Volya didn't want to take it easy, but Liam's almost-embrace was more comfortable than all the LazyBoy chairs in the lounge combined. He surrendered to it, let his ass connect fully with the chair, and leaned back. He sat, biting his lips, while the scientists settled down after his outburst. They didn't seem to mind it that much.

Heck, daSilva's grin barely fit on his long, swarthy face. The man couldn't have looked happier if a million dollars rained down from the ceiling. He was so obviously itching to exclaim, I am glad you've asked! it was half-way between hilarious and pathetic. Instead, this Dr. Ever Stranger cleared his throat. "The DNA chain of the Alpha-female that Dr. Young had located—and yours, Volya—contains a peculiar spacer. Very peculiar. It plays a similar role to CRISPR, but not quite."

Volya didn't gulp, but his blank expression must have spoken volumes. At any rate, it was potent enough for DaSilva to shake his hands in the air in frustration over losing him. He then cringed and spelled it out: "CRISPR is a genetic sequence that allows one organism to emulate the genome of another."

While daSilva cringed over this gross oversimplification, Volya caught a movement out of the corner of his eye: Anabelle. And he was not alone slanting his eyes at her at first, then openly gawking. They all did, despite their fine manners.

Instead of dying from embarrassment, Anabelle climbed to her feet and turned in a slow circle. "One organism imitates another... Example: a human who emulates a horse."

She was so well-adjusted, it was practically epic.

"Am I... like Anabelle?" Volya addressed himself to Marina, because in his opinion, she was the least likely to be deluded. In the hush that once again commanded the room, his quiet voice carried. Good thing he spoke in Russian.

"No!" all the scientists replied in one voice, not even slowed down, let alone deterred, by the language barrier. Apparently, he wasn't destined to be a misunderstood antihero.

"Anabelle is not the genetic carrier of the Alpha-CRISPR, Volya. You're the only one in this room who has it," Lydia said. "Something, or rather, someone, had triggered a catastrophic mutation in my daughter when she had accidently interfaced with the Mnemosyne."

Volya blinked. "The Mne-what-now?"

"The ancestral memory interface," Marina inserted quickly. 

Volya blinked again, waiting for her to elaborate, until she didn't, obviously assuming that everyone in the room functioned on a high enough level to understand what it meant. He felt a tiny bit flattered and very much confused.

Lydia milked the dramatic pause that fell after Marina's remark for all it was worth, then threw her arms upward, elegantly bent at the wrists, shawl trailing to win back their attention.

"In terms we can all understand, Anabelle was cursed to merge with her horse, resulting in a synthetic creature."

"A centaur," Anabelle said helpfully.

Volya almost whined, I knew that, changing at the last moment to a pertinent question. "Cursed by whom?" 

"As best as we could tell, the individual Anabelle saw in her memory was one of your Alpha ancestors during the war with the Yamnaya," Lydia said.

"And all the evidence points to the wolves as the animal group they had been interdependent with," Young added. 

Wolves? Volya Wolkov, the Will of the Wolves... or Freedom of the Wolves. Taina Wolkova, the Secret of the Wolves. 

Volya capped Liam's hand resting on his shoulder. Squeezed it. "If Anabelle is a centaur, am I... am I a werewolf?"

"Of course," Lydia said.

This sounded bizarre, but nobody laughed. The bunch of pop-culture references swirled through his head: Michael Jackson dancing to Thriller, bare-chested men with fangs (though that could have been vampires) on the book covers and the hulking furries in Skyrim. Werewolves! Men run in terror before them, women love them... yeah, those guys. He had his work cut out for him to live up to the expectations. Maybe he should hit the gym or something.

Liam reached out for his abandoned coffee mug, glanced inside it, then plopped it back, meticulously placing it right over where the brown circle had already stained the tablecloth. The pop stars apparently drank their coffee hot and only hot.

Meanwhile, Lydia moved around the table to wrap Anabelle in an awkward hug. Awkward, because of the height difference, not because of the loving sentiment that passed between them.

"Anabelle doesn't remember much of what she had seen, but we think she'd pulled on a thread of a seminal ancestral memory. She had witnessed the curse being placed on Yamnaya by your ancestors thousands of years ago—and it somehow jumped to her, like wildfire across the road," Lydia said, misty-eyed.

Volya shouldn't have been gawking at the two women, but he did. His heart squeezed into a tiny ball with envy: what he wouldn't have given to be loved like that...

Liam's arm slipped along his back, across his back, to rest on his knee. Volya darted a sideways glance at Liam to verify that he somehow didn't pick up on his unworthy emotion. But Liam's soft gaze rested on Anabelle. The envy tugged at Volya's gut even stronger.

"It all fits," Young assured Volya, though he wasn't arguing. He was too busy being caught in his feelings to argue.

Young's palm chopped the air in time with his words. "Given what we know about the Yamnaya, to their enemies, their horses would appear to be an integral part of their culture and victory. It's a natural curse to place on someone of their lineage."

The talk of curses and ancient genocidal maniacs on horseback didn't jive with the affluent pavilion flooded by the gentle spring sunshine. Birds were chirping outside, for goodness sake. Cushions on the overstuffed sofas beaconed. The décor was all calming pastels and earthy tones. This kind of conversation demanded a drafty castle, flickering candles and a raging thunderstorm beyond the windows. They should have talked last night.

Food started to smell like it needed to be cleaned up soon, rank and stale, most of it poisonous, but Volya had lost his appetite anyway.

"So what do you expect me to do about Anabelle's curse?" Volya asked.

Lydia's hands steepled together in a pleading gesture. "We seek your help to unlock your genetic memories and, if possible, undo what happened to Anabelle."

"And why do you think I can do it? Because I'm a werewolf?" Volya's voice jumped like an octave in mid-sentence. Liam literally shivered next to him.

Lydia paid no heed to this mishap of adolescence. "It's just a hunch," she said. "One morning I woke up after an exhausting dream, and I just knew that this mysterious Alpha group had been responsible. As the curse was laid, so it could be reversed."

Anabelle flinched. "Mom!"

But Lydia was well past being stopped with this appeal to common sense. Her eyes glowed with a fanatical hope. "And that's when we started looking for you."

Volya built his life around the core belief that nobody gave two friggs whether he lived or died. But while he was surviving in the orphanage, a group of mad scientists had lively debates about him. He should be flattered or something. Instead, a shiver ran down his spine. "You were looking for me? Me, specifically?"

"At first, we looked for women who'd given birth to a male child carrying the Alpha markers," Lydia explained, "We supplied testing for the area of interest, but it proved impossible to track any of the Alpha females down. They disappeared like smoke."

Tell him something he didn't know! "Like my mother, right?"

Young leaned forward in his chair, "Ms. Taina Wolkova left no trail after your birth. She vanished, taking your twin sister with her. My working hypothesis is that she might have been travelling in her alternative form, perhaps as a wolf—"

The crazy speculations faded into insignificance once Marina rendered Young's ramblings in Russian. The penny had dropped. Forget the stupid penny! An effing thermonuclear bomb had exploded in Volya's chest, knocking his mind out of his body for a sec. He sat bolt-upright, out of Liam's lulling embrace. Shell-shocked, he looked from one face to another, not really seeing them. The scientists and the room, the centaur, the tablecloth, the silver utensils, the housekeeper standing placidly just out of the earshot—the whole world was leeching colour, like a photograph left out in the sun.

He could barely hear his own voice, it was so muffled. "A sister... a twin! I have a twin sister? The baby my mother wanted when she left me behind?"

Marina bit her lip before she translated his exclamations for the English-speaking audience.

"Yes, yes, fortunately for us," Young affirmed crisply. "Otherwise our choices would have been children and mental patients."

The buzzing in Volya's ears blocked the alarmed exclamation from Lydia, but as he turned in one place, in slow motion, his gaze latched at Sangha's plump hands pressed to her mouth.

"Vince," Sangha whispered, obviously regretting being too slow to stop Young from being crass. "You didn't..."

Volya jumped to his feet, swaying.

"Whoa," Liam staggered from his chair after him, but he pushed away Liam's steadying hand. He pushed it away before he rationalized his simmering resentment. Then he did, and he wished he'd shoved Liam harder.

Liam had known. That's why he sat next to him, had his hand on his shoulder, and took him out on that pity-date in Moscow. Why he wanted to doll him out in new clothes. That's why he looked at him with sad doe-eyes. The coward hadn't given him a single hint about how he was a dispensable child. He'd just waltzed in like some god into Anna Leonidovna's office and snatched him away, glossing over it like it was rubbish.

Worse, Liam refused to tell him anything in private, when he had begged him! Begged him! Now he had to face this crap in front of strangers. All nine of them could smell his weakness. They stared at his shocked absorption of this new reality. Even June lifted her eyes from the phone and squinted around the room with a vague concern.

Stop being weak, the inner voice said sagaciously.

Volya shook his head, as if the voice was an annoying fly he could shoo away. He didn't care for its ultimately unhelpful advice. He didn't care for Young's failings in the empathy department, June's distress, or for Sangha's best intentions or whoever's. Not even Liam's. No, particularly, not for Liam's.

Screw him. Screw this idiocy. Screw them all.

The place suffocated him. He desperately needed a gulp of air, because some evil vacuum cleaner must have sucked it out of the room. On stiff legs, Volya lumbered for the exit.

Fortunately, he remembered just as he bumped into it, that the door was transparent. He didn't beat against glass like a moth. It would only be his Frankenstein-look-alike stomping to be embarrassed about later. But 'later' be damned. To hell with embarrassment too.

"Let him go," Damir said behind his back, in English. To Liam probably.

Volya didn't want to think of it, talk or do anything at all. Least of all, he wanted to ask for permission. He just wanted to get the hell out.

With shaking fingers Volya fumbled with the latch to release it and looped outside.

Running...

Running...

Running...

As if running was his salvation.