Katya lifted her glass. “Za vstrechu.” She met Harper’s eyes across the table. “To our meeting.”
Harper lifted hers. “Za vstrechu.”
The vodka hit the back of her throat like a lit match tossed into gasoline. Heat exploded through her chest and radiated outward, the burn reaching her fingers, toes, and even the backs of her eyes. She coughed, her eyes watering, and briefly she couldn’t breathe.
Katya didn’t smile. But her green eyes did.
“Again,” she said, and poured.
Harper drank the second one. It burned less going down, although maybe the first one had simply cauterized everything in its path. The warmth spread through her body, burrowing into her muscles, and for the first time in days, the knot of anxiety in her belly relaxed.
It felt good. The vodka reminded her she was alive.
They washed the dishes. Side by side at Katya’s deep ceramic sink, Harper elbow-deep in warm water and soap suds, while Katya dried.
They talked, easier now as if vodka had taken the edge off something between them.
Katya asked about Harper’s work. The doctoring. The aid work in Chechnya, the border camps. Real questions—not interrogation but genuine interest. She seemed to understand what it meant to do difficult work in hard places and wanted to know how another woman had handled it.
Harper asked about the guesthouse. The off-season. The life Katya had with her cat. Katya shared with the pragmatism of a woman who’d made peace with small things. The guesthouse had been her husband’s project—he’d died two years ago, a heart attack, quick and without warning. She’d kept the place going because it was what she did now and because she wasn’t a woman who gave up on things.
“And the sniping?” Harper kept her voice light, testing the door.
Katya’s mouth flattened. The door was there, but it had locks.
“Shoulder injury,” she said after a moment. She rolled her left shoulder as if demonstrating, the movement stiff and truncated at the top of its range. “Nerve damage. I can still shoot, but the precision is gone. At eight hundred meters, the difference between perfect and good enough is a millimeter. A millimeter is a life.” She shrugged. “So I bake bread.”
She said it the way Pav would say it. Factual and without emotion. The enormous thing underneath compressed into a sentence that fit in your pocket.
The dishes done, the glasses were refilled. They sat back at the table, the kitchen warm around them. The cat had migrated to the chair Pav had vacated and was washing itself with focused dedication. Snow fell in thick blankets outside the window.
Katya turned her glass slowly on the scarred oak. “You got him here alive.”
Harper looked down.
“That is not nothing,” Katya said.
“Sasha didn’t make it.” The name came out before Harper could stop it. She stared at the pale gold vodka in her glass. “She was one of the women from the compound. She was shot before the helicopter went down. I thought if I got her out…” Her throat constricted. “But I got her out, and she still died.”
For a moment, the only sound was the cat washing itself on Pav’s empty chair.
“You cannot keep everyone safe,” Katya said at last. “Not in places like this. Not when men make other people into choices.”
Harper sipped her vodka, relishing the burn.
Katya’s gaze flicked to her and lingered. “Pav learned that badly. Did he tell you about his brother?”
“He told me the watch he wears was his brother’s. That’s all.”
Katya poured another vodka for herself. She lifted the glass, angling it in the light.
“Alexei was two years younger. Same nose. Same eyes. Softer, though.” She paused. “He smiled more.” A faint frown touched her face. “Told terrible jokes.”
Harper didn’t move—worried any sudden movement would send the story back into the dark.
“Alexei followed Pav into everything. Military. Special forces. When Pav left the Teams, Alexei wasn’t far behind.”
Katya snorted softly. “Even the same haircut, for God’s sake.” Her gaze dropped briefly. “Pav wanted him to do something sensible. Engineering. Teaching. Anything.”
