3. Sasha
3
SASHA
SIX MONTHS LATER
The cinderblock slips from my grasp, crashing into frozen mud with the sound of a skull hitting pavement. It tears my hands open as it goes.
“Goddammit.”
I stare at the jagged, red groove carved across my palm. As I watch, blood pearls along the seam, brighter than the June sun bleaching the sky as it rises.
“At it again?” Kosti calls from the porch. Steam rises from his chipped mug as he sips his morning coffee. “You’ll reopen the gut wounds if you go too hard.”
I toe the block toward the firepit. Kosti’s safehouse in Vermont is as well-equipped as they come: thirteen crates of Soviet AKMs buried beneath behind the toolshed. Six kilos of C-4 molded into hollowed-out encyclopedias in the root cellar.
But not a single fucking barbell. I’m left to lug around rocks like a fucking caveman for exercise.
“Better infection than weakness,” I mutter, stripping off my sweat-soaked t-shirt. The barbed wire scar around my neck twinges as I haul the cinderblock back up, rest it on my shoulder, and start to squat.
Every inch of motion is fucking agony. My thigh screams; my torso screams. Most of all, my head screams. Two syllables on endless repeat.
Ssyklo.
Ssyklo.
Ssyklo.
I keep my mouth clamped shut, though. Even though there’s only me and Kosti out here in the Adirondacks, with no one else for dozens of miles in any direction, I’ll be damned if I let so much as a single grunt of acknowledged pain slip past my lips.
Only cowards show pain.
Six months of isolation and this place still hasn’t grown on me. I despised it in those first few weeks in the dead of January, when I couldn’t even sit up in bed without assistance. Pine boughs would scratch at my window all night long like feral cats. Snow rose and fell and rose again.
The whole time, I laid flat on my back and buried my agonized moans.
Doctors came and went. Secret doctors, discreet doctors, the kind who accept cash in unmarked envelopes and know to keep their mouths shut if anyone asks where they’ve been. Down to a man, they told me the same thing:
Your femur is broken and your femoral artery was nearly shattered. Your A/C joint and the tendons attaching your pectoral muscle to the bone are both in ruins. Most likely, you’ll never walk again.
The doctors were wrong. Even when every inch of me bellowed in pain, I found a way to struggle upright. That turned into standing, and standing turned into timid steps to my door and back.
All day and all night, I’d do that same ten-foot walk. My socked feet sliding across the thick carpets of the safehouse bedroom. I’d be woozy and sweating bullets by the time I got back to my bed—then I’d turn around and do it again.
And again.
And again .
The winter eventually petered out. Spring came in, but the robins pecking at the window glass were just as annoying as the pines. Eventually, I conquered the stairs the same way I conquered the stretch from my bed to my door.
Fuck knows how many bloody bandages I went through. Kosti shuffled in daily to empty the trash cans and leave food for me to eat. He never said much in those first few months. Didn’t explain why he’d damned me by showing Ariel proof of Jasmine’s survival, only to save me from Dragan. He’d just look at me, nod, and say, “Hm. He lives another day.” Then shuffle right back out.
It’s summer now. The sun is a bitch, viciously hot. I’m sweating bullets and the cinderblock is numbing my wounded shoulder. But I keep going.
I squat.
I stand.
I squat.
I stand.
Somewhere along the way, I lose count of how many repetitions I’ve done. Kosti’s chair creaks protest as he rises and saunters over to me. Grass whispers under his Italian loafers—still polished daily, even in this backwoods shithole.
He pauses in front of me and watches for a while.
I lie down and start to bench press the stone. My pecs hate it, but since when the fuck did I give a damn what my body cares for?
Three sets of thirty. Burn through the pain.
Kosti rolls a cigarette and lights it. I grimace. The smell of it makes my mind go to Feliks. Kosti got word to him for me, somehow, some way. He’s camped out in a Bronx safehouse, living under cover of darkness, waiting for my orders.
What those orders are and when they’re coming is a mystery to us both. I’ve been foaming at the mouth with thoughts of getting back to New York and putting a knife through Dragan’s throat.
The first time I snatched the car keys off the kitchen table and tried to go do exactly that, Kosti told me it was too soon. “Your body is broken, Sasha. Push too hard and it’ll fail on you when you can least afford it.”
“My body will do what the fuck I tell it to.”
He found me an hour later, kneeling in the dirt, unable even to finish the walk to the truck.
I had no choice but to acknowledge he was right—I’m not strong enough yet. Not sharp enough to do what must be done.
My body will heal eventually, though.
My mind?
That’s another question entirely.
Six weeks spent aimlessly horizontal gives a man too much time to think. And I had too much to fucking think about.
Well, too much and not enough. Because ultimately, all roads led to the same place.
Ariel.
Try as I might, I couldn’t keep my thoughts away from her. Even if I started with schemes of how to root out Dragan, where he might be vulnerable, how to reach him… inevitably, I ended up thinking of her.
Let me ? —
No, Sasha. You had your chance.
I stand, spit, and start to curl the rock.
“The demons are alive and well today, I see,” remarks Kosti. The sun coming up over the treetops has his face glowing pink now.
“The demons can go fuck themselves.”
I watch him out of the side of my eye as I keep curling the rock up and down. He’s a difficult man to figure out, and he has shown little interest in answering questions.
Why’d you save me?
You seemed like a worthwhile investment.
Then why’d you fuck me over in the first place?
Family is a funny thing, Mr. Ozerov.
I can make neither head nor tails of the old bastard. As far as I can tell, he’s content to rot in these woods until my beard is as gray as his.
“At least give me some news,” I say between grunted exhales. “It’s been a week.”
He shrugs. “I’ve given you all I have.”
“Bullshit. ‘The Serbians think you’re dead’ came five months ago. ‘Things have stayed quiet’ was four. ‘No sign of her’ hasn’t changed since the first time I asked.”
I don’t have to explain who “her” is, thankfully. I have no intention of ever saying her name aloud again.
Kosti puffs on his cigarette and gazes thoughtfully into the rising sun. “Would you like there to be some sign of her?”
“I asked for news, old man, not psychiatry.”
“You mean ‘psychology.’ ‘Psychiatry’ would involve drugs.”
“I’m going to need drugs to stay sane if you don’t give me some fucking morsel to think about.”
Kosti chuckles as he taps his temple. “Feisty, feisty demons.” After a pause, he adds, “I did get this, though. Not much, but it’s something.”
I drop the block and snatch the offered cell phone out of his hand. On it is a picture of a man in a nightclub booth.
Dragan Vukovic.
He’s got a magnum bottle of champagne clutched in one greedy paw, some silicone-enhanced blonde in the other. The arrogant sneer on his face makes my stomach curdle. Even worse is that I recognize the club name scrawled in neon over his head.
“That’s my fucking club. ”
Kosti accepts the phone back and tucks it into his pocket. “He thinks you’re fish food in the Hudson, Sasha. He’s gotten comfortable.”
“Comfortable men make mistakes.”
“So do angry ones.”
I grab the block and start doing lunges in place. “Dead men don’t, though.”
Sighing, Kosti rubs his beard. “ You’ll be joining that club if you don’t take it easier on yourself. You are still healing, Sasha, and you have a long way to go until you’re?—”
“Rest is for corpses. I don’t intend to be anything of the sort.” I ignore the lightning bolt of pain shooting up my leg as I keep touching my knees to the grass until my quads burn like hellfire.
“Stubborn bastard,” he accuses.
He isn’t wrong.
“It’s kept me alive thus far.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll correct that oversight soon enough. Now, why don’t you have mercy on that poor cinderblock and come have a glass of water?”
He rests a wrinkled hand on the block cradled in my arms to make me pause for a moment. His eyes flash as he looks at me and arches one thick, hairy brow.
With a grimace, I let the block fall to the grass between us.
We thump up the stairs. Kosti steps into the kitchen to fill two glasses of water. He reemerges and hands me one, then we each take a seat in the rocking chairs.
The cabin looks out on a long, flat stretch of valley. It’s mostly grass, ringed with a few clumps of pine trees. Deer are grazing in one of the fields to the north. For a while, I let myself begrudgingly enjoy the silence.
Kosti, of course, can’t bear to let me do that.
“If you knew where she was,” he interrupts, “would you go to her?”
I grip the glass in my hand hard. “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to talk about it?”
He waves a semi-apologetic hand. “I’m an old man. Very forgetful.”
I don’t buy his bullshit for a second. “Very annoying, too.”
“Gratitude is not one of the virtues of today’s youth, is it?” he teases.
“No more than brevity is a virtue of the old.”
He laughs. “You know, I’ve enjoyed these months with you, Sasha. You’re an interesting character. Full of contradictions.”
I rock back and watch as the grazing deer get spooked and go dashing over the fence, up into the foothills of the Adirondacks beyond. “Nothing about me is contradictory anymore. I’ve got one goal: kill Dragan Vukovic.”
“So it’s a no, then? You wouldn’t go to her, if you knew?”
I turn and stare him dead in the eyes. “No.”
“Liar.”
My teeth grind together. It doesn’t take much to piss me off these days, and the old man has become an expert in mashing those buttons repeatedly. “I’m not lying.”
“Yes, you are. You’d go find her and drag her into this self-loathing grave with you, if you could.”
I don’t answer. Instead, I look down at the chessboard that rests on a small folding table between the two rocking chairs. It’s in the middle of a game, one that Kosti and I have played on and off for six months running. Weeks pass between moves sometimes. His white is hemming in my black pieces. Pawns have fallen on both sides. My queen is stranded in a distant corner of the board, but my king stands tall alongside a rook.
It looks bad for me, but I know better. I have a move waiting that will flip the game on its head. As soon as it’s my turn again, this will all come to a swift and bloody conclusion.
“She is no longer a part of my life,” I say tonelessly. “It’s best that way for both of us.”
I notice Kosti purse his lips, but he’s quiet for a while. Eventually, he offers up, “You’ll have to choose at some point. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood and all that.”
“We’re doing poetry now?”
“No, Sasha, we’re doing truth.” He cranes his neck to catch my eyes. “Dragan lies at the end of one path; Ariel at the end of another. You can’t walk both at once. You can’t turn back once you’ve chosen. But at some point—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point— you’ll have to choose. For your sake and for hers alike, I hope you choose right.”
Then he reaches down and makes a move with his knight that I never saw coming. My plan goes up in smoke.
And so the king remains poised between squares. Stuck. Cornered. Waiting.
Across the board, the queen waits, too.