Page 46 of Adam, Mine

“You use knives a lot?” he’d asked, staring dubiously at Elias’s mangled face.

“I was a cook, in another life,” Elias said. “I learned . . . overseas . . . that I am better with knives when it comes to hunting.”

That a man like this could understand, and the lie of army service slotted in where it was supposed to. The tanner brightened and went into a story about hunting knives while Elias ignored him and thought about what he was doing.

Justice was a funny thing where he was from. They didn’t have police and courts in their town. They had what was right and what was wrong, forgiveness and penance, punishment and retribution.

When the baker’s son took liberties with Lyrica and her father cut his face, no one said anything. When Arnie the sneak thief turned up to church with broken fingers, everyone still spoke to him kindly. Justice had been served and you move on.

Elias’s father had spoken to him of a series of murders in the past, before Elias was born. Where a married man who desired another man’s wife had assaulted her and in the struggle took her life unintentionally. The woman’s husband had walked the streets in mourning for three days before going to her rapist’s house and strangling his own wife. The town buried the women near to each other and the rapist left from shame. The murderer was embraced by the community and had brought flowers to both women’s graves every day until he passed.

Retribution and penance. Elias’s father made sure to mention that, if the woman had living family, they could have taken this man’s life as well and the circuit would have been complete. But, as she was old enough for both parents to have passed and had no children, the man sought penance with the labor of flowers.

Elias was his family’s only son. They intended with this tale to teach him that women were not a game and their lives should not be whims to his desires. It was . . . not exactly a relevant lesson in that regard. But Elias had learned two things.

1. That the punishment of stealing a life was a life in exchange.

2. That the act of taking life required penance even when justice had been served.

The tanner was hammering in rivets and holes to sew. He’d gone quiet. Elias shifted on the bench uncomfortably.

“Can you add another loop? Wide as two fingers to the left side.”

The tanner looked up. “It won’t be secure enough for a bowie knife, if that’s what you’re using it for.”

Elias shook his head. He pulled Agatha’s doll from his pocket and held it up. “It’s for her.”

The tanner beamed. “Oh, is that for your girl back home?”

Elias put the doll away. “I don’t know if I will see her again. If I can, the way things are now.”

Misunderstanding him completely, the tanner reached across his work desk and put a hand on Elias’s sleeve.

“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. When she sees your face, she will look past it and know her papa,” he said, eyes dark with compassion.

The thought of Gida tore through Elias, sharp and terrible. The tears on her face and the terror in her eyes. Elias just smiled tightly and nodded.

He paid the tanner and slid his new holster over his shoulders. His knives tucked well in their slots: close to his heart, easy to grab, never in the position to fall. The doll fit, too.

Throttle

Victor woke with a start. He twisted around frantically. He was in a round home, dirt floors, thatched roof, facing a fire and swaddled in blankets that smelled sharply of fresh wool. Whoever had done this had wrapped him so tight he couldn’t even move his arms.

“It would perhaps be better to prepare for the weather?”

Victor craned his neck as far as it would go under the circumstances and found a man sitting to his left a little behind him. He had windswept brown hair and an unkempt beard and didn’t seem particularly interested in giving Victor eye contact. Instead, he was focusing all his attention on knitting a large gray blanket that Victor could smell from where he was sitting.

“If I were to travel to such a place as this? I would think so,” the man said. “You are an Englishman?”

A strange question for someone speaking to him in his mother tongue. Victor shook his head. “German.”

The man nodded—like he was pleased he’d guessed right between the two—and continued to knit. Victor turned his head back toward the hearth. Then he spotted something to his right that he’d missed.

Every item Victor had been wearing save his long underwear had been removed from his body and laid out on the floor to dry. His shirt, pants, and jacket closest to the fire. His money—paper, ingot, and coin—pocket watch, tiepin. His paperwork: letters, identification, the spell notes, and list of locations. Even his boat ticket stub was exposed. A wall of white, robbing him of a shred of privacy.

Victor just closed his eyes for a moment to process that. Fury, humiliation, and horror fought to take him over, but it was despair that settled in his throat, choking him.

Would he never cease to be at a disadvantage with these men? Would helplessness be his only friend during these travels?