Page 23 of Captured By the Pakhan

"—the bed wasn't slept in and I thought⁠—"

"I know. I know, kid."

And then he steps forward and puts his forehead against my shoulder, which he has not done, which nobody in this house has done, and stands there shivering.

I put one hand on his back.

Over the top of his head I can see the lawn I just crossed twice, silver with wet, and the tree line above it going black against the sky. Somewhere in there is a birch I put my hand on.

"I'm not going to lie to you," I say, quietly, into his hair. "So I'm not going to promise I'll be here forever, because I don't know that. But I'm here tonight, and I'll be here tomorrow, and if that changes you'll hear it from me first and not from an empty bed. That's what I've got. Is that enough?"

He nods against my shoulder.

I get him inside. Andrei carries him the last of the way up the stairs, because the boy's feet are genuinely too cold to walk on and because Andrei asks — actually asks, one word, looking at me and not at Sergei.

At the top of the stairs he hands him over without a word.

I get his feet warm, then get him into bed. I do the counting twice more, and it's nearly half three before he goes under properly and I can straighten up with my knees screaming and my clothes soaked through to the skin.

Andrei's waiting for me in the corridor outside.

He looks at the coat. He looks at the mud up my legs to the knee, and the grass seed, and the state of my boots.

I wait for it. I've got about four sentences ready and none of them are any good.

"Utility door?" He asks.

"Yes."

"Two o'clock."

"1:52."

He nods slowly, like I've confirmed a figure in a report. Then he says: "The cigarettes. I have told him about those damn cigarettes."

"Not hard enough, apparently."

"No." A pause. "Apparently not."

And that's it. That's the whole conversation. He doesn't ask why I came back and I don't offer, he turns and goes down the stairs, and it isn't until he's gone that I realise he never once looked toward Ilya's end of the corridor — which means he already knows, and has known since before he asked, and every question he just asked me was a courtesy.

Great. Wonderful. The mute one has manners.

And when I turn around, Ilya is at the end of the corridor. Coat on. Keys in his hand. The same six feet from the door as before, the same everything.

Except tonight he isn't looking at the door.

He's looking at me — at the stolen coat, at the mud up my legs to the knee, at the grass seed in my hair — and I understand with total clarity that he has been home longer than I thought.

That he watched me cross that lawn. That he stood at a window in an unlit house and watched a woman in a servant's coat go up his north slope at two in the morning, and did not send a single man after me.

That he watched me stop in the tree line. And that he stood there, for however long it took, waiting to see which way I came out.

Neither of us says anything for a long moment. My heart is still going and there's an entire conversation happening that neither of us is audibly having.

Say it, I think. Ask me. Ask me where I was going and let's have it out right here. Right now.

He doesn't.