sensed as much. He would have to find out her secrets. It might not be easy. She did not reveal herself in artless chatter as so many females did.
No, she waited and listened and bided her time—
“Tell me more of Vivienne,” his cousin said. “Do you mean to make her your mate?”
“Lukian…” Kyril’s voice held a warning. “She is human and mortal.”
“And so she will remain. Unless you take her as yours forever in the rites of our kind.”
“I know that,” Kyril said a little irritably. “In any case, it is high time for me to—”
His cousin interrupted him. “To what? Find one woman and give up your wild ways?”
“Yes.”
Lukian gave a disrespectful snort. “You have been made welcome in a hundred beds, some say. And I hear that women will not wash the sheets after you leave. They vow to treasure them forever.”
“Ridiculous. And mostly untrue.”
“Oh?” Lukian inquired. “What part of it is true? The one hundred women or the sheets that bear your manly mark?”
“Who have you been talking to?”
“I did not make up these wild rumors,” Lukian said solemnly. “And I cannot trace them for you.”
Kyril was silent. Had Vivienne heard such tales? She was too intelligent to believe them. She would dismiss them as boozy jests. Or so he hoped.
The oars splashed in the water as Lukian laughed rudely. “No one is as good at being bad as you are, cousin.”
“A year ago I would have taken that as a compliment. But now…” Kyril did not finish the sentence.
“Since you met Vivienne,” Lukian prompted. “Go on. You still have not told me much about her.”
“We are friends.”
“Hah.”
“Perhaps not for much longer,” Kyril conceded.
“Of course not. We are wolves at heart.”
“We are men, Lukian. To all outward appearances. And we follow the conventions of men.”
“More’s the pity.”
Kyril felt the hair at the back of his neck rise. An ancient response…but the threat he sensed was somehow new. His cousin, blood kin, seemed deeply troubled. Lukian’s mind should have been easy enough for Kyril to read. But something seemed to have clouded it and Kyril could not pick up very much at all.
He did not understand Lukian’s irritable mood or his interest in Vivienne. Perhaps it would be best for Kyril to assert his claim upon her now so there would be no misunderstanding later.
“I am considering Vivienne for the rites,” he said at last. “Of course she must understand fully who we are and the nature of our mission in England, and that will take time. The men of the Pack mate for life but we are—”
“As wild as we want to be otherwise,” Lukian growled. “And rough. The women of London adore us.”
Kyril knew what he was talking about, but he had no wish to satisfy Lukian’s unwelcome curiosity about his own sensual adventuring. Kyril was quite sure that his feelings for Vivienne went far deeper. But they had been inspired by physical passion.
“I would never treat Vivienne with roughness, not even in play. She is different.”
Lukian rowed on. “All females are the same, cousin.”
Kyril made no reply to that, occupying himself by looking from side to side. Theirs was not the only boat on the river but it was too dark, even for him, to make out many details of the others. Some craft had lanterns at the stern, some at the prow. A few had no light at all.
It was possible that they were being followed. The agents of the Tsar were everywhere, now that the Congress of Vienna was over and the Russian eagle was spreading its imperial wings.
It seemed hardly fair that one powerful man could decide the fate of millions, Kyril thought. His own clan included. But they numbered only in the hundreds, even after generations of intermarriage.
They might vanish in a few more.
He pushed aside his forebodings and looked at Lukian, whose unerring sense of direction was keeping them on course. Nose to the wind. The old Pack motto. Whatever was clouding his cousin’s conscious mind did not seem to affect his instincts.
Perhaps the enfolding darkness heightened those. Kyril gave heed to his own and allowed himself to enjoy the journey. Moving swiftly over water in the night was a sensation something like flying. There was a tang of brine in the air. He inhaled deeply. The sea was not all that far away—if they continued around the Isle of Dogs, following the great loop of the Thames, they would soon join the ships heading for the open ocean.
But they would not. They were only to observe and take notes upon the unloading of a Russian ship, the Catherine, at the Baltic Dock on the south side of the Thames. She had been listed as missing in the shipping news, but had been sighted two weeks ago and boarded by the officers of another, faster ship, who reached London first and relayed the news of her slow, perilous progress through drifting ice.
It was early in the year for that. The ship had sailed from Archangel on schedule, well before the port was locked in by winter, loading at the wharves of the Dvina before entering the White Sea and going on through the Baltic.
But northern seas were notoriously unpredictable and too many of the captains who sailed those dangerous waters were drunken brutes. The owner of the Catherine’s cargo, a wealthy man named Phineas Briggs, did not trust the ship’s master, whom he had not hired. Nor did he trust his Russian factors or his English middlemen. Kyril and Lukian had been recommended to him by a friend, and the deal had been sealed with a handshake and a few well-chosen words.
Phineas Briggs did not believe the story about the ice and held that the Catherine’s captain had detoured to a remote island to pick up something that was not on the cargo manifest. In a word, he suspected smuggling.
Someone would be clapped in irons, Kyril knew, or several someones, and a great fuss kicked up in the Admiralty. Then everybody would go right back to smuggling again.
He could not help that. He respected Mr. Briggs’s shrewdness but it was not as if he or Lukian needed the man’s money. Nonetheless, the case provided an excellent cover and a reason to be on the docks, should English officials inquire as to the reason for their presence.
And the Taruskins had intelligence of something else that was likely to be in the Catherine’s hold. Agents of the Tsar, traveling incognito. They apparently knew who many of the other members of the Pack were, if not precisely what they were.
Kyril sighed. He and Lukian would soon be on the south bank and at the warehouses on the dock, where they could observe the passengers leaving the ship in the morning—that would take place before the unloading.
They would have to memorize
