Kate Furnivall - The Concubine's Secret

Alexei blew smoke at him. ‘Not this time,’ he said as he unbuttoned his shirt.

‘No smoking, please.’

‘I’ll smoke if I choose.’

‘ Nyet . Your chest must remain still as stone.’

‘Fuck!’ Alexei said and stubbed it out.

The men in the wine store laughed as they watched, enjoying his discomfort. One thief, a wiry twenty-year-old with a rash of pock craters on his cheeks, walked over to one of the wine racks and extracted a bottle. He wiped the dust off with his shirt sleeve and used the corkscrew on a chain by the door to remove the cork. He pushed the bottle at Alexei.

‘Here, malyutka , drink.’

‘ Spasibo , it might make you lot look a bit prettier.’

The young man laughed. ‘What could be prettier than this, friend?’ He unlaced his boot, kicked it off and removed his sock. ‘Look, tovarishch. Is that pretty enough for you?’

It was a cat, covering the surface of his foot. A laughing cat’s face with striped fur and a large blue bow under its chin, a wide-brimmed hat on its head.

Alexei laughed. ‘And what does that one mean? That your feet smell like cats’ piss?’

The vor nudged the tattooist’s elbow and the needle cut deeper. Alexei didn’t wince but accepted the wine.

‘It means I’m sly.’ The vor narrowed his eyes. ‘Sly as a cat. I smell out rats.’

‘Hah, comrade, smell like a rat is what you-’

‘No talking!’ The needle was buzzing and stinging, busy as a wasp. ‘Keep still.’

The tattooist had designs on his knuckles, a mix of letters and numbers that meant nothing unless you knew the code. His breath smelled of beer, strong enough to make Alexei turn his face away. He let his eyes close and unexpected images came to him. It was the sharp burning point of the needle that summoned them, its stinging pain on his chest. He remembered another day with a similar pain, his final day in Leningrad when he was twelve. His mother, the Countess Serova, was whisking him away to China, away from the Bolshevik troubles, and Jens had come to say goodbye. He had shaken Alexei’s hand as if he were a grown man and asked him to take care of his mother. ‘I’m proud of you,’ Jens had said, and Alexei recalled now the sorrow in his green eyes, the sun burnishing his hair as he rode away on his horse and the crippling pain in his own chest. Not on the skin like this, but deep inside.

Lydia had once said to him, ‘The trouble with you, Alexei, is that you’re too damn arrogant.’

Look at me now, Lydia. No arrogance left, is there? Here I am in rags, at the mercy of a gang of thieves, my skin massacred in the midst of filth and unclean needles. Humble enough for you now? And if they find I’m lying about having been a prisoner at Trovitsk camp they will remove this brand of membership with acid. Or worse, with a knife.

‘Look at him.’ It was the whispery voice of the one with the hair oil. ‘He’s fallen asleep.’

‘Trying to show how tough he is.’

‘Too bored to stay awake.’

‘He’s an arrogant bastard. What the fuck does Maksim want with him?’

Alexei opened his eyes, stared directly at the faces and lifted the bottle to his lips. He took a long, drowning drink.

Chang was gentle with her. Gentler than Lydia remembered from before. As if he feared she would break. Or was it that he’d grown used to delicate Chinese orchids who had to be handled carefully? She heard herself whimpering. She tried to silence the sound but couldn’t, because she wanted him to tear her apart and put her back together in such a way that she was fused with him, body and soul.

But as he caressed her, stroked her, kissed her breasts, explored her naked body as if it were familiar territory he was committing to memory once more, she felt something inside her break loose. She started to shake. Her bones seemed to be emptying, releasing something bad from within, all the pain and the fear and the anger and the yearning. It came flooding out of her.

He held her. He rocked her in his arms, murmuring, soothing, locking her so tight against his heart that she lost all sense of boundaries and mistook its strong beat for her own. She clung to him, breathed him in, felt him slowly, breath by breath, become a part of her again.

And when the flow of his hand on her skin had quietened the tremors within her and the sounds in her head, he kissed her mouth with a harsh hunger that made her ache. She realised he’d known she wasn’t ready before. How is it that he could know her better than she knew herself? Her limbs entwined with his and she kept her eyes fixed on his as they found each other all over again.

Her skin still smelled the same. It glistened with sweat and soothed Chang’s fear that his fox girl might have travelled too far from him. Until she trembled in his arms, he thought he’d lost her to the Russian with the wolf eyes. He brushed his lips along the soft hollow at the base of her throat and heard a moan, though he didn’t know if it was from his own lips or hers.

He lay on his side and gazed at her. At her arms, at her chin, at the scar on her breast. At the intense moist mound of red curls between her legs, a fire inside and out. She was beautiful. Not in a Chinese way. For oriental taste, her hands and feet and even her knees were too big, and her nose too long, but he loved those parts of her. Her skin was pale and shimmered like river water in the dim golden light, yet when he touched the flat plain of her stomach or the tight muscles of her thigh he could sense a fine steel mesh under the flesh. Had that been there before?

No, that was new.

In Junchow she had shown a determination he had never before found in a female, a courage he’d thought belonged only to men. She had opened his eyes and taught him otherwise. But this new inner strength of hers, this was something different. It made his pulse miss a beat. This had been forged by her journey through Russia and he felt a stab of guilt that he had not been there at her side. It stole a part of her from his soul. As if the greedy gods had decided to keep his fox girl for themselves after all, instead of giving her to him.

‘ Lydia.’

The night was passing too quickly.

‘ Lydia, tell me where your father is.’

She tucked her face into his chest and said nothing.

‘Have you discovered yet where he is?’ Chang persisted.

‘He’s here,’ she muttered against his skin.

‘In Moscow?’

She nodded.

‘That’s good news.’

She shrugged in the crook of his arm and he remembered it, that gesture. A small gesture of defiance. He’d forgotten how each little movement of hers had the power to creep into his heart.

He stroked her back, waiting.

‘I can’t find him,’ she murmured in a flat tone.

‘Tell me. Tell me what you do know.’

He felt her ribs quiver.

‘I discovered that he’s been moved from Trovitsk labour camp to a secret prison in Moscow. But I don’t know where it is.’ She raised her head, amber eyes questioning. ‘Why would they do that?’

‘He was an engineer, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps they are using his skills to work on something.’

‘I thought the bastards had moved him for…’ The word seemed to stick in her throat. ‘Experiments.’

He frowned. ‘What kind of experiments?’

‘Medical ones. I’ve heard rumours that this kind of thing goes on and I thought the secret prison in Moscow could be for that.’

‘Human guinea pigs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh Lydia, you really believe that’s what’s happened to him?’

She rubbed her face against his skin. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Let’s believe it is his engineering ability that they want. You said he was one of the best.’