Afon
The eggs are done.
Two of them, overeasy, same as I've done every morning for the last six months, ever since I left the city and all its demons behind me. The yolks sit golden and trembling on the cast iron like they're wary of moving too fast. I understand the impulse.
I slide them onto a plate with the spatula and set it on the counter next to the coffee pot. Then I stand at the kitchen window and look at the snow.
It hasn't let up. If anything, it's coming down harder than when I first noticed it around four this morning, which is when I stopped chopping wood and went to sit on the porch with Wolf and watch the world go white.
I sat out there for two hours in the cold, not because I enjoy suffering—that's Caroline's department, apparently—but because the inside of the cabin had become unbearable.
Every time I glanced at the couch, the girl was there, curled up under my blanket, breathing softly through her busted nose, and looking so much like her mother that it made my lungs seize.
Susan Oglethorpe's pale green eyes.
Bill's stubborn jaw.
Christ.
She's got both of them in her face but neither of them left in her life, and she wants me to explain why.
I press my palms flat against the edge of the sink and lean my weight into them.
The porcelain is cold. The water I ran earlier has long since drained, and a single coffee ring stains the basin.
Outside, the snow fills in the footprints I left on the porch steps this morning.
It'll keep doing that all day if it doesn't stop, and if it doesn't stop, she's not going anywhere, and if she's not going anywhere…
I kill that thought dead.
It's been a long and lonely six months up here.
Then again, that's how I wanted it. I left all my tools of the trade in Lukas Lazarev's office, broke my phone into pieces and jettisoned those pieces into the Hudson, and then drove north until the cell towers stopped working and the road turned to dirt.
I came here to disappear. Not poetically and temporarily, but literally and permanently. I came here to stop being Afon Satyrin, the man who did things for powerful people. I wanted to start being nobody at all.
It worked, too.
For a while.
The first month was the worst. My body didn't know what to do without orders. I'd wake at four and lie in the dark waiting for a phone that wasn't there to ring with a name and an address and an unspoken understanding of what I was meant to do with those bits of information.
It was like kicking an addiction. My hands twitched, my jaw ached from clenching, and I sweated through my sheets as I tossed and turned night after night.
I walked the perimeter of the property a hundred times a day, checking sight lines, adjusting my trail cameras, securing the structure against threats that existed only in the muscle memory of a life I was trying to shed.
But things got better. Slowly.
By the second month, I could sit in the armchair for half an hour at a time minutes without standing up to patrol.
By the third, I could read a book from beginning to end.
I found Wolf in the fourth month—or he found me, half-starved and trembling in a ditch off the logging road, seventy pounds of wet black fur and trust so blind it made me angry.
You can't just trust a stranger like that, you idiot, I snarled at him more than once. You can't just love so easily. Don't you know that? Don't you know what happens when you do?
He'd just wag his tail and lick me.
So I fed him. He stayed. We agreed not to talk about our feelings.
By the fifth month, I'd found something approaching contentment.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it happiness.
I gave up on "happy" a long time ago—twenty years, give or take—right around the same time I gave up on the idea that the things I've done could be undone or forgiven or even properly understood.
Content was enough.
Frankly, it was more than I deserved.
So I shouldn't be surprised that now, as month six came to a close, Caroline Oglethorpe fell face-first into my yard, and the whole fragile architecture of my nothing life cracked right down the middle.
I told her I'd talk. I meant it. But standing here now, watching the snow pile higher against the windowsill, I'm not sure I have the faintest fucking idea of how to begin.
It's not because I don't remember the events she wants to know more about. It's the exact opposite problem: I remember everything. Down to the finest details of every lie Bill ever told his daughter to keep her safe.
Your father was a good man, Caroline.
He was. One of the best I've known, and I've known very few of those.
But good men keep secrets.
Yeah. They do. Him more than most.
I rub the band on my left ring finger with my thumb.
It's a habit, no better than a former smoker who still reaches for the pack that isn't there.
Twenty years of wearing this thing and the groove it's carved into my skin is as permanent as any tattoo.
Yelena's been dead longer than she was part of my life, and still this ring sits where she put it.
Behind me, I hear Caroline murmuring to Wolf in a baby voice. Something about his ears being "little velvet triangles." Wolf, the traitor with a heart made of cake frosting, is eating it up.
I can't believe I yielded to her demands so easily. When I found her face-down and bleeding in my yard, I knew right away what she'd come for, and I had no intention of giving her that. But push came to shove, and I folded like a fucking lawn chair.
I'm still reluctant to do it, but I gave her my word, and that's one thing I won't go back on. So I'll do it, goddammit.
I'll bring her this food and start at the beginning.
But the beginning is not where I truly want to start.
The beginning took place in 1994, in a warehouse in Brighton Beach, with a handshake between Bill Oglethorpe and Gervasii Satyrin that set everything in motion.
Fuck, I can still picture my brother's face.
Young. Reckless. So goddamn sure of himself.
If only we'd known then how wrong it would all go…
Sighing, I turn to put the eggs on a plate and bring them to her.
And then Wolf barks.
Instantly, all thoughts of past and future evaporate. There is only the dangerous now, a moment in which anything can happen. I whirl around to see him on his feet, ears pinned forward, body rigid, facing the front door. The bone lies forgotten on the rug. His teeth are bared.
Caroline sits up on the couch. "What's—"
I hold up a hand.
She goes quiet.
I listen.
Wind. Snow hissing against glass. The creak of the cabin settling. And underneath all of it, faint but unmistakable, a sound that does not belong here.
A motor.
It's distant—half a mile, maybe more. If the wind is right, I sometimes catch notes of logging trucks winding up the neighboring mountain. This is not that. This is an irregular, stuttering whine, the pitch rising and falling.
An ATV, possibly.
Or a snowmobile.
Neither of which has any business being within two miles of this cabin. That's the whole goddamn point of this place. It's mine and mine alone.
Wolf growls low in his throat.
"Stay here," I say to Caroline.
"What? Why? What's happening?"
I don't answer. I grab my jacket off the hook by the door and step into my boots without lacing them.
The Remington is on the rack above the doorframe, but I leave it there.
If whoever is trespassing on my property sees me storming around with a loaded rifle in hand, the situation will escalate before I have a chance to assess it.
Instead, I take the folding knife from the bowl on the side table and slide it into my back pocket.
"Afon!"
I look back at Caroline. She's sitting upright now, blanket pooled at her waist, green eyes wide. Wolf has positioned himself between her and the door, which I note with grim approval. At least the dog's got his priorities straight.
"I heard something outside," I tell her in the calmest voice I possess. "Probably a branch. I'm going to check."
She frowns. "A branch?" She doesn't look convinced, but she doesn't follow me, either, which is all I need.
I step out onto the porch and tug the door shut behind me.
Nine inches of snow on the ground means the temperature has dropped another ten or fifteen degrees since dawn. My breath comes out in thick, white plumes.
But when I stop to listen, I hear nothing. The motor sound is gone now. Or is it merely turned off? Is its rider listening for me, like I'm listening to him?
I stand still and scan the tree line.
The clearing around the cabin is roughly forty yards in every direction before the forest takes over.
Everywhere I look, the snow is pristine and unbroken except for the maze of tracks I left this morning going to and from the woodpile.
Nothing moves. No sound except wind and the soft patter of snowflakes.
All is right in my little corner of the world.
Except for one thing.
Along the eastern tree line, partially obscured by a stand of birch, is a set of boot prints. Not mine. They emerge from the deeper woods, run parallel to the clearing for about twenty feet, and then cut back into the forest heading northwest.
Someone was here. Recently. The prints must be fresh because the snow hasn't had time to fill them in all the way. Whoever it was came close enough to see the cabin, walked along the perimeter, and then retreated.
A grim, familiar feeling steels over me. Like it's snowing on the inside of my veins.
I step off the porch and cross the yard. I keep my pace unhurried and casual, in case someone is watching from the trees. When I reach the boot prints, I crouch and examine them.
Size eleven, maybe twelve. Deep heel strike. Either a heavy person, or someone carrying weight.
I follow the prints into the tree line. They lead northwest through the birches, weaving between trunks. They mark out a careful path, free of snapped branches or scuffed bark.