Caroline
Windows have been doing me no favors lately.
When I first arrived in Afon's life, I was the one looking in the mirror.
Now, I'm on the inside looking out.
The window in this hut is small and rippled, the glass so old it distorts everything like a funhouse mirror, and frost has crept up the bottom third of it.
None of which prevents me from seeing Afon Satyrin out there in the clearing, splitting wood in nothing but a skintight thermal.
I'm not watching him. I'm not. I want that established. I'm sitting on the bed, ostensibly resting my ankle per Dr. Afon's strict medical orders, and the window simply happens to be in my line of sight, and he simply happens to be framed perfectly in the window. Simple. Veeery simple.
Thock.
The first night I was here, that sound drove me insane. He chopped wood for hours while I lay on his couch with a goose egg on my forehead. At the time, I decided it was the auditory equivalent of a middle finger. A man telling me to eff off in percussive Morse code.
Thock.
That was before. Since then, he's carried me to bed—twice—peeled a kidnapping crew apart like a very gory orange, and kissed me up against a stone wall. Things have changed. The clunk of axe hitting wood is no longer a warning.
It's more like foreplay.
Context, it turns out, is an aphrodisiac. Nobody warned me about that. Dr. Levinson never once said, Caroline, beware of contextualized lumberjacking. The road to multiple orgasms is paved with the stuff.
Thock.
As I watch, Afon sets another log on the block. The thermal has gone translucent across his shoulders with sweat. Steam is literally rising off him, like he's a draft horse, or a casserole. A huge, muscly, bearded, sexy casserole horse.
I last a few more agonizing minutes. Then I dig his spare jacket out of the duffel, shrug it on—it fits me like a flannel circus tent—and limp out into the snow.
Afon doesn't even look up. "No."
"You don't know what I was going to say."
"You were going to offer to help." The axe comes down and the poor log he's chosen as his victim gives up its ghost in two clean halves. "Which is a lie. You were bored, and you wanted to come stand near the activity."
This is so precisely accurate that I consider suing him for unauthorized access to my internal monologue.
"I contain multitudes," I say instead. "One of those multitudes wants to learn a survival skill."
He straightens, leans on the axe haft, and looks at me for a long moment. He notes the flannel and his nostrils flare, but he doesn't remark on it. Then he sighs, recognizing a lost cause when he sees one.
"One log," he negotiates. "Then you go back inside before you frostbite something I'll have to amputate."
What follows is, in theory, a brief lesson in axe mechanics.
That is what's happening, objectively. But subjectively, what's happening is that Afon Satyrin steps behind me, close enough that I can feel the furnace of him through two layers of flannel, and closes his hands over mine on the haft.
His palms are rough and twice the size of mine.
His chest is at my back. His beard grazes my temple when he leans down to correct my grip, and his voice is a sensual purr in my ear.
"Don't swing with your arms," he says. "Let the axe fall. Your job is aim. Gravity does the work."
"Copy that, Sarge."
"Hips square. Eyes on the spot you want to hit, not the spot you're afraid of hitting."
"That's very motivational-poster of you."
"Here we go."
Together, we lift the axe up high and let it fall. The log splits—not cleanly, not like his, more of a reluctant divorce than a guillotine, but it splits. I whoop, thrilled with myself. Wolf barks in response from inside, where he's cowering out of the cold, that little weenie.
"I did that!" I announce.
"Gravity did that."
"Gravity and I did that. We're a team now."
Afon steps back, and the cold swarms into the space where he was. All the unspoken things seem to be living in that space, too. The kiss, the shared bed, our fingers interlaced.
He takes the axe from my hands—or starts to. My fingers don't release it right away, and so there's a brief period of time where we're both holding the haft, connected by thirty-six inches of hickory.
I make the mistake of looking up at him.
He's already looking at me.
His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there a beat too long to be deniable. The steam rises off his shoulders and tiny ice crystals of condensed breath glisten in the thick expanse of his beard. His dark irises gleam.
As for me, I'm grateful for the flannel I'm drowning in, because it conceals my tightening nipples and fluttering heartbeat. With my hands tucked inside the too-long sleeves, he can't even see how my fingertips are shaking.
"Off you go inside," Afon coughs at last. "Before you get ambitious."
I go. But I take my split log with me, and I set it by the stove like a trophy. If Afon notices that I burn every other piece of wood first and save mine for last, he is gentleman enough not to mention it.
The deal comes due after dinner.
On the menu tonight is venison, seared in the cast-iron pan with salt and gusto. Also, regrettably, a side of beans. I swear he climbed a beanstalk and stole Jack's magic, never-ending supply of the stuff.
We once again eat at the narrow table with our knees touching. The fire is chuckling along merrily. Wolf, full of deer scraps and self-satisfaction, sprawls by the stove and snores. Occasionally, he farts loud enough to wake himself and look around in a confused daze. It's setting quite the mood.
I've been rehearsing how to raise the topic. I'm two breaths from launching into my whole spiel when Afon sets down his post-dinner coffee, looks at me across the lamplight, and says, "You found something on my ribs, didn't you?"
I freeze with my fork halfway to my mouth.
So much for my opening statement. I set the fork down.
"It looked like a swallow," I say carefully. "Mid-dive. Wings swept back. Holding a skeleton key in its beak." My heart is doing the thock-thock thing again. "It's the exact image my father drew at the bottom of his last letter. I spent months trying to identify it. I came up empty."
"Yes," Afon agrees. "It's not in any database, because it was never meant to be found." He rotates his mug a quarter turn on the table. "My brother designed it."
The hut goes very quiet. Even the wind seems to lean in.
"Gervasii," I say softly. The middle man in the photograph. The arm slung around young Afon's shoulders.
"Gervasii," he confirms.
And then he tells me the story. By the haunted look in his face, you'd think he was exhuming a corpse. Maybe, in some ways, that's exactly what he's doing.
"Gervasii chose a swallow, because the bird crosses the mountains every year and always finds its way home.
The key was because we were the key, our own way out.
" He's looking at the lamp flame, not at me.
"It was our crew's mark. A private one, a nameless one.
We called the route we found 'the Lastochka. ' That's Russian for 'the swallow.'"
"The route," I repeat. "What route?"
"A smuggling route," he explains. "This was the better part of twenty years ago. Product came down out of these mountains and into the city. My brother and I ran it."
"Product meaning…?"
"Narcotics." A muscle thumps in his jaw.
"Off the books. Against Lukas's express rule.
He considered drugs bad business—too much heat, too many federal agencies with budgets.
He forbade it. But we did it anyway, because Gervasii was ambitious and I would've done anything that damn fool asked me to do. "
I could swear, for just a moment, his eye glistens with a tear. Then he clears his throat and continues.
"It was a small crew. Six men, sometimes eight.
All of us marked with the swallow, here.
" He touches his own ribs, low on the left side, exactly where my fingers found it.
"The youngest of us was a kid Gervasii found half-starved running errands for a chop shop in Kingston.
Hungry kid. Clever, too. Gervasii brought him in like a stray and raised him like a son.
Taught him everything we knew. He had a gift. "
"What was his name?" I ask, concerned about overstepping my bounds.
"Viktor Reznik."
I shiver. I've never heard that name before in my life, and somehow it still makes the hair on my arms stand up, like my body recognizes it instinctively.
"What happened?" I ask.
"It came apart." He turns the mug another quarter turn.
"The crew came apart, and Gervasii died.
I got out. I dragged Matvei clear of it—he was fifteen, and he'd just watched his father die.
I was not going to let the life have him too.
Then I crawled back to Lukas on my knees.
" His smiles sadly. "There's a price for being forgiven, in our world.
Mine was fifteen years of doing the Bratva's ugliest work.
Whatever Lukas needed done that no one else would do, I did it.
That was the cost of the venture that killed my brother. I paid it willingly."
I think of Gold Chain in the bunkhouse: Used to kill people for the Lazarev Bratva.
I knew in broad strokes that Afon had been involved with the Lazarevs' dirtiest work, but it's one thing to know that and another thing to see in his face just how much that work cost him.
He looks haunted by ghosts that no one else can see.
"And Reznik?"
"Vanished," he says. "Everyone assumed he was dead. I wanted to believe it." He finally looks at me, and his eyes in the lamplight are the color of the forest in November. "It's easier to forget a dead man."
"I take it he wasn't actually dead, though."
"No." Afon leans back, the chair creaking under him.
"As I later learned, he spent twenty years rebuilding the exact same thing we'd had.
The Lastochka, but bigger and grander. Nastier, too.
" He sees the question forming on my face and heads it off.
"Which I am not elaborating on tonight. The point is, a few weeks ago, Viktor got word that Afon Satyrin—of all the phantoms in all the graveyards he's passed through—was living in a cabin on his mountain. "
"What do they want with you?"
"They want me in the ground," he replies. "I'm the last one left who knows what Reznik did to get where he is. That makes me a loose end with a long memory. In his line of work, you can't afford a liability like that to remain free."
"But then why me?" I croak, suddenly afraid. "The men at the camp, one of them called me—"
"Bait," Afon finishes for me in a very good guess. "I'm sure they thought they could grab the woman who came down the mountain with me to draw me out. They want to know how much I've told, and to whom." He holds my eyes. "You were a fishing lure, Caroline. And I'm the fish."
My body is reverting back to the cold-sweat, hollow-stomach thing it learned in the back of the kidnappers' panel van. Wolf's snoring suddenly sounds very far away and less reassuring than it did a moment ago.
"Okay," I say. "To recap: Smuggling route plus dead brother equals vengeful kingpin with abandonment issues.
I'm following all of that. But…" I lean forward over my cold beans.
"Afon, where does my father fit? Because Bill Oglethorpe was an attorney from the Upper East Side who wore Brooks Brothers and thought jaywalking was a moral failing.
And yet he drew your secret smuggler bird in his last letter to me, which means he knew about the Lastochka.
" I shake my head. "How? Why? He wasn't—he can't have been—"
I can't even finish the sentence. The end of it is too absurd. Or too plausible. I genuinely can't tell which anymore, and that's the part that scares me most.
Afon looks at me for a long, long moment.
"Because your father was in this world," he says at last. "Not like I was, but tangled up in it nonetheless." He rubs a scarred thumb along the table's edge. "Bill and I knew each other. A long time ago. He did me a very big favor when I needed it most."
"Knew each other how? What kind of favor?
" I'm halfway across the table now, knees pressed against his, every cell of my body straining forward.
"What do you owe him? What does any of this have to do with—" and my eyes go, traitorously, to the shelf, where the photograph from his nightstand now sits propped against a can of beans. "—with the woman in the photograph?"
Afon stands.
As soon as he does, I'm sure I've blown it again. He's going to storm out into the dark the way he did the night I said her name.
But he doesn't do that. He crosses to the shelf, and with one scarred finger, he nudges the photograph a half inch to the left, squaring it up.
"The how of your father and me," he says to the wall, "is bound up with her. And that's not tonight's story."
Later, I lie in the narrow bed on my side of where the Berlin Wall used to be, and I recalibrate.
Thirty years of my father shuffle and re-deal themselves behind my eyes. The cufflinks. The crepes. The late nights that made my mother scream in her sleep.
Good men keep secrets, Afon told me over that first cup of coffee, a hundred years ago. And his are going to break your heart.
I'd thought I was ready. I'd said, I'm a big girl. I can take it, with the confidence of a woman who'd never heard the name Viktor Reznik.
The swallow burns behind my eyelids. Mid-dive. Key in its beak. A bird that crosses the mountains and always finds its way home.
A foot away, close enough to touch, the man holding the rest of the truth breathes slow and even.
I'm a lawyer. I came up this mountain for discovery, for the full file, for one hundred percent of a story, and I am well-versed in all the ways to extract stories from even the most unwilling of storytellers.
But lying here in the dark, listening to him breathe, I'm no longer sure I want to leave with the truth…
… so much as I want to stay for the man keeping it.
Wolf sighs against my feet.
"Oh, shut up," I whisper at him with a scowl. "I already know."