He notices I’m awake and says, “There you are.”
My mouth tastes like blood.
I push myself up an inch, enough to feel the handcuffs bite at one wrist where it’s hooked to the grab handle above the door. Good. Useful. I’d rather know the shape of the trap than guess it.
“You hit me from behind,” I say.
“Not personally.”
Of course not.
He glances out the window, then back at me. “Your men scattered when you fell.”
I laugh, and the sound hurts. “Cowards.”
That gets the smallest change in his face. Not quite offense. Something closer to tiredness.
“No,” he says. “Confused. There’s a difference.”
I sit with that for a second, breathing through the pain.
Then I say, “End it right here.”
He looks at me.
I mean it. I can hear that in my own voice.
If this is the moment he’s been arranging for years in one form or another, then let him do it. Let him stop talking around the point and finally put a bullet where all his old disappointments live.
He studies me for longer than I like. “You think too simply when you’re angry,” he says.
“And you think too much when you should have pulled the trigger years ago.”
His mouth tightens slightly.
The car keeps moving. The city outside has thinned into long industrial roads and fenced stretches of water and concrete, but I can’t tell exactly where we are. My head is still pounding too hard to trust distance.
He says, after a moment, “I’m done running.”
I look at him and say nothing.
Because I don’t know what that means from a man like him. Done running could mean confession. It could mean surrender. It could mean he’s decided to die in a way that suits his own vanity.
He keeps his eyes on me. “I should have dealt with all of this differently,” he says.
I almost laugh again, but there’s no strength left for it. “That might be the first honest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
His jaw works once, and for the first time in a long time he looks less like the man I spent my life trying to outrun and more like an older one who has finally exhausted the idea that he can keep his sins neatly arranged.
“Moscow was a mistake,” he says.
“No,” I say. “It was a choice.”
“Yes,” he says quietly. “And then it became a mistake.”
I stare at him.
The car turns. Somewhere outside, gravel spits under the tires.
