” she called through the interphones. “I’ll wake you on the descent—”
But she broke off as the plane rolled left, fighting her efforts to level out. Nina swore, leaning out over her cockpit and suddenly very, very awake. “Bring us around! There’s still a twenty-five kilo on the rack.”
All traces of weariness bottomed out of Yelena’s voice. “Can you see it?”
“Yes. Last bomb didn’t drop.”
Yelena was already taking them back out wide, past the target into the darkness. Nina caught a flash glimpse of the next U-2 lining up to descend, pilot probably wondering if they’d lost their bearings. No time to worry about that. Nina toggled the bomb’s release, but nothing dropped. “Stuck fast. Level out on the straight, and throttle back.”
“Why?” Yelena called even as she fought the plane’s left-leaning roll, applying opposite aileron and stick to take them flat and steady. Nina unclipped her safety harness. “Ninochka, what are you doing?”
“Giving it a push,” Nina said reasonably and stood up.
“Nina Borisovna, get back in the plane!”
“Keep just over stall speed,” Nina overrode her, “and steady.” Then she slung a leg over the side.
The airstream was rigid and icy as a current of water, knifing down her sides as she put one boot and then the other on the lower wing. Her body locked in the chill of the wind, and her teeth set up a chatter. Nina clung, gloved fingers clamped around the lip of the cockpit, for a moment utterly unable to move. It wasn’t fear, she was just frozen as though swallowed in ice. The wind was a malevolent bitch, wanting to scoop her off toward the ground floating past eight hundred meters below. She’d spin turning and turning through the wisps of cloud, and Yelena wouldn’t be able to do anything but watch . . .