Katya

This was war.

It was so easy to think of it in terms of ideals and speeches and flags, but it was this: the breaking-open of living things.

Recommended Listening 

I live to write books that say, "Here's something terrible that happened, and here's how this group of people handled it." As a reader, so long as those characters' reactions are honest, I will gladly tug on someone else's boots and walk a mile or two with them.

Katya is the kind of character I love to write. The kind who takes all the horrible things that have happened to her, balls them up tight, and lets the rage turn cold and analytical. The kind of bottom-of-the-food-chain, caught-in-the-machine's-gears character who does what she has to in order to survive. 

I feel like this is a good place to say that this story is dark, but nothing my regular readers can't handle.

From White Wolf

Copyright © 2017 by Lauren Gilley

All Rights Reserved

When she looked down at his face – and God, the aristocratic cut of his features, the way his gray eyes had a blue cast in this light – a jolt of awareness crackled through her. The weight of his hand, of his gaze, of his breath turning to frost in the air between them. She wanted, absurdly, to shove his black fur hat off his head and spear her fingers through the dark waves of his hair, feel the warmth of his scalp in her hand. Wanted to climb inside his coat, up close where his heat bled through his clothes, smell the sweat and dirt on his throat.

The sudden, visceral urge horrified her. She’d been close, skin-close, to [someone like him] before. When she closed her eyes and turned her face away from Nikita’s concerned gaze, she could see the other face – the crooked, nicotine-stained teeth, the harsh lines around his mouth, the grimace of effort as he tore at her skirt…

She made a frightened, involuntary sound in her throat.

“Katya.”

“I’m fine,” she said, but she wasn’t. Because she’d allowed him into a dark and secret part of her psyche. A damaged place in which rape and intimacy had become so tangled that she wanted to sink her teeth into his skin for reasons that shocked and confused her.

“Katya.”

“I’m fine,” she repeated, and this time she forced herself to be, taking a deep breath, fixing her gaze on the clearing ahead of her. She unslung her rifle and snugged the stock into her shoulder.