WHAT'S MORE COMMON IN WAR: LOYALTY OR BETRAYAL?
April 1944. After so-called liberation from both the Nazis and the Soviets, Ukraine remains a battleground between resistance fighters and the ruthless Soviet secret police working to break them at all...
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❦ SCREAM, NIGHTINGALE, SCREAM V. as the wet burns, so the dead breathe ——————————————————
Taras and Vika's luck ran out when the sleet started.
Pellets of ice bit into their bare skin and strafed the mud the NKVD men had forced them to stand in since nightfall. Specialized detention fit for enemies of the state, they'd called it. Torture would have been a better descriptor for the bastards to use.
Five meters away, the four riflemen huddled with their submachine guns on the threshold of the barn's slat doors. Half-tied shelter caps swallowed their shoulders. Rain had turned the tops of their peak caps to ponds. The cloth sagged like wet paper.
No wonder Captain Kondratyuk and his deputy, Sokolov, cowered in the bleached wood and clay farmhouse instead of conducting an inspection. It was the storm of the year with the rains Iryna had warned them about. Besides, if the two officers visited, they'd merely be greeted by the must of damp straw and prisoners soured by their own shivering.
Melted sleet poured down Taras and Vika's straight noses. It acted as the plaster that kept strands of blonde and auburn hair glued to foreheads twitching with itches that couldn't be scratched. If either of them lifted twine-bound wrists off their back, they'd be yelled at, humiliated with a slap to the cheek, or shoved face first into the mud.
"Moskali," Vika cursed under her breath as the guards lit a cigarette to pass around. "Do you think the Russian pigs went back for the horses?"
Of course Vika was the one to remember the horses. To be Cossack was to be born in the saddle—or so the proverb went. By taking her away before she could recover Solovey, the NKVD officers had stolen her from her way of life. Ties to her heritage evaporated without the presence of the Don stallion, leaving her to descend to hurling slurs for what they'd done.
"Last I saw, they had retreated into the tree line," said Taras. "The gunfire must have scared them off. They're probably running free on the plains."
That was conjecture. Both of them knew it.
Vika turned away with a creased face and resumed relenting to herself. "Wherever they are, my shashka is still on Solovey's flank—my father's shashka. I should have drawn it. I should have impaled one of these red bastards when I had the chance."
Both of them snapped their jaws shut at the shifting of shadows. A broad silhouette slipped through the rain towards them on the path of stone shards that ran between the outbuildings and the farmhouse.
Taras recognized the figure as Lieutenant Sokolov. Unlike Captain Kondratyuk, he was stouter, younger, and more confident in his enforcer role. He wielded his Tokarev pistol as an extension of his arm, and his decisions made on the banks of Styr seemed genuine compared to his commander's performance.
