Page 87 of Captured By the Pakhan

Los Angeles, 7:15 AM

Ifly back on the Friday against medical advice, against Andrei's advice, and against my own, and I do it because there is a conversation I am not going to have on the telephone.

Sergei is on the terrace when I come through the house. He has been out there most mornings since she left, according to Karina — not doing anything, not reading, just sitting on the step with his arms around his knees looking at the water, and coming in when somebody tells him to.

He hears me and turns around, and I watch him decide not to run at me.

That is a new thing, and I hate it. Six weeks ago he would not have considered it in the first place; two weeks ago he would have done it. Now there is a visible moment in which a ten-year-old boy calculates whether he is allowed, and decides he isn't, and stands up politely instead.

"You're back."

"I am back."

"Karina said—" He stops. He is looking at how I am standing. "You're hurt."

There is a version of this conversation where I say it isn't anything.

"Yes," I say. "Somebody shot me on Thursday night. It went through the side and out again, and a doctor has closed it, and I am going to be slow and bad-tempered for three weeks and then entirely fine."

He goes white.

"Sit down," I tell him, "because there is more, and you are going to want to be sitting."

We sit on the step. It takes me longer to get down than it should, and he notices that too.

"I need to tell you some true things," I say, "and I am not going to make them smaller. You are ten, and you've been lied to by adults your whole life for your own good, and I have been one of them, and I am finished with it."

He nods. Both hands flat on his knees.

"There is a man," I say. "He is a senior officer in the FBI, and he is also something else, and he is the man who sent the people who came into our house in New York in March."

Sergei's hand goes to his arm. To the place. He does it without any idea that he is doing it.

"The man who shot me."

"The man who sent the man who shot you. Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I have spent eleven years taking things away from people like him, and he wants them back, and he cannot find me." I look at the water. "So he has been looking for anybody who can lead him to me. And that is why the people came to the house, and that is why he wants Raven, and that is why I have to go and finish it."

"Is that why she left?"

And here is where I could take it. Here is the open door — yes, she left because of the danger, she left to protect us — and it would be free, and it would make a boy feel better this morning.

"No," I say.

He looks up.

"She left because of something I did," I say. "Not something you did, and not the man in the FBI. Me. She found something in my office that I had built, and it was a bad thing, and I built it before I knew her and I didn't undo it afterward, and when she found it she made a decision about who I am."

"What was it?"

"When you are older."

"That's not fair."

"No," I agree. "It isn't fair, and it is the one thing today you are not getting, and the reason is that it is about her and not about me, and it isn't my thing to hand over." I turn my head. "You may ask me again when you are eighteen, and I will answer it then, and I will not have forgotten."