Lost Russian Luna

Chapter Five

We pull out, leaving the halo of the casino behind, the city pouring neon and static against the tinted glass. I count the lights: fifteen pawn shops, five and a half wedding chapels, since one was a drive-thru and wasn’t sure it counted, three all-night donut places, and I nearly asked for them to drive through to grab some, but embarrassment stopped me from even speaking. Every intersection, I inventory the possible outs. The delivery trucks idling at loading bays, the convenience store with its windows already bullet-holed, the rat’s nest of alleyways behind the strip clubs. I could jump or run if I wanted. But I am pressed flat by gravity and the memory of the Alpha’s voice. And by the knowledge that Duncan would catch me before I’d even touch pavement. I was a coward after all.

He doesn’t speak. Just watches the city smear past, eyes gone opaque in the dim. I try to catalog him the way I catalog every threat, but it keeps coming up blank. Too much and not enough. Hair is almost black, but not; there’s a hint of color in it when the streetlights flash. Skin tanned from the sun, but not soft. Eyes unreadable except when they aren’t, and then they are the only thing in the universe.

I don’t know how long we’ll drive. Vegas recedes and the sprawl thins, then dies, and we are on some anonymous two-lane road where the only light is the white whip of our headlights. I feel every mile in my teeth. My hands start to ache, nails gouged so hard into my palms I’m leaving little bloody half-moons. I make myself stop. I make myself breathe. If they have brought me out to the desert to hide my body in the desert, this was the way to do it. No one will miss me or mourn me.

At last, the SUV swerves onto gravel, crunching through a gate and up a hill to a house so dark it seems to float above the desert. Ranch-style, low and wide, probably custom-built to keep prying eyes out. There are other cars, at least two or three, all expensive and perfectly parked. Security lights click on as we pull up, painting the house in sterile pale creamy blue, as if the world outside can’t touch what’s inside. It was perfect for the Las Vegas elite.

When the car stops, Duncan doesn’t reach for me. He waits, watching. I force myself to move, to unlock my knees and crawl out on myself. The desert cold sucks away the memory of casino cleaning scents, replacing it with dust and brittle grass, with a trace of wild and sweet. A coyote, a nearby rabbit, and wolves, so many wolves scenting the area to mark the region.

People are waiting. Three men on the porch, all built on a similar frame; tall, muscular, too perfect to have ever played contact sports, but with the hunched shoulders of those who expect a fight at any moment. One of them, the tallest, steps forward and opens the front door. No one looks at me except to make sure I don’t try to run. The mingling of wolf smell assaulted my nose. I clouded through my nose, wiping out the cleaning scents and reminding me of pack, a foreign one but pack all the same.

Inside, the house is all pale tile and natural pale stone. Spartan, impersonal, but not empty. There are marks of life here, or at least of occupation: the scent of burned coffee, a jacket draped over a barstool, the faintest sound of a TV somewhere down the hall, and wolves, scent imbuing the area. I catalog these, too, the way a mouse catalogs the angles of a new cage.

The subtle ushering marched me down the hallway with the art that showed off prints of desert flowers and cacti. Duncan stayed at my side, and I could feel the others shadowing behind, never far but not touching. My stomach knots the previous knots with each step. I wonder if they are taking me somewhere special outside to shoot me, and if they would bother with a grace.

But they led me to a pastel bedroom. It was as the rest of the house, bare but for the essentials for a bedroom with a full bed in a simple comfort set that belonged right from an sss home page, a simple wood dresser, a nightstand, and yet another print of a desert sunset scene. It was a picture that looked like something taken right from Zillow. It was boring, and I barely wanted to enter as I stood in the doorway, unsure what to do.

Duncan entered and nodded at the pale green bedspread. “Sit,” he says, the command understood by the barely kept human. I follow and sit.

He leaves, only the hint of one of the male wolves waiting close to the doorway, and me to the eggshell walls. I glanced at the stone lamp, which was something interesting in the room. It was a local stone, pale and natural, with a simple shade. I wanted to reach out and touch it to make sure it was real, but it was probably worth more than I could afford right now. Everything in here was. I rocked back and forth on the bed to get a better look at the only thing different in this room since I didn’t want the panic to overtake me.

I smelled the woman before I saw her come into view. She was older than I expected, early forties perhaps, with her hair in the loose bun of a lovely chestnut color with a few wisps of silver. There was a softness in her cheeks that probably wasn’t blush. She wears black yoga pants and a bright pink zip-up hoodie featuring dancing flamingos. She was pure wolf, though, older and wiser with the way she moved in and watched me with her deep forest green eyes.

Her bright pink lips don’t smile. Instead, she regards me with a clinical interest. She could see everything wrong with me. I curled into myself, trying to hide all my flaws.

“Amelia,” she says with another American accent, I don’t understand where it is from. Somewhere I have heard yet. “I am here to see what is wrong with you. Don’t try to fight me or go feral. I will fight back, even if I am a healer.”

Her dark eyes glanced to the top of my head, down to the scarring over my neck, and down to my thin frame and lower. She sees everything, and I felt… weak.

“Now, strip so I can examine you and see what we are dealing with.” She pauses. “Let’s do this the easy way, girl. You look like you are going to jump out that window, but it isn’t worth it.”

I nod, the fight has been beaten out years before I reached this point. I uncurled my arms and began to peel off the disgusting maid uniform before I stood naked before the judgmental healer. I let her see the damage, the scarring, the too-sharp bones under my skin, the oddly healed bones, and the weird birthmark that stated my position that had been burned off me.

She circled me, keeping a good arm’s length between us. I am sure I was dangerous. I was far more afraid of her than she was of me. She reached for my chin and flinched. It was not enough to stop what was happening. But enough to let her know I was still here, alive in this husk of a wolf.

She shifts my head back and forth, fingers cold against my skin. Her eyes flicker over my old wounds, then to my eyes, and back to my neck. The scars were hard to miss and told a story that I survived someone determined to kill me. “When did you shift last?

I don’t answer. There was an answer somewhere, I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I could hold my shifts in. I still had the power; it wasn’t something they could take from me. I was born a Luna, not an Omega. I appeared. I didn’t have to turn with the moon, but I had to lie. “Recently.”

Her fingers dance over the scars, hesitating to test the size and shape. I sucked the air through my teeth. She nods, pulling her hand back. “Do these hurt?”

Lie or not to lie, what was one more? “Not much.”

She examines the rest of my thin body, chuffing at the bruising from my work that didn’t seem to heal like a wolf should. “Why?” She pointed to the bruising.

“I don’t eat much,” I replied. I couldn’t come up with a solid answer. I don’t shift enough, and I am poor. It was a lot of reasons.

“Any allergies?” she asks.

“I am a wolf, besides the normal?”

She chuffed again. “Besides the usual?”

I shook my head.

She glances at my face again. “You’re Russian?”

I nod. She says nothing to this, but her eyebrows twitch, filed away for later.

She moves down my body, methodical. Touches my ribs, counts the protruding bones. “Malnutrition,” she mutters, mostly to herself. “Severe. How much do you weigh?”

I shrugged. I had no idea. I hadn’t weighed myself in years. “Maybe 43 to 44 kilograms, give or take.”

“Jesus,” she says in the unholy way, like he had appeared behind me on fire. I tilted back to see what she was shocked at, but then realized it was my weight. I thought the Americans were happy about the “thin is beautiful” thing, but it appears she wasn’t on that boat.

She finishes with a quick check of my wrists, my knees, then sits back, arms folded.

I heard her sigh. “I will get you something better for you to wear; that outfit won’t do.” She starts to walk away. “Will you tell me who did this to you?” I felt the words hit me. Why would she ask? I couldn’t tell if she wanted to know or if they were searching for who to return me to.

I stared at her back, her beautiful posture, and even the veins on the back of her hands. I felt I should answer, someone higher in the rank of a pack. But I am not pack, I am still rogue. But there is no trust. They could send me back. It was bad enough that they knew I was Russian. So I say nothing. It was safer.

She sighs and continues out the door. She opens it, cracks, and I hear the rumble of male voices. I yank the soft blanket to wrap around me. She turns and says loud enough for the hallway of men. “She needs privacy.”

Several footsteps shuffle around before a long pause, and several males leave. Duncan’s voice, sharp, came through. “Tell me.”

Amelia continued to leave. “She is worse than you said. Malnutrition, damage that isn’t healing. She is barely speaking, and I am not sure she is shifting correctly. I am not sure what the last pack did to her, but it is worse than anything I have ever seen and should be destroyed for it,” she nearly snarled. “Alpha. Also, some clothes, those rags smell like bleach.”

The words hang, and silence follows. It is not a compliment.

Duncan hesitates, then I hear him step away from the door. A longer pause. Then silence.

Amelia returns shortly, shutting the door with a pile of clothing to hand to me. She hands them and sits on the edge of the bed, not close to where I was watching or where I could touch. “Here are some old clothes, none of them will fit, but you might be able to tie them up for now until we get some weight on you.”

Picking through the pile, I picked out the sweat pants and the T-shirt to cover what I could. Nothing fit as Amelia had warned. I dressed quickly under her watchful gaze. Once finished, I tied my hair up in a bun, securing it with a lengthwise tie.

“I can only guess what they did to you,” she says, this time soft. The undercurrent of the secrets waiting to pour out. “They don’t understand here in this pack, nothing like that has ever happened here like that.”

I watch her, studying her from her soft smile, trying to calm myself, to the way her eyes don’t move unless she wants them to. A lifetime of keeping monsters out, only to be sitting here wondering if I had placed myself in the middle of other ones pretending to be normal wolves.

She digs in her old-fashioned doctor’s bag and shakes out several different pills to hand to me. “I have no idea what you are low on, but here are several different vitamins. I want to do some blood work, but from what you look like, you are probably low on everything, and I should give you antibiotics to be safe. Even if we can get sick, you look like a strong wind would take you away.”

I take the rainbow hues pile of pills to stare at them. I could dry swallow them but stare at them, waiting to see if I really should. They could be anything: vitamins, drugs, poison, or a test. I didn’t have a lot of choices here and picked through them, swallowing them carefully as she watched—a test after all.

“I’ll be back with food, and you will eat it all. Don’t throw it up or hide it, just ido t.” She adds, " I would waste free food.

I nod. Right now, I want her to leave me alone with my thoughts in the quiet. I want to be alone—too much attention. I need to think about. it

Amelia finally leaves, and I am finally alone in this quiet room. I sit back on the soft bed and can think. The room is silent, but outside I can hear the wolves. The occasional footsteps in the hall, the rise and fall of arguments, the clang of pots in the kitchen. I begin to figure out where the exits are within the house from the sounds, the places I might be able to hide in this room. I peer out the window to see the desert and how easy it would be to vanish once again, and have my bones be picked clean.