#TeaserTuesday - The Winter Palace

 Progress on all things Sons of Rome has been snail-slow thanks to other projects, obligations, and a lack of proper research and story-mapping time. But I did decide last year that it simply wasn't possible to include every story thread I wanted into Lionheart. Thus, an in-between novella was born, one that will follow along with Nikita's pack that will run concurrent with the first part of Lionheart. Given lots of memory, allusion to the past, and Alexei coming a bit more into his own, it's titled The Winter Palace. I don't know when it will be available, but goodness, I've missed my grumpy Captain Baskin. 

From The Winter Palace
Copyright © 2022 by Lauren Gilley 

Nikita lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the old one. He dropped the last bit of the filter and crushed it beneath his bootheel. Took a long, long drag off the fresh one, and blew the smoke in a hard plume up into the air. The wind swirled it into tattered gray ribbons, carrying them off between the trees.

The familiar, acrid stink of Marlboros couldn’t cover the scents that clung to the sable collar of his coat: blood, old and new; wolf musk, Sasha’s. He imagined he could smell Dima’s cologne, and pastry flakes from a pirozhki someone had tried to press on him. Fancied Moscow still clung to this coat…that coat. The long black leather one that had kept him warm when he’d worked for men he’d hated; the coat he’d then hated in turn; the coat that Sasha loved, and that Nik himself was, slowly, embracing again.  

He tipped his head back, cig held away, coat collar no longer tickling his chin, and inhaled deeply. Scenting. The wind wasn’t in his favor, was in fact carrying his own scent downwind, but he was old and discerning enough that he could catch the smell of them, faint though it was: fine threads in the tapestry of the forest’s snow, and pine needles, and squirrels, and rabbits.

There were three of them. Vampires all, smelling of blood and youth. Newly made, at a guess – and his guesses usually proved fact.

Nikita propped a shoulder against a birch trunk and took another drag, settling in to wait.

A bright red cardinal landed on a branch just beside his head, and gave its particular, pealing cry, before fluttering off, a flash of berry-bright in the black and white of the late afternoon forest. He took another drag and swore it smelled of burning flesh and hair; only memory pressing up too close for comfort.

He hadn’t thought much of the snowy Buffalo landscape when they’d first arrived more than a month ago. They’d been exhausted, nursing wounds, and praying that Rob Locksley came through on the promise to keep the feds off their backs. Then had come the settling in phase. Then getting married. He still marveled that he’d had the balls to ask, and every time he glanced down at his left hand, and the white gold band there, his mind filled with the image of Sasha, snow melting in his hair, smile bright enough to drive back the darkest of clouds.

God, but he was sappy. Newlyweds were allowed a little of that, right?

But when things had finally, truly settled, and he’d had a chance to go traipsing through the deep snow, sometimes with Sasha beside him, sometimes with Sasha running happily ahead on all fours, and sometimes alone, he’d begun to feel the touch of the past. Not a tug – it didn’t drag him back into a dark headspace, not now, after everything, after allowing himself to be happy – but a light weight, like a cool hand pressed to the back of his neck. A reminder. Snow in NYC had just been snow, but here, hemmed in on all sides by wilderness, with views of frozen ponds, and dirty slush lining the walkways, he kept expecting to turn his head and find the pack – the original one – following along at his heels, man and wolf both.

But he was the only one wearing a long, black leather coat now.

And he was expecting company.