"Yes."
She looked at the knife as if she had only that moment found it in her own hand, and set it on the dresser, and when she raised her eyes they were too bright, and her chin had started the small war it wages whenever she refuses to let it shake.
"You promised me this was the safest place in the world."
"It is."
"Then there's no such thing."
"No," I said. "There is not. There is only me."
She let that land, and I watched her decide whether to take it as comfort or as threat, and settle, the way she settles everything, somewhere defiant in the middle.
"That is not as reassuring as you seem to think," she said.
"I did not say it to comfort you. I said it because it is true."
"Do you ever say anything that isn't a knife?"
"No. I find the softer things waste everyone's time."
A sound came out of her that was half a laugh and half something giving way, and she pressed the back of her wrist toher mouth, and for a moment neither of us pretended she was not afraid. It was its own kind of nakedness, more than a kiss would have been.
"My abuela used to say fear is just love with nowhere to go," she said, to the dark window and not to me. "I never understood it until tonight. I'm not scared for me. I am, but that's not the part keeping me awake." She turned to face me. "I'm scared because somewhere in the last three weeks I stopped wanting to be anywhere you aren't, and that has to be the single dumbest survival instinct a person ever grew. Falling for the man with the most enemies in New York."
"You have not fallen," I said, because I needed it to be true more than I have needed most things. "You are frightened. The two wear the same face at three in the morning."
"Don't." Her voice was quiet, and it was steel. "Don't you dare hand me the safe version of it. Not you. You're the only one who's told me the truth this whole time."
She crossed the room. Not toward me, precisely, but the room was not large enough for the distinction to hold, and she stopped near enough that I could see the pulse running too fast in her throat.
"Two nights ago you called yourself a name," she said. "In the kitchen. And you let me walk away believing it."
"It was true."
"Was it, though?"
Here was the moment. I have walked into rooms full of men who wanted me dead and stood steadier than I stood in that doorway with a tired nurse and a knife on the dresser. I could have lied. I am an excellent liar; it is most of my trade. But she had asked me to my face, and she had stopped trusting a man's words and taught herself to read his hands, and my hands had already given me up by carrying me to her door.
"I am not a coward," I told her. "I am trying to keep you alive, and wanting you makes that harder than it has ever been."
She held my gaze. "Then keep me alive fast, Kolya. I'm not going to wait forever."
She told me to hurry. As if a man like me had ever been handed the luxury of time.
Neither of us slept.
11
RUBY
By my fourth day in the house of ghosts I had developed a condition the medical community has not bothered to name but every nurse recognizes on sight, which is the particular insanity of a body with nothing to do and a brain that will not agree to it. I had reorganized Galina's spice drawer, which she silently put back the way it had been. I had taught Stas a card game and lost forty imaginary dollars and most of my dignity. I had walked the east wing enough times that I am fairly certain I wore a track into the rug. By the time the walls began talking to me, I had a plan, and the plan was to get out before they answered.
It is a particular helplessness, being kept safe. People think safety is the absence of fear, and it is not. Safety, the enforced kind, is fear with the doors locked, so that it cannot go anywhere and neither can you. I had spent four days marinating in it, and I had reached the point where I would have negotiated with the man hunting me for ten minutes of an ordinary sidewalk.
And there was the other thing, the one I was not going to say out loud in a house with this many ears. Two nights before, in a doorway, with a man on my fire escape and a kitchenknife on my dresser, Kolya had told me that he wanted me and that wanting me was the hardest thing he had ever done, and I had told him to hurry. Then we had both done the single most maddening thing two people can do with a confession like that, which is nothing. Two days of it. Two days of passing each other in hallways with all of it hanging in the air between us, enormous and unspoken, while armed men politely pretended not to notice the temperature of every room we shared. A woman can only be wanted from a respectful distance for so many days before the want comes out sideways, as rearranged spice drawers and lost hands of cards and a path worn into somebody's good rug.
I found Kolya in the office where he does the things men like him do, surrounded by screens I'd made a point of not studying too closely, and I planted myself in his doorway like a citizen with a grievance.
