Ben nodded. “Then I’ll call you Nikolas, because that’s my truth.”
Aleksey’s expression didn’t change, but he said evenly, “You’re not staying, Benjamin. Don’t think that you are. I don’t want you here. I don’t wantyou. You’ve been useful to me for a number of years, for a number of reasons—some very pleasurable—but I’ve no further use for you.”
Ben chuckled. “Good try.” He ripped the trouser leg open and paled. “Fuck. How many times were you hit?”
“I’m not sure. They were only trying to stop me, not kill me, so they kept hitting this leg.” Ben had to fetch the hot water and cut off layers of blood-soaked bandages and wash the blood away before he could assess the damage. Two shots had taken chunks out of the thigh, but one had gone right through, missing the femoral artery by a whisker. And other things, come to that.
“You were lucky.”
“Hmm, lucky was just how I was feeling all night.”
“Okay…” Ben went to work. He knew a lot of practical field medicine, and the first aid-kit was extremely well stocked. It even had a morphine pump. “You want?”
Nikolas, as Ben now allowed him to be again in his mind, came back from some place very far away and frowned, saw what he was holding up and seemed tempted for a moment, but then shook his head. Ben put it back and handed him a handful of painkillers with some water. “We’ll give it a while, and then I’ll stitch you up. Did they hit you anywhere else?”
Nikolas shook his head but pulled his shirt out of his ammo belt. “Did you know that the wall at the back of our house had glass embedded in it? For security, I suppose. I always wondered why that cat walked across it so carefully.” His chest was crisscrossed with glass cuts. Some had reopened and were bleeding. Ben cleaned them up and handed him some antibiotics, which he swallowed down with some more water. He looked tired now, hollowed out.
“You want some clean clothes?”
Nikolas nodded and lay back on the stone bench with a sigh. His leg was bleeding again.
Ben left Nikolas lying in the early morning sun and went back in to check out his pack. It was Soviet issue, but the good kind they gave Spetsnaz. Some of the kit inside was American, some British, but most was Russian: weapons, sleeping bag, rations, and some clothes. He took only the clothes, sorted out a clean set of everything, and took them back out.
Nikolas was asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Ben squatted down and studied the sleeping face. It was the man he knew as Nikolas, of course. But also it wasn’t, or rather Nikolas hadn’t changed at all, but Ben could now see things in the face that he hadn’t seen before—or perhaps that he could onlynowinterpret. He’d seen only the urbane diplomat; he should’ve seen the soldier—he was there. He’d seen a man of wealth and privilege; he should’ve seen the man formed, moulded, and shaped by hardship and deprivation, for he was there as well.
When Nikolas woke, Ben was crouching a little way away from the stone bench, cooking on his hexi stove. Nikolas sat up with a groan. Ben turned the heat down and came over, picking up the needle and thread he’d sterilized. “Ready?”
Nikolas only grunted and turned his head away. Ben smirked. “You made all that fuss about a tiny little bite, and now you’re going to just sit there in stoic silence as I stick this huge needle in you, aren’t you?”
Nikolas glanced back at the needle. “Stop trying to be funny and just do it.”
He did wince a few times, and there was a lot of swearing—in Russian, Ben noted, with some amusement. Clearly, Nikolas wasn’t too bothered now about admitting his more natural choice of language. And although Ben wouldn’t swear to it—as he’d been slightly distracted since he’d woken to find Aleksey Primakov watching him—he was pretty sure Nikolas’s English had improved, too. When the procedure was over, Ben wrapped the thigh tightly and then helped Nikolas to wash and change out of his clothes and get into clean replacements. When it was all done, Nikolas sank back down onto the bench, clearly exhausted. Ben went over and fished a large steak out of the pan and handed it to him in his mess tin. Nikolas reared back. “I’m not eating that.”
Ben nodded as if in agreement, but said, “Yeah, you are. You’ve lost a shit load of blood and you need to heal.”
Nikolas curled his lip into a pretty nasty smile. He leant back on the bench. “No, I’m not. I have issues with food, Ben, you may have noticed, and do you know what? I think I’ll tell you why, because I’m sick of you nagging me to do things I don’t want to do. I was the youngest in a prison camp of two hundred men. I got fed if I was good. You get my meaning, I assume. So, for you to tell me that food is like sex—all good—wasn’t appreciated. Now, leave me the fuck alone, and take that thing away.”
Ben studied him for a while. “You didn’t drag your butt across the moors in the dark last night with two hundred pounds on your back because you want to die. You want to live,Aleksey,you always have. So I suggest you eat that, or when they come for you, and they are coming for you, they’ll take you, and then what you went through in those camps will be like holiday memories. You trained these men; you know what they’ll do to you. It’s your choice. This,” he pointed at the steak, “is not food; it’s ammunition. It’spower.” He shrugged. “But it’s your choice.”
He went back to the stove, forked up his own steak, and began chewing it. When Nikolas had eaten all of his, Ben slid a couple of eggs onto his plate as well with some buttered bread. Nikolas looked faintly sick, but he ate all that too.
When Nikolas tried to lie back on the bench once more, Ben shook his head. “Bed.” He took Nikolas’s arm, levered him to his feet, and helped him limp painfully up to the bedroom. Nikolas lay down on Ben’s sleeping mat, and his eyes began to close involuntarily. Suddenly, from a corner of the room, Radulf appeared. He eyed the supine figure for a moment then lay down alongside him. Ben chuckled. “The dog recognises you, anyway.”
Nikolas turned his head, pain and exhaustion etched clearly on his face. “And you?”
Ben leant over him and said distinctly, “I never really knew you, did I? So to me you are exactly the same annoying bastard you’ve always been.” Then Ben kissed him. As he eased his lips away from Nikolas’s he slid them to his ear and added in a whisper, “It’s only the bullet wounds that are keeping me from fucking you until your leg isn’t the only thing throbbing badly. Take that thought into sleep with you…” With that, he left Nikolas to the deep, healing sleep that he needed.
§§§
Unfortunately for all three of them, painkillers, antibiotics, stress, pain, and unfamiliar food didn’t mix well. In the middle of the night, Nikolas semi-woke and vomited everything he’d eaten over pretty much anything in reach—which included Radulf. Ben, who was sleeping in the other bag across the room from him, held his head, which was pretty much all he could do until he helped Nikolas from the ruined sleeping bag, stripped him, washed him, and dressed him in clean clothes once more. He then tucked him in his sleeping bag in another room. Radulf, he took to the stream and immersed. He’d never seen a dog in shock before. He wrung out the cute bandana, retied it and took the shivering creature for a moonlit walk to the top of the tor. They sat for an hour, Radulf shaking, Ben crying, and then they came down and pretended none of it had happened. By the time Nikolas woke again in the morning, everything had been cleared up, all the kit was hanging to dry on gorse bushes, and Radulf was, once more, lying bravely by his side. Ben watched as Nikolas put a tentative hand to the dog’s head. “Wolf of the House?” Radulf banged his tail on the floor in agreement.
Ben was in the garden when Nikolas finally emerged. He squinted into the sun and sat back once more on the bench. Ben handed him a drink of water, which he took gratefully. Nikolas was wearing just the boxers and T-shirt Ben had found for him in the dark, so it was easy for Ben to crouch and examine his leg. It didn’t look good—red around the wounds—so he gave him some more antibiotics. “You’ll have to go to the hospital if these don’t work soon.”
“You know that’s not possible.”
