Page 97 of Adam, Mine

“Please!” he screamed, voice hoarse. “Я здесь!”

But the door stayed closed.

Victor sank to his knees, then fell to his side to rest against the steps. He wasn’t too cold: he could wait here, sleep a bit, and try knocking again in a while.

The coat he had been given was so good and warm, only his eyes felt the chill. Victor pulled his scarf down to cover them.

He tried not to cry.

He’d made it this far; he could wait a while. He was man enough to try again, when he had enough rest.

He just needed to rest.

Adam

Victor woke to the sound of loud banging. He was too weak to turn his head, to lift his arm and remove the scarf from his eyes.

He heard a crack next to him and a gust of wind buffeted his side. The door must be open.

Steps went past him into Yaroslav’s house.

Victor struggled, begged his aching bones to rise, but they denied him. He prayed to God and tried to scream, but he couldn’t gather enough air for more than a whisper. He lay limp as the dead while his chance slipped away. He wept then, motionless and silent until he fell back into unconsciousness.

Victor woke again for a brief impression—his last, perhaps—of a thumb tucking itself beneath his scarf.

It was cold and stiff, but it wiped the tear beneath his right eye.

More fingers dug beneath his scarf until the freezing hand was able to cup behind his neck.

The last thing Victor felt, before drowning in darkness, was the soft press of a forehead against his own.

–

I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers. . . .

I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavoring to bestow mutual pleasure. I was now alone.

Fool

Elias sat on the train and ached in waves. It had only been four days in Willem’s house, but it felt . . .

Currents were so many things. They were words, they were vibrations, they were the waves of the sea, the blowing wind, possibly also the shifting of the earth. It was not so impossible to believe Willem could control the current of favor, feelings of trust. Or maybe it all just orbited him and he bent to their will.

“Brogan will be waiting” was the last thing Willem had said to Elias before closing his door.

Elias looked down at his hand. His palm was healing with the speed it had back when he was in Geneva. But he could feel the strength rushing back to him from Victor’s end.

A woman sat in Elias’s train booth, and he shifted to make room. She smiled at him.

His scars were so faded it was hard to see them from a distance and they did not disgust up close. People were starting to warm to him again. Elias . . . did not have a taste for it. He could remember the cruelty of strangers too vividly.

He leaned his head against the ice-cold window and looked out at the German countryside rushing past. He was almost halfway there.

Elias felt a whisper. He closed his eyes. Victor was sending him something, but the thread barely moved. He was doing that thing where he was trying to send something that wasn’t the right medium for this style of communication.

It was . . . soft, what Victor was sending him. Elias listened closely. It was . . . the sound of rushes, a river, the pleasure of skin, coolness almost like what Brogan had done for him, warm wind. The warmest wind he had ever felt, then silence again.

Elias opened his eyes. Victor must be in Italy now. Then Russia for last. He felt a thrill of laughter at how incorrectly he had gauged Victor’s path.