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Instead, I get a few feet away and turn back, only to find her kneeling to help Toma to his feet. It enrages me. All anew. And it takes everything in me to draw back from the surprise of her clear disobedience.
I find myself wanting to yank her to her feet, to drag her up the hill kicking and screaming if need be.
Instead, I watch, almost stunned, actually speechless, as she helps Toma to his feet. He averts his gaze from me, as though ashamed to need or accept her assistance, especially in front of me, his boss. The man who holds his life and fate in his hands. But still Toma lets her.
I watch, dumbfounded, as Kat gives me a hard, scolding look, and pushes past me. As she leaves me there in the drizzling rain and walks up to the house without looking back.
Chapter Nine
Kat
My heart is pounding hard as I walk into the house. I don’t realize until I reach the kitchen, flicking on the tap and shoving my cold hands under the spout, that I’m shaking. My gun is holstered back in my waistband, disarmed and with an empty magazine. I can still smell Toma’s blood in my nostrils.
What was that? What just happened?But it’s simple, really, and it makes sense. Toma didn’t tell anyone where we were going. Aleks got back to the house from his intelligence mission and found me missing. He heard gunshots. He thought I was being killed or tortured, and his mind went red. I understand it. I understand his anger at Toma, too. But the wildness in his face, the bloodthirsty relish as he beat his man…it doesn’t matter that IknewAleks was capable of violence.
There’s something totally new in seeing it. Something very, very frightening, that leaves a bad taste in the back of my mouth. And I think again: of how he killed Konstantin’s brother, of how he’s probably killed many men, for far more or far less. I think of how he held me that night, so many years ago. He felt like a lover, then. He felt like a lover just last night.
But is he? Do I even know Aleksander Lukin atall? Did I ever?
Do I want to?
“You should have known better.” His dark voice comes from the doorway. I turn and find him there, leaning against it, arms crossed over his chest. There’s an artifact of anger in his face, in the glint of his eye and the set of his jaw. But he’s no longer seething. The skin of the knuckles on his left hand is broken. “You should have called, or notified me. Or for fuck’s sake, Kat, waited until I got home.”
The tap is still running. I look into the sink, bracing myself with both hands against its edge. “Come here.”
“What?”
“Come here.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he does. I don’t even look at him as I take his hand and guide it under the tap. He doesn’t grimace as I push soap, more roughly than necessary, maybe, into the tears in his knuckles, working the blood out. When it’s gone and they’re clean and pink, I dry his skin with a paper towel. All the while not looking at him.
“I want to see my son,” I say, softly. I run a hand over my hair, turn off the faucet, and shift so my back is to it, leaning against the counter. I have a view out the kitchen window here, and I watch his men, milling about my drive, my yard, all in black with their guns and their trucks. I didn’t love the farmhouse before, or I didn’t think that I did; now I yearn for how it was just a few short days ago, with the wind in the trees, the paint peeling off the façade, the fences starting to bloom cushions of emerald moss…I was struggling, yes. But there was peace in it. Now there is only fear, and loneliness.
And whatever strange, dark fire I am nursing in my heart for Aleksander Lukin.
“OK.”
I look at him sharply. “What?”
He inclines his head. “I made the arrangements. I’d like to take you to your mother’s house, today.”
I wait for the other shoe to drop. “Why?”
“There is a chance we may need to leave at a moment’s notice. Surely, you’ve made your peace with that. Today, tomorrow. In a week.”
“I thought this was only supposed to take three days.” ?
“And it might. But it might not. There are…complications, which have arisen. Orders from the top.”
I stare at him. From the moment he arrived, he’s been keeping things from me—but I sense that this is different. Bigger, maybe, or just more meaningful. “I thought you were the top.”
His eyes glint. That little half-whisper of a smile tips one corner of his mouth. “Yes, well. In many ways, I am. In others, in matters political and financial…in matters familial, I sometimes am asked to answer to others.”
“What does that have to do with me?” But I can at the very least guess—I’m no one. I wonder if the powers that be have reminded Aleks of that. That my murder at Konstantin’s hands, a result of retribution against Aleks, would have no lasting repercussions to either of them. I can hear it, a cinematic Russian voice, full of static over the phone:You’re needed here. Leave the girl to die; she means nothing.
“Nothing. As of now, that is.” Aleks watches me. Now, his expression is inscrutable. He’s good at that. Putting on this mask or that one, deceiving me. “Get ready. I’ll take you to see your family.”
I’m happy—as happy as I can be when that sounded eerily like an order.
