"The gray sedan. Two back. It has been parked at four of our five stops today, and it just switched its engine off, which is the exact opposite of what a parked car does." He took the grocery bag from my hand, unhurried, a man helping his girl with the shopping. "Walk. Do not run. The car is forty feet ahead, and we are going to reach it like nothing on this earth is wrong."
We managed it, all the way to the doors. Then the doors shut, and nothing was right. The gray sedan came alive behind us with no pretense left in it, and Kolya pulled us into traffic with a violence the heavy car had clearly been built to survive and I had not.
"Seatbelt," he said.
"Already"
"Tighter."
"Are they going to shoot at us?" I asked, in a voice that belonged to a calmer woman than the one wearing my coat.
"No. Shooting means they want you dead, and dead is simple. This one wants you alive, which is worse, and which is precisely why he is not going to have you." He took a corner that folded me into the door. "Hold on to something bolted to the car."
The sedan was good. I will grant it that, the way you grant a disease credit for being thorough. It read his turns before he made them. It cut a corner to gain on us and clipped a parked van and did not slow for it, which told me everything about how badly the people inside it wanted what they wanted, and Kolya made a sound low in his chest, almost satisfied, the sound of a man learning the exact dimensions of the thing he is up against.
"Good," he said, to the road more than to me. "Now I know how much you want her."
What came next I can only give you in the language of the nurse I am, because it is the only language I own for a body doing things faster than the mind can sign off on them. We went down streets I knew and streets I did not, the city smearing past the glass, his hands easy on the wheel in a way that was somehow worse than panic would have been, because panic I understand, and a man this calm at this speed has done it before, and lived, and taken notes. He made a turn that should not have been makeable. He ran a light that had strong opinions about being run. The gray sedan stayed welded to us through Gowanus and lost us at last in the cat's cradle of one-way streets beneath the expressway, where Kolya cut our lights and slid us into the black mouth of a loading dock and laid one hand flat against my chest, nothing romantic in it, only holding me still, while the sedan went screaming past the end of the alley and did not come back.
We waited in the dark until even his shoulders dropped a fraction, and then he eased us out and folded us into ordinary traffic like two people headed home from the store. We made ita single block before a red light caught us, and we sat there, the engine ticking, our breathing far too loud in the sudden hush, his hand still flat against my sternum where he had forgotten to take it back, or had decided not to. And the adrenaline did what adrenaline does, which is burn off every lie you have been telling yourself and leave only the true thing underneath it, glowing in the dark of you.
We lost the tail at fifty miles an hour and caught something far more dangerous at the next red light: the truth.
The light went green. He did not move the car. It cycled back to red, a whole turn of it, and the man stuck behind us leaned on his horn, and Kolya, who has hurt people for less, did not so much as flick his eyes to the mirror, because he was looking at me, and I was looking at him, and we had run out of road and out of excuses in the same breath. I had spent weeks building careful little walls around this exact moment, the way he builds them around everything, and I felt every one of mine come down at once, and felt nothing but relief, which is how you learn a wall was holding up the roof.
"Say something," I said, because the silence was unbearable and because I am a coward in the precise opposite direction from him. "Tell me this is a bad idea. Give me the seventeen years, the enemies, all of it. Talk me out of it. You're good at talking me out of things."
"I am," he said. "I find I do not want to."
He pulled the car off the avenue into the first dark, quiet block he found and killed the engine, and the silence that dropped over us was the loudest thing I have ever heard.
"This is a mistake," he said. He did not sound like a man who believed it. He sounded like a man reading the warning printed on a door he had already walked through.
"Probably." I had unbuckled the belt he made me tighten. I do not remember choosing to. "So tell me to stop."
"I cannot."
"Then don't."
He moved. For a man built like a wall he moves like a rumor, and then there was no space left between us at all, his hand at the back of my neck, his other arm braced against the door, pinning me to the cold glass with nowhere left to go and not one cell in me that wished to, both of us breathing like we had run the whole way here on foot, which, in every way that counted, we had.
When he finally kissed me, it wasn't gentle. Nothing about him was. That was the entire point.
12
KOLYA
The drive back to the compound is twenty minutes, and I could not tell you a single thing about any of them. I remember her hand, which had found mine on the gearshift somewhere in the chase and simply never let go, and I remember thinking, with the part of my mind that never fully closes, that I had crossed a line in a parked car like a boy of nineteen, and that a man my age, in my position, ought to be ashamed of it. I waited for the shame. It did not come. What came instead was worse, and the worse thing was certainty.
A man in my work learns the difference between a thing he wants and a thing he has decided to do, because the first gets you killed and the second keeps you alive. For twenty years I have made certain I only ever felt the second. Wanting is a flare in the dark. It tells everyone precisely where you are standing. And I sat in that car beside her with a flare going off in the center of my chest, lighting me up for anyone who cared to look, and I found I could not, for the life of me, make myself put it out.
We came in through the side of the house I use when I do not wish to be seen, and on the unlit back stairs I stopped, because stopping was the last discipline I had left.
"This is the part where I am meant to be sensible," I said. "Where I give you the reasons, and you thank me for them years from now, when you are safe and old and married to someone who has never killed anyone."
"God, that sounds boring." She had stopped one step above me, which put us nearly eye to eye, which I am certain she engineered. "Say them anyway. I want to watch you try to mean them."
"You are twenty-four."
