Afon
It's so cold and dark that no human in their right mind should be out here.
But I'm glad to be. Hell, it's almost a relief.
Because out here, I don't have to look at her face.
When I emerge from the diner, Wolf rises from where he's been lying against the building wall, tail thumping once against the planks. I crouch and scratch behind his ears.
What a creature he is. He asks for nothing and gives everything. I take a moment to cup his ears and let him nuzzle my chin. I need it every bit as much as he does.
"You're the smart one," I inform him. "Always have been. Though I think you know that by now."
He licks my face in agreement.
Through the steamed glass, I can see Caroline in the booth, hunched over her cold pancakes, both hands wrapped around a mug she isn't drinking from. The line of her shoulders is wrong.
I put that there. We're not together. Two words is all it took to break her spirit.
I did it to avoid danger. That's what I tell myself, at least.
But the reality of it is far uglier than that.
The truth is that I am falling. I have been for a long time now. I've probably been falling since the moment she fell, right into my life. Every night with her arm across my chest and her hair under my chin, I've fallen a little further.
Every time she calls me a jackass and means it like a love letter, I fall a little further.
And when Barb said married, for one second—one godforsaken second—I let myself see it. A future. Wide. Warm. Bright.
I saw the whole thing in the time it took my heart to beat once, and then I cut it down, because that's what you do with things that can hurt you.
I had that. Twenty-one years ago, I had that, in a borrowed suit at city hall, with Gervasii standing witness and a woman in a blue dress telling me I was too ugly to deserve her. I had the warm room and the future, and I thought I'd have it forever.
But forever only lasted a year. The world took all of it back on a cold, lonely county road outside Saratoga Springs.
Nobody in this life gets that twice. Nobody. You get one shot, and if you're a man like me, you're lucky to even get that. If you do get a taste of it, like I did, it doesn't last long. It's ripped away and leaves behind only a thin bronze ring.
Well, that plus the nightmares. Those are here to stay, too.
So no. I will not picture the crib. I will not let myself want what I'm not allowed to keep.
Caroline Oglethorpe is going to walk away from this mountain one day soon, and I am going to let her, because that's the kindest thing I have ever done for anyone, and because wanting her to stay is the most selfish.
I straighten up. My side screams where the graze has reopened twice now, but I embrace it. Pain doesn't lie about what it wants.
Then, when I feel the familiar steel in my soul again, I reach into my jacket and pull out the satellite phone.
A quarter-pound of plastic and circuitry. So little and yet so much. I've carried it like a tumor for days, and kept it buried under a cairn for months before that, because the number stored in it is the devil's number. Not because Lukas Lazarev is evil; he's not.
But because, if I call him, it's a one-way ticket to hell.
So I'm not calling Lukas.
I power the phone on and the screen shines blue-white against the storm. It takes a moment to find a signal. Up here, even in a town, the sky has to cooperate.
Then the bars climb, one, two, three. I scroll past the single stored number and key in another from memory, one I haven't dialed in years but never forgot.
It rings four times. I'm preparing myself for voicemail when the line clicks.
"Yeah?" It's a man's voice, deep and lazy. There's music behind him, jazz with a saxophone, and the clink of glass. A bar, or a kitchen, late.
"It's Afon."
A pause. A surprised breath. The music dims—he must be moving somewhere private. When he speaks again, he doesn't sound so lazy and distracted anymore.
"Afon Satyrin." He whistles. "Well, fuck me sideways. I'd just about put you in the ground in my head, old man. Figured you finally went and got eaten by a bear up in those mountains."
"Not yet."
"Damn shame."
But there's warmth under it. There always was, with this one. Alexei Ivanov—or whatever he's calling himself this decade—was a fixer before I left and he's a fixer still. A man who knows things, moves things, keeps the kind of ledger you can't subpoena. He owes me from a long time ago.
"Don't I know it," I drawl.
"What's wrong? I know you aren't calling to catch up. I only ever get a ring from you when shit's on fire."
"Something's definitely fucking burning." I watch the snow scribble sideways through the lot. "Listen to me. I need to know where Lukas is. Lukas and his people. Kir. Matvei."
He pauses again. Careful, as always. I can hear him deciding how much it's safe to know and how much it's safe to say. That's a skill that's kept Alexei alive for thirty years.
"Why," he questions, "would a man who walked away from the Lazarev Bratva and went to live in a tree want to know where Lukas Lazarev is?"
"Because I might need him, and I need to know what I'm working with before I decide whether I'd rather take a bullet or ask for a favor."
Alexei laughs, a short, surprised bark. "There's the Afon I remember.
" A clink, ice in a glass. "Alright. Off the record, for old times, because I still owe you for that thing in Newark we don't talk about.
You're in luck and you're out of luck both.
They're gone. All of them. Lukas, his boy, your nephew—they took a trip, what, a week back?
Maybe ten days. The whole circus. Took the wives, too. "
"Wives, too, huh?"
It's still bizarre to think of the three of them as married off.
Matvei, Kir, Lukas… they were ravenous wolves, each in their own way.
Matvei the playboy, Kir the prodigal son, Lukas the domineering patriarch.
No woman could ever be enough for any of them.
Until, one by one, each met their match. Funny how that works.
Alexei chuckles. "Wives. Crazy shit, right? The world has simply stopped making sense, brother. Anyhow, yeah, all six of 'em are gone for some R that one's still at the counter, working on his pie.
This is someone new. He must have snuck in while I was on the phone. I didn't hear the bell. Not sure how I missed it.
Caroline's posture has changed. She's sitting up straight now, both hands flat on the table, smiling politely. And—fuck me, is she laughing?
I'm in motion at once. Wolf is up and at my heel without a sound. I pound across the lot through the snow, my hand drifting toward the small of my back where the Makarov rides warm against my spine.
I don't know who this motherfucker is. He could be nobody. A trucker, a local, a lonely man in a storm who saw a pretty woman alone and decided to try his luck.
But I haven't lived this long by assuming the best.
I put my hand on the door, and the bell jingles, and the man in the canvas coat turns his head toward the sound.