Page 66 of Fight or Fly

I nodded.

“Nikolayev was not yet the Chairman when I was arrested, but he was an up-and-comer with a reputation for viciousness,” she said. “I assume the others have already told you that he’s a plant. The underground’s most valuable mole, hiding in plain sight.”

“He’s a monster,” I said, because I hadn’t evenbegunto process the idea of Nikolayev being Beckett’s mate yet.

“He has spent a lifetime cultivating the persona of a monster,” she replied carefully. “There’s much more you still don’t know, but everything he’s done has been in service of the cause of alphomic resistance.”

“At what cost, though?” I muttered, thinking of all the dead alphas and omegas.

“Less than you think, and more than many would be willing to pay,” she shot back. “Anyway, my family and I were immigrants. You already know this.”

I nodded. They’d come from the Ukraine when Irina was nine. She’d lost much of her accent, but not all of it. Now, it was more pronounced than I remembered.

“What you don’t know is that my mother was friendly with Sofia Nikolayev, Kostya’s sister, when they were at university together.”

“Nikolayev’s sister... the one he killed when she presented as an omega in adolescence?” I asked skeptically. “That doesn’t add up.”

“Yes.” Irina let out a little huff of dark amusement. “Such a shocking act of violence, wasn’t it? They say the body waspractically unrecognizablewhen he was finished with her.”

The words clicked into place, and I blinked. “You’re telling me he faked a murder? Of his ownsister?”

“The family did, yes. Sofia Nikolayev is now Sofia Shevchenko, married to a beta soviet chancellor in the Ukraine. Together, they are the nominal leadership of the underground in that area—and congratulations, because you now possess information that could bring down a sizable chunk of the resistance. Not to mention a sizable part of the Ukranian government.”

I shook my head, trying to settle everything into place through the haze of pain, exhaustion, and drugs. “But your arrest. That doesn’t explain—”

“I told you my mother had a connection to the Nikolayev family,” Irina said. “When I disappeared, she used it. The Committee’s extradition laws are draconian. The fact that I was born in the Ukraine was grounds for the Euro-Soviet Committee to have me hauled back there. I was a special case, you see. I’d infiltrated the beta military. Such an egregious offense brought me to Kostya’s personal attention, and we all know what he does to omegas on his family’s private estate.” Her voice dripped with irony.

“Your trial and execution records were sealed,” I said hoarsely.

She shrugged. “Of course they were. Stories of hunting down prisoners in the forest like animals play well with the zealots, but it makes for messy paperwork. Especially when those prisoners are actually disappearing rather than dying.”

“But our pups.” My throat felt tight around the words. “Hemutilatedyou! Our bond...”

Real anger flared in her eyes. “He did no such thing!” she snapped. “He was just... a bit too slow.”

She looked away, her hand lifting to brush fingertips over her lower abdomen. It was the first unintentional body language I’d seen from her. “I’ve no doubt the bastards who violated me assumed I’d die of shock and blood loss on the flight across the Atlantic. That’s probably why they didn’t fight the extradition harder.”

My good hand clenched into a fist against my thigh as I pictured it—my nails digging crescents into the flesh.

“Kostya hid me away on his estate,” Irina continued in a detached tone. “He got me medical care, and when I’d recovered to the extent it was possible to do, he asked me if I wanted to fight for him from inside the very organization that is trying to destroy us. I said yes.”

“You let me think you were dead,” I whispered.

She looked suddenly very tired. “Of course I let you think I was dead. What did you expect me to do? Mail you a letter explaining that a high-ranking member of the Committee is also a high-ranking member of the underground, and that he’d saved me so I could work for him? That was never going to happen.”

My head was spinning with more than the painkillers now. “But Beckett—”

“Is Nikolayev’s mate,” she said sharply. “And you were not in his confidence when it came to that fact.”

That was a knife straight to the gut—a brutal reminder that Beckett hadn’t trusted us enough to tell us more than the bare minimum we needed for any given mission.

Irina must have seen something of this in my expression, because she continued in a gentler tone. “He did it to protect you.”

A rusty sound emerged from my throat—the opposite of a laugh. “Yes. And look how well that’s worked out for everyone involved.”

Irina’s expression closed off again. “You’re all here. You’re alive. There are worse outcomes.”

“So what does this mean for us?” I demanded, needing to know what she expected of me now that this years-long charade was finally ending.

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