Lone Werewolf Duology (bxb)

35. The Arrival

June 2017, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and in Taganrog, Russia

The flash of anger guttered out, leaving in its wake a sheen of sweat, shaking hands and weak knees. Volya no longer wanted to bite someone's head off. What he needed was to catch his breath and figure some stuff out. He stumbled out to the sundeck, but it was awfully crowded.

Damir and Marina stood by the railing, at a judicious distance from one another. Damir hailed Volya with a relieved smile, as if his appearance had interrupted an unpleasant conversation. He even shouted an exaggerated compliment and waved for Volya to come join them.

Volya approached the odd couple warily, sniffing the air for sparks. There was some crackling of electricity, but not all out thunder-and-lightning.

Damir clapped him on the shoulder. "Good job on the singing! I was skeptical, but Liam and you almost brought me to tears."

"Tears of pity, because I'm hopelessly pathetic?"

"Nah, it was all admiration. Cross my heart!"

"Thanks."

"Maybe we should ask Liam to lend us his guitar, eh, Marina?" Damir went on. The way he turned to Marina, he might have forgotten that Volya was there altogether. "Remember a few tunes that we've sung in the field school? No?"

Damir's tone was uncharacteristically tentative.

Marina crossed her arms under her breasts and searched the horizon with the gaze of a pirate. Her lips squeezed into a pink dot. "I don't play anymore. It's a waste of time."

"She's just modest," Damir confided in a theatrical whisper—so he was cognizant of Volya's presence.

Marina responded with absolutely nothing. Not another denial, not a shadow of a smile, not a twitch of an eyelid.... nothing.

Damir's wind-reddened face hardened.

A lightbulb went on in Volya's head. The way Damir slanted glances at Marina, checking for her reaction to everything he had said or done, and thought he hid it so well; the way he bristled whenever Marina's expression softened.... It clued him in. He'd gotten so pissed off about singing with Liam, because--

"I..." Volya followed Marina's lead and looked at the oceanic swells. They were pretty average. "I just wanted to stretch my legs. So, I'm going to walk. Ah... walk some more?"

He circled the sundeck, grinning sheepishly whenever he passed Marina and Damir, because he had no other choice. Facing Liam was impossible. His stateroom made him claustrophobic at the best of times.

"Volya?" Liam called, stepping into sunshine and ocean breeze. "Sorry to interrupt..." he frowned, as Volya prowled past him. "To interrupt your exercise, but you gotta apologize to Anabelle. She's convinced she'd said something wrong."

The yacht was large, but Volya had nowhere to run. "Okay. I'll apologize to her."

He made it to push past Liam, but Liam caught him by the elbow. "What did I do wrong?"

Volya darted a glance at Marina and Damir. God only knew why the pair insisted on holding their positions. The silence hanging between them sparked more and more, despite not closing an inch of distance. But the stubborn fools stuck to their respective spots, like two ants caught in amber.

In a hurried whisper, sweltering, Volya said, "Nothing, Liam, you did nothing wrong. I apologize to you as well. Living in tight quarters is getting to me."

"Ooh..." Liam gave him an incredulous stare. Volya gulped. Yeah, from all lousy excuses, this was the lousiest, but what could he do? Tell the truth? No, he couldn't do that. Let Liam think that his dad's floating palace wasn't big enough for him.

"That can't be it," Liam said flatly.

"Yeah, well, I didn't put it well, that's all. Your dad's yacht is wonderful!"

"Then what's wrong?"

"The salt water on all sides, for miles and miles. Wolves are not fish? I just need to walk more, run around, ah... meditate... maybe drop by the spa? I'll never act out again, I swear."

He would have rambled on and on, came up with more, if Liam didn't release him.

"I see," Liam said, chewing his lip. He didn't look convinced, but the innate niceness wouldn't let him pursue the subject.

Volya loved Liam's innate niceness. He loved everything about Liam, which was his real problem. He swallowed and pointed to the door leading back to the owner's deck. "I'll go then... apologize to Anabelle?"

"Okay."

Volya hung his head and hurried away, sifting through the rubbish he'd just told Liam, and trying to invent something less idiotic for Anabelle. But Anabelle didn't drill him. She just said, "No worries," and pushed her magazine under his nose, with a Who Said it, Kardashian or Hemingway' quiz.

Once Volya thoroughly revealed his ignorance of either pundit, he climbed back to the sundeck, just as he'd promised Liam he would do. There, he leaned on the railing like Marina and Damir had done. He stood there for a long time, staring at the rippling horizon, thinking, thinking... and he couldn't think himself out of it.

He had exploded because things went so well between Liam and him.

For a few moments, he let it go and sang not just with Liam, but to Liam. How I love you... the song went—and he reveled in that line. He was courting Liam, despite his best intentions. Then he remembered Toshka, and it proved too much. He couldn't handle it, because it wasn't supposed to be like that. They were going to Russia, back to Toshka, so he should have come to his senses by now. His crush on Liam should have weakened, because Toshka was his soulmate. A man should have only one soulmate, one!

Volya's fingers turned white on the railing as he searched the horizon for a hint of land. The land beckoned like his eighteenth birthday had once beckoned with a promise of escape. Well, he was out of the orphanage a year early, and the world proved to be too complicated for him. He wanted to go home. To Toshka.

"Sail faster. As fast as you can, please," he whispered to the yacht.

***

It was only after they had made the second, official, landfall at Taganrog's port—the first being a smuggling run to hide Anabelle in a secret cove along the coast used from antiquity—did Volya realize that he would find no relief from his growing crush on land. If anything, he'd have it worse than on the yacht: he would share a tent with Liam at the base camp.

Under the silvery light of the moon, his hair ruffled by the familiar salty breeze from the Black Sea, Volya lifted his face up.

He basked in the moon rays, chest expanding until his howl rang through the night. It roused a pack of stray dogs huddled for the night in the old port. The wretched creatures bayed themselves hoarse in a cowardly attempt to muffle his voice.

The dogs couldn't stop him from coming onshore. No, their baying didn't rob the stars of their giant size, nor the smell of dust and flowers left by the day's heat of its pull on him. Even the unfamiliar—the sound of the lapping waves, the hint of the shores frequented by the desperate and the hopeful, the pirates and the slaves, the vacationers and the rebels—even the unfamiliar told Volya he was finally home.

He breathed deeply, enjoying being one with it all, and that his home proved to be bigger than the orphanage.

At home, he would be stronger. He would cope. He wouldn't be the first man in history who had to function around someone wrong for him, but who made him sweat and stutter anyway. He wouldn't be the last.

The men in this situation learned to hide their feelings. If Damir could do it, however badly, he could do it.