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Then he let go of my shirt and shoved me away.
“You don’t have the first idea how alone I am,” he said in a rough, quiet voice, laced with pain. “You don’t know what it’s like to have your family and friends reject you, to be cast out of your home as an aberration.”
I was about to tell him that yes, I did, but he went on with, “You don’t know what it’s like to have your own brother, the man you shared a womb with, reject you in favor of some pathetic milksop who wouldn’t know what real strength was if his life depended on it.”
I sucked in a breath. I’d forgotten about Mikal with everything else going on. Peter had once told us all about how betrayed Dmitri felt, simply because Mikal had fallen in love with Jakob. Dmitri had forced his brother to choose, and Mikal had chosen his beloved over his brother. I completely understood why, now that I’d met both men, now that I might have a beloved of my own. Jakob was strong, regardless of what Dmitri thought.
“You have no idea what it’s like to have your friends, your only friends, turn their backs on you, to have the young man you thought you could build a life with accuse you of horrible crimes,” Dmitri went on. “You have no idea what my life has been like, how I’ve struggled to survive.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, letting out a breath. “And I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”
I felt Hayk shift beside me and imagined that he would laugh at me once again for apologizing for things that weren’t my fault. Laugh or scold me for it. But I kept my eyes on Dmitri.
“I hope someday you find what you so desperately want, Dmitri,” I went on. “But you won’t get it from me. You can’t get the love and devotion you crave by forcing someone into it. You have to leave yourself open for it, because you don’t know when love is going to find you.”
Those words sounded in Ludvig’s voice in my head, even though I was the one speaking them. It was the sort of advice he would give me, and it filled me with warmth. Maybe Ludvig and I were never meant to be, but he was right. Our nearly two years together were not wasted. We’d shared things in that time that had changed us and that would make both of us better people going forward. It was wonderful, really.
But Dmitri still scoffed at me. “Listen to you,” he said, stepping back as though I smelled bad. “You’ve turned into a foppish poet.” He stiffened with anger all over again. “I don’t need you talking down to me and spewing silly platitudes about love. I don’t care about love. I don’t need you or Peter or Mikal, or anyone else. I’ve always looked out for myself, and I will continue to do it.”
“But you could find someone,” I argued. “If I could find someone who likes me for me, then so can you. But that person isn’t me, Dmitri. It will never be me.”
I took a step toward him, then continued with, “I still want to help you. Hayk and I are here to help you escape from the estate and to make it down to the waterfront. Find a ship bound for the other side of the world. Have adventures, Dmitri. There has to be someone out there just waiting for you.”
“I don’t need your help!” Dmitri shouted, though there was a sudden twist of grief mingled with his anger, as if my words had broken his heart instead of encouraging him. “I don’t need you or anyone else,” he repeated, though this time, he turned and fled the cool darkness of the storeroom.
I glanced to Hayk, then the two of us raced after him.
“You have to be careful, Dmitri,” I called after him as he crossed the yard between the storeroom and the back of the kitchen, heading toward the wall. “There are guards all over the estate, and while I don’t think they’ll bother you if you’re just wandering around, the second you try to get out, they’ll stop you.”
“They won’t stop me,” Dmitri insisted. “They wouldn’t dare.”
“Oh, I think they’ll dare,” Hayk told me quietly.
We followed Dmitri out into the darkness. The moon wasn’t full, but there was enough ambient light from the city and from the stars to see a little bit. We could certainly see the guards carrying torches around the perimeter of the estate. There were more of them now than there had been during the day, which I was willing to bet Dmitri hadn’t counted on.
Sure enough, Dmitri seemed to hesitate as he moved hurriedly away from the estate buildings. He kept to the shadows surprisingly well, which I figured he’d learned in the forest, but he changed direction often enough that I was certain he didn’t actually know where he was going.
Hayk and I followed, and though I glanced to him now and then and found him peeking at me, neither of us said anything. We just followed Dmitri, keeping our distance, but keeping him in sight. I felt bad for him, which would probably make everyone from Hayk to Magnus laugh at me, but he’d clearly reached the end of his rope. He moved like a wild creature who had been hemmed in and was trapped between the hunters and their traps.
It broke my heart, if I was being honest. Dmitri wasn’t lying when he said he’d lost everything. He was a man alone. But he didn’t have to be. If he’d bent just a little bit in his life instead of being so brittle, if he’d traded his bravado for kindness now and then, he wouldn’t have come to this.
“Help me,” he hissed at last, more angry than fearful, whipping back to face me and Hayk. “If you fancy yourself such a magnanimous, free man, then help me, for fuck’s sake!”
We’d all come to a stop by the side of a particularly fragrant herb garden. There were several citrus trees planted around the edges that gave us slightly more shadow than we would have had otherwise. Part of the wall was only a few yards to our right, and at that moment there weren’t any guards close to us.
I stepped forward, frowning at the wall. For a moment, I could tell Dmitri thought I was stepping closer to him, but I walked past him, straight up to the wall.
The wall around the Hakobyan estate was only about seven or eight feet tall, and it was made of some sort of white brick. The other side was inlaid with the same glossy tiles that decorated the sides of the houses and gave Good Port its distinctive look, but on the inside, the bricks were bare. I had the feeling they weren’t intended to keep out invading hoards, but rather to serve decorative boundary markers. They were designed to keep the riff-raff out, but there was a strange sort of inherent trust in the riff-raff as well. A handful of townspeople with a makeshift battering ram could have punched a hole in the wall with relatively little effort. They weren’t city walls like I knew them.
With that in mind, I took a few last strides toward the wall and jumped up, grabbing the top of the wall and pulling myself up. It didn’t take much effort at all.
“Stop!” someone shouted from the second floor of the kitchen building, which was still the closest building to us. “Get down from there at once. Milton! Horace!”
I continued to pull myself up until my head and shoulders were above the top of the wall, mostly so that I could see what was immediately on the other side. I was surprised to find myself looking straight down into the enclosed back courtyard of a mid-sized house. A startled boy of about twelve, who was in the middle of dumping a bucket of something into a cistern, blinked up at me.
That was all I needed to know. Without even acknowledging the boy, I pushed back and jumped down, falling into a crouch at the base of the wall.
By the time I straightened and turned back to where Hayk and Dmitri still stood in the shadows, two guards were running at me, one from each side. They slowed their steps when they saw by the light of their torches who I was.
