The Wolves of Winter

It was three weeks later when I next found him. I was working a job in the Czech Republic (It turned out Pajari had been murdered by other members of the KGB in his hotel room about a week after I'd started my search for him,) and I was concentrating on the Winter Soldier. Carver had been pleased - I'd told him I thought the Soldier was out and working in Eastern Europe, and he'd given me free reign to look for him.

It turned out that the most simple of things - a money trail in Prague - led me to him. He'd bought some weapons from a shady dealer, and after a short questioning he'd told me where I could find someone who could lead me to the Soldier. I'd contemplated letting the dealer live - he's begged for his life for a full five minutes while I cleaned blood off my hands to get rid of any evidence of my interrogation - but decided against it, putting a bullet into his head and leaving his shop quickly.

It had taken me less than a week to track him down. He was staying in a cheap motel on the outskirts of the city under a false name, Alexi Abramovich. I checked into the room next to his, and after checking that he wasn't in the room one morning, I bugged it out.

For two days I watched him through hidden cameras and microphones, listening to phone conversations and watching him read files. I still wasn't sure what he was looking for in Prague, but he seemed kitted out for a mission.

It was the night of the second day I'd been watching him. I was sat in my room, watching the grainy footage of the Soldier pacing his room, flipping a knife in one hand. I'd noticed he tended to do that, muttering to himself in fragmented German, Russian and several other languages I couldn't place due to poor sound quality. He paced up and down the room, muttering German phrases that were too quiet for me to distinguish while he flipped the knife in his right hand with impressive skill. Finally, he swung around, and came back down the room in the direction of the camera. I frowned. That was odd. The camera we was heading to was placed in an air vent at the side of the room - it was the air vent that connected to my room. It wasn't his normal path for pacing.

He walked straight up to the camera, and then, instead of turning and continuing back across the room, he raised his eyes and looked directly into the camera. The breath caught in my throat as his lips turned up into a smirk and he opened his mouth.

"Опен дверь, Ренегаде." He called. I could hear his voice through the headset, and faintly through the air vent. I watched as he walked to the door of his motel room, and wasted no time in snatching up my gun and knife. He'd told me to open my door.

As I stood up, I heard a knock at the door, and gritted my teeth. He asked (in Russian) to come in. Slowly, I made my way over to the door and opened it a crack, looking outside. The Soldier smirked and pushed the door open with ease, stepping inside the room and batting the gun out of my hand gracefully. I took a step backwards, inadvertently allowing him even further into the room.

He glanced around at my surveillance equipment and looked down at me. "I'm impressed. It took you less time than I expected to find me here. You're here to kill me?"

The seconds ticked by as we stood in silence. He took a step towards me, into my personal space - we were so close we were practically touching - and smirked again. "You can try, if you'd like."

Without warning, my right hand shot out to grab a fistful of his long hair and yank it to the side. He snarled and cried out in pain as I pulled, slamming my free hand into his ribs to make him double over. I let go over his hair, knowing that I had to move quickly - I wouldn't have the element of surprise for long.

I sent one booted foot into his stomach, and he stumbled backwards, falling onto my untouched bed and bouncing there for a couple of seconds. I leapt over and straddled his hips, reaching for my knife with my left hand while I wrapped the fingers of my right around his throat, squeezing. He scrabbled at me for a couple of seconds while I struggled with my knife, eventually mimicking my earlier movement and grabbing my hair, using it to yank my head backwards, exposing my throat.

He managed to move his body so that I was underneath him, caging me beneath his arms again. Of course, this time he didn't have the benefit of a hard surface to pin me against - the springy bed was far easier to move on. I tucked my legs up and kicked out, catching his stomach and sending him flying backwards across the room, where he crashed into my surveillance equipment. He picked himself up slowly, swinging his left arm out to grab my throat. The cold fingers closed around my windpipe, and I cried out as he started to squeeze, backing me up and slamming me against the wall. I closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.

But it didn't come.

I opened my eyes slowly, feeling the pressure around my throat subside. Slowly, his hand dropped to my waist, his fingers tracing the waistband of my jeans. His eyes were focused everywhere by mine; they flickered across my lips, my jaw, my chest, all the way down to the curve of my hips, before finally, with an agonizingly slow pace, meeting my gaze.

I couldn't work out who started stripping whom, but the next thing I knew my shirt had been thrown halfway across the room, and he was kicking off his trousers and my back was against the wall again and his lips were on mine. Somewhere in the back of my head, I knew it was wrong, and I knew I should have been putting a gun to his head instead of digging my fingernails into his back and dropping my head to rest in the crook of his neck,but it was just so hard to care when he was pressing his lips against mine in a hot, feverish kiss, and wrapping my legs around his waist and pushing my back further against the wall with each thrust of his hips.



We didn't talk as we collected our clothes. We didn't even make eye contact as we changed, but as I turned my back to him to pull my shirt over my head, I could feel his piercing gaze on me. Finally, when we were both fully clothed, I turned to look at him. His hair was messed up and sticking out at odd angles from where I'd dragged my fingers through it, and there were faint bruises at the base of his neck from where I'd taken to sucking on the skin. I knew that they were nothing compared to the marks he must have left all over me - I could already feel the bruises forming on my hip from where he'd used his left hand to pin me to the wall.

He licked his lower lip, pulling on his jacket before finally speaking. "До следующего раза."

I watched him leave before dropping down onto my bed and surveying the mess we'd created around the room. There was now no chance of my surveillance equipment working ever again, and we'd managed to knock over a lamp. I touched two fingers to the side of my throat, where a bruise had been left by his lips, repeating his words in English.

"Until next time."

Notes