The moment the long-awaited sign to the Bugrad flashed past the car window, a smile tugged at my lips. Just a little further—home. I closed my eyes, summoning the memory of my favorite lavender candle, the softness of the blanket I had ordered online during my confinement within four walls, all because of the Kserton "maniac." Those days already felt like a blurred, forgotten life. I never would have imagined longing so desperately for my own room. Only a month ago, I had been ready to quarrel with Kostya for the right to go to the mall with friends, to catch a movie, to spend an evening with Nick.
That life was over.
Or was it?
I opened my eyes. The car still sped forward, but not toward home. Kostya's foot was heavy on the accelerator, carrying us farther down the highway.
"I thought we were going straight home."
"Plans changed." His eyes never left the road, his expression unreadable. "Dr. Smirnov called me last night. Said you've decided against treatment."
I bit my tongue, studying his face for a hint of what he felt. All I found was silence and the suffocating weight of his restraint. Inwardly, I cursed Vladimir with words I'd never dare speak aloud. So much for doctor–patient confidentiality.
"So it's true, then."
Kostya's grip tightened on the wheel, the leather of his gloves creaking under the strain.
"No matter what I say, you won't listen. As usual."
"You're right about that," I snapped, cutting him off before he could build momentum. The same argument, again—the same crack in the fragile ground of our family. Would he ever understand that he couldn't keep deciding my life for me? After Halloween night, I thought he had learned, that he meant to build a bridge between us. But bridges need both sides, and I was alone on mine. Instead of meeting me, he had spent the past month laying plans to clip my wings just as they'd begun to spread.
"Let me finish," he said finally, as I folded my arms and turned to the window. The scenery beyond was a mirror for my mood: endless black trunks of bare trees marching into the horizon, like a cursed orchard where summer would never return.
"I'm not going to talk you out of it."
I smirked at the bait. Kostya never surrendered easily. This was only the opening move in another trap, and I braced myself for the inevitable.
"If you choose not to be a werewolf," he continued, "you must first understand the price of that choice."
I rolled my eyes. The way he said it, he might as well have been reciting a line from some medieval drama, all prophecies and doom. If his aim was to frighten me, he had failed.
"And what's the price? Don't tell me—lock yourself in a basement on full moons, chains and all?" I wiggled my fingers theatrically in the air. "Ooooh."
The impression fell flat; I couldn't even mock his solemnity properly. My laughter broke through instead, nervous and sharp, as though I already half-believed such a fate might be waiting for me.
"The moon phases only touch us indirectly," Kostya said, his voice clipped. "Yes, senses sharpen as the full moon nears, even in human form. But moonlight won't transform you on contact. Those myths were spun deliberately, to throw suspicion off the truth. The same with silver bullets. Whether it's lead or silver, a bullet is a bullet—and it hurts the same." His lips trembled with the memory of pain, the disgust etched deep.
"But aconite isn't a myth," I murmured, recalling the shiver that ran through me when I brushed against the flower in Denis's greenhouse.
"No," he said flatly, flicking on the blinker and turning off into the woods. "That one's real enough. Call it a family allergy, if you like."
"Would've been nice if you'd warned me," I muttered, but he ignored the reproach, gaze locked on the road.
"How often do you see aconite sprouting in a field? It's poisonous to humans too, though in small doses it has its uses. Maria and I never thought we needed a cover story."
At the sound of my mother's name, the ice in me softened. Maria—my bright, kind mother. A calm island of childhood I longed for even now. She had stayed away from Kserton on Dad's insistence, for her own safety. That he had once again decided such things from on high burned inside me, but I swallowed the bitterness. How could I argue, when I knew so little about the thing within me—silent still, but there? My carefully built future felt like a house of cards collapsed with a slap of fate's hand.
"In short," Kostya's voice cut back through my reverie, "I'm taking you to the Karimovs. You'll see the consequences for yourself."
"The Karimovs?" My chest tightened. "Nik's parents?"
"Yes. Nikita won't be there, of course. No one's seen him since that night, and neither the pack nor the twins know where he's gone. You do know Maxim and Viola are hereditary hunters?" For the first time since the drive began, Kostya's eyes flicked to me. I nodded.
"Not just know," I whispered. The memory was a live wire—Lyudmila's accomplice, the twins' ruthless efficiency. Gleb's arm choking me from behind, the rag pressed to my face, acrid and unforgettable. My first date with Nick had ended in a kidnapping, a grotesque punishment delivered by his own mother's will.
In the hospital, Vladimir had explained what I had already half-suspected: vampires could toy with human emotions. Among purebloods, it was considered crude, almost dishonorable. But Nik—under his mother's shadow—had no such scruples. He had plucked my feelings like strings, bending every "no" into a "yes," twisting my memories until I no longer trusted myself. By the second week in the hospital, I noticed details resurfacing warped, reshaped by the manipulation. I began to wonder if I was losing my mind, unable to tell where reality ended and Nik's fictions began.
Dr. Smirnov, for all my mistrust of him, had caught the change in me. It led to a raw conversation about false love, about how I had been too eager to believe the dream he imposed.
"I've seen the twins in action," I said finally, forcing my thoughts to focus.
"I hope you won't again," Kostya muttered.
"They have peculiar methods," I admitted. "But effective."
No words could have summed it up better.