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Here’s what I knew.

I’d been working at the wire since I woke, and not at the wrists but at the ankles, because the man who’d tied me had been in a hurry and had twisted the wire over the bottom rung of the chair instead of through it. It had slid an inch every time I flexed my calves. Twenty minutes of small, careful, patient shifts, disguised as shivering, had loosened the loop, and now I felt it give.

Here’s what else I knew.

I’d spent my life being hit by strong men. I knew where the weight went. I knew how the body falls.

And I knew Roake was a doctor, not a fighter.

He stepped in front of me with the scalpel held loose in his right hand, and bent, slowly, to examine my left arm. I felt his breath on my skin. The hair on my arms stood up.

“This will be quick,” he said. “I promise.”

I lifted my knee and drove my boot into his stomach.

He folded, with a gasp. The scalpel spun out of his hand and skittered across the concrete. I threw myself sideways, chair and all, and hit the floor on my shoulder with a crash that lit up every nerve I had. The chair splintered. One leg snapped off. The wire on my ankles slipped free, and I was up on my knees, then my feet, my wrists still bound behind me, with a chunk of broken wood in my hands.

“Get him!” Roake wheezed.

The two men in gray came at me from either side.

I want to say I fought like a warrior. I fought like an idiot. I swung the chair leg with both hands behind my back, and it caught the first man across the temple with a crack and he dropped. The second grabbed my arm. I kicked his knee. It bent the wrong way. He screamed.

“Baby,” said a voice, from somewhere very low, very slurred, very far.

I turned my head.

Maksim’s eyes were open. His face was gray. His mouth was moving, slowly, forming a word.

Down.

I dropped.

Something screamed over my head. A dark, fast, whistling streak that I felt more than saw, and a man behind me who had been about to shoot me made a wet noise and toppled backward, clutching his shoulder. In his hand was a long-barreled, ugly, silver-loaded gun.

In the doorway, in a shaft of yellow light, stood a small woman in a vintage coat, with a curly mop of hair and a look of towering fury.

She’d thrown a knife. A perfectly ordinary kitchen knife, the kind you’d use to carve a chicken.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Sabine Volkova. “There was a fence.”

Chapter 30

MAKSIM

Silver

Iheard all of it.

I want that understood before anything else. I lay on the concrete with my cheek against the frost and a blade of silver-coated steel between my shoulders, and I could not move a finger. I could not blink. I could not turn my head. The paralysis was total and exquisite, a slow white flood that began at the wound and spread outward through every fiber, and it left me exactly one faculty.

I could hear.

I heard Roake tell his story. I heard the tenderness in it, and the cold, and the grief. I heard the whisper of a woman who had sung badly in the shower. I heard a boy in a chair say, in a voice that shook from the cold and the fury and the fear, I know him.

Because I know him.

I have been alive for eleven hundred years. I have been called many things: saint, devil, predator, prince. Not once had anyone stood up in front of a man who meant to cut him apart and said, without a shred of doubt, in a cracked American voice, that they knew me.