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“I said, don’t say anything.” Her voice is firm enough to silence me, and her gaze is very direct. “I shot Konstantin, tonight.”
Heat floods my chest. A black rage at her having even been put in the position to shoot her would-be killer—my enemy. And then a sweet and vengeful pride. This woman who is now my wife is no child, no scared little girl. She is a monster, sweet and wild and dangerous as a predator in the woods. She loves me, despite what I am.
I do not deserve to love her. I never have.
Still. I do. How I do.
“I shot him, but I couldn’t…I didn’t have it in me to kill him.” Her chin wobbles, the first sign of vulnerability she’s given me yet tonight. “But I told him that I will, next time. That if you don’t, I’ll kill him. And I will. I thought that I cared more than that, about my soul, or my conscience. But I see it now—those things don’t matter. Not when it comes to real life, to real death. My son needs his mother. And I need him. And any threat to that must be eliminated.” Her eyes are very dark, full of black flame. “Next time, I won’t hesitate.”
Without another word, she turns, and steps into the shower. I mean to follow, and I will, but just for a moment I stand there, on the opposite side of the glass. Her pale, limber body is like a line of moonlight; or else a statue, meticulously cut, and glinting mysteriously. Her hair is a dark ribbon, spilling in curls between her shoulder blades. Her eyes are closed against the spray, and at her feet, the water runs rich red, redder with every course of the spray. Washing the violence of the night from her flesh.
Her violence, tonight, I think. And for the first time, I realize: Katerina May could survive in my world, after all. Katerina May could be future.
***
“Mercy.” Toma’s eyes shine with tears. He is on his knees in the woods, down the hill where he brought Kat that day. Wind batters us, bringing sheet after sheet of stinging rain. Half of it is sleet, pricking like falling ice. In Russian, he begs, hands onthe back of his head. “He threatened my family—my sisters. He said he would skin them like pigs, that he would send me their fingers by post, one by one—”
“What did you think I would do?” I ask. My tone is mild, as is my face, and the language of my body. But inside, I am anything but. There is something intimate in a betrayal; I trusted this man. Yuri trusted this man. Kat trusted him, and he fed her name to a snake; he turned the key and opened the door to her room for the enemy. “Do you think I am merciful to betrayers? Do you think your sisters will be safe from me, Toma?”
“Please,” he sobs again, wretchedly. Tears pour down his cheeks and he holds his head, shoulders shaking with every ragged gasp. “Please, God, not my sisters—”
“I will not spare them,” I say, and his chin snaps up, eyes wild with desperation. “I cannot spare them now, Toma, you must know that. You are an example; and as your life was not enough to bargain with for blackmail, it won’t be enough for recompense. I will see them buried beside your mother, while your bones will remain here, on this alien shore.”
“I can give you more,” he pleads, eyes bulging, shining with mortal terror. “There are more safehouses, more men—”
But under the torture of this afternoon, once Kat had identified his voice with certainty as the one conversing last night with Konstantin, Toma already gave every location he knew; under torture, he told how it all happened, how Konstantin approached him the very night we arrived here, how he slipped the perimeter, how he helped them take Kat, unconscious that first night. He divulged everything under the knife. Like any desperate man, he now wants me to believe there is more yet to share, as he looks up the barrel of a gun.
I know better. I have tortured many a man in my time, though few were rats; they are uncommon enough for this very reason. And when found, they must be made a display of.
That’s why my men are arranged on the ridge, looking down. That’s why every one of them must watch this.
“Wait.”
Kat’s voice is strong even in the wind, though soft as ever. The men part in the middle, looking to her in surprise as she makes her way down the hill to me. I grimace, turning and meeting her before she can make it to the clearing.
I lower my voice, so only she can hear me. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to watch,” she says, solemnly. Her face is pale, with less of its usual light. I don’t like that. But I can’t begrudge this girl getting harder. It is demanded to survive. “I wanted him to see my face. And think of how I would have died, and my son, too, and my mother and brother.”
I touch her face. Now that we are married, it does us well to show it. This is the affection, imagined or real, that Konstantin came to hunt Kat for. Now it is her shield. She looks surprised at the touch, at the tenderness, and her gaze does soften.
“No,” I say. “There are some autonomies I will allow. This is not one of them.”
“He sold me out,” she whispers, and to my surprise, tears spring to her eyes. “I thought he was a friend. I thought that I was safe with him.”
“I know. But you’ve seen enough. You don’t need to see this done.” I turn her face to me, drawing her eyes from where they linger on Toma over my back. “This is a very hard world. You do not need to be part of all of it, Kat. Please. Let me spare you this, at least.”
Her lip trembles, but she nods. “OK.” I can see, plain in her face, that she’s conflicted. She looks like she wants to say something to Toma, but seems to think better of it. “I’ll go in.”
She turns to go, and my men step aside and lower their gazes as she goes—in something like respect. I think they admiredher already, for what she had suffered. But now they know that she can—and will—fight. Now they know she will kill. Now she has faced and survived Konstantin herself, not once, but twice. And I have a suspicion that this second encounter, she was not meant to survive.
But she did.Perhaps she would fit in better in this hard world than I’ve given her credit for.I swallow the notion, waiting until she’s out of sight to turn back to Toma. His teeth are chattering now, and some of the light of fight has gone out of his eyes. He is realizing just how far he has fallen. And that there is no turning back.
“Mercy,” he whispers again, but this time there is no spirit to it. He has sealed his fate.
I raise my pistol, and before I can speak, Yuri places a hand on my shoulder. I turn to my friend. His face is grey, with grief or shame or duty or all of it, and his mouth is a grim line. When our eyes meet, even before he has spoken, I know what he will ask.
“Allow me,” he says, in soft Russian, his breath clouding. “Toma was here as one of my men. I vouched for him. And in that, I failed you.”
