His gaze focused on her face, then slid left and right, finding Sofi and Ana, loyal friends who had risked their lives to save Katerina. To save him. The shades did not understand friendship, but they understood allies well enough. They understood survival, and would spare the Dimis that stood at Katerina’s side. That was something, at least.
“Here,” he said again, from within his shroud of shadows, and allowed his shades the slightest touch, wrapping around her forearms, holding her steady. “Don’t move.”
Beneath their cold grip, Katerina froze—in repulsion? In terror? It must be one or the other, because what else could she feel for a creature such as him?
Fighting back the misery that churned within him, he slipped a tendril of Darkness into the keyhole of the shackles that chained her wrists, as he had done with his own. A shift to the left, another to the right, and the metal gave way, clattering onto the stones.
Katerina gasped. “How…”
Niko gave no answer. His eyes narrowed, focusing on the red, raw circlets that ringed her skin. They had damaged her, after all. They had hurt her, and he had not been there to protect her. Imprisoned or not, he had broken his oath to her.
A hiss slid between his teeth as his shades caressed the evidence that the cuffs had left behind. “They will pay.”
It was his voice, but not. It was a portent of doom, and even to his own ears, it was terrifying.
This time the intake of breath wasn’t Katerina’s, but Sofi’s. The huff of air as it passed her vocal cords was the loudest sound Niko had ever heard her make, audible in the gap between the bells’ strident complaints.
“Yes, well,” Ana said, striving for the bravado that reminded Niko so much of his Dimi, “they’re going to pay sooner rather than later if we don’t get out of here. Or, we will. Personally, I’d prefer not to find out who comes out on top. This way.”
She turned her back on him, with what had to take an inordinate amount of courage, and headed for the corridor that led away from the exit. The one holding the rest of the wing’s prisoners.
“No.” The word fell from his lips with cold, clear assurance. “Up the stairs.”
Ana whirled, peering through the blackness at where she imagined him to be. “Straight into the belly of the beast?” she scoffed. “Katerina, tell him that is a terrible idea.”
His Dimi spoke slowly, each word measured. “If Niko thinks that’s what we should do, then I will do it. I trust him.”
The words were intended for him alone, each of them a dagger through his chest, more painful than the one that had taken his life. “You shouldn’t,” he replied, as if they stood by themselves in this moldering corridor, with the bells clamoring overhead and the footsteps growing ever closer. “Not in most things. But in this, yes. I will not let you down.”
He had killed the guard who had appeared at his cell door before the man could raise the alarm, his shades spiriting a blade from the man’s belt and plunging it deep into his belly. When the man had cried out, the shades had made quick work of the guard who followed, chasing him to the door to the tunnels when he tried to escape, then feasting on his essence until naught but a husk remained. For a terrible instant, Niko had sworn they tasted something else: Elena Lisova, here in this underground hell, come to drag him down to true perdition. He could have sworn he saw her, wearing the same damnable gown she’d married him in, silhouetted in the torchlight.
But no. It had been his imagination, a trick of the light that left him cold all over and sick to his stomach. Damn the woman; when would she stop haunting him?
He had cast the taste of her away from him with all his strength. A third guard had met an equally grisly end, strangled by Niko’s chains when he attempted to scream for help. As Niko knelt, divesting the guards of their weapons, the shades had coursed down the corridor, seeking out yet another meal. They had paused only when they’d tasted someone familiar. An ally. A friend.
Alexei.
Gods, the shades had nearly choked the life from him. Shame spiraled inside Niko at the memory.
But they hadn’t. He’d pulled them back just in time. And together, he and his former second had made short work of the guards who remained. Some already lay dead, in an appalling state of dismemberment—had this been what the first guard had been babbling about, before Niko killed him? He could not imagine who had been responsible, unless his shades had somehow escaped his grasp without his knowledge and slaughtered them; a chilling thought.
The rest of the guards were clustered down an opposite corridor, far enough away that they might not have posed a threat, but he didn’t want to take any chances. There had been a gaggle of them, all engaged in a dice-wager over whether Niko would plead for his life from the gallows, die with the dignity befitting a Shadow, or wrest his power back from Berezin and try to kill them all.
They had paid for their avarice with their lives. He and Alexei had slain all of them, and never once had his second looked at him askance. He had trusted Niko wouldn’t harm him.
He had never taken Alexei for a fool, but there was a first time for everything.
“Up the stairs,” he said again, and moved past the three Dimis blocking his way, cloaked in shadow. Saints knew what he must look like right now, drenched in blood, the shades roaming free. If his appearance frightened the Dimis so much that they refused to follow, they would die.
At the foot of the steps, Alexei joined him, emerging from the mouth of the corridor where he’d concealed himself, laying a trap for anyone who might seek to prevent their escape. His former second had killed at least one intruder; Niko had heard the man’s muffled scream, an instant before he’d smelled the reek of offal.
Though Alexei couldn’t see Niko inside his shroud of shadows any more than the Dimis could, he moved unerringly to his former alpha’s side nonetheless. Together, the two formed a shield in front of Katerina, Ana, and Sofi, as they were trained to do. And though he and Alexei no longer ran with the same pack, Niko could smell the first hint of the other Shadow’s Change.
He longed to Change himself, to inhabit the skin of his black dog once more. Could he control the shades in the form of his dog? Better not to find out.
“Now,” he growled, and Alexei stepped forward beside him, still in human form.
Together, they surged up the steps, the three Dimis in their wake. He had no wish to decimate the Druzhina Guard, but neither did he intend to cower within the corridors of the prison, hiding like rats in a maze. He had planned on a stealthy departure, releasing Katerina from her cell and sneaking through the streets of Rivki under the cover of night, but even the best-laid plans could fail, and this had been far from that. If he and Katerina could not flee in secret, then they would have to confront their enemies head-on, their allies by their sides.
