Afon
The night before the wedding, I find Lukas in his study.
I don't knock. I never have. He's sitting in the same chair as always, a glass of whiskey at his elbow, the fire low. He doesn't look up when I come in. He just nods at the chair across from him, and I sit.
For a long time, neither of us says anything. That's how it's always been with Lukas and me. We can sit in a silence that would make other men squirm. We've sat in worse silences than this one, in worse rooms, with worse things on the floor between us.
"She'll do it," I say finally. "She'll marry me."
"I know," Lukas says. He sips his drink. "I never doubted it."
"I did."
He turns his head and looks at me with those dark gray eyes that have seen everything and forgiven almost none of it. "You doubt everything good that comes near you, Afon. You always have. It's why you're still alive, and it's also why you've never been happy."
I don't have anything to say to that. He's right, and we both know it. There's no point arguing with a man who's been reading me like a cheap paperback since before this girl was born.
"You shaved," he notes.
"For the wedding."
"Mm." He looks back at the fire. "You look like the man I knew twenty years ago."
I shake my head. "That man's dead."
"No," Lukas says. "He's just been hiding on a mountain."
I look at the fire. The coals flare and settle.
I wonder if my cabin is still there at all, or if all the ash has blown away or been covered by snow.
To think I was planning to live there for the rest of my days, and yet, now that it's gone, I don't feel one bit of sorrow for the loss.
The woman I'm going to marry came waltzing out of the woods and ruined my final peace, and all I want to do is beg for her forgiveness and let me spend the rest of my days with her instead.
Lukas doesn't say anything else. He doesn't have to. We just sit. Two old men and a fire and twenty years of silence we both know how to hold.
It's the most peace I've had in a long time.
"You told her about Bill," Lukas says.
"I told her everything."
"And she's still here."
"Against all odds," I agree. "For now. But only because she's got nowhere else to go."
Lukas turns the glass in his big, scarred hand. "You always did this. Tell yourself the worst version. It's a way of bracing for the blow." He sets the glass down. "But I watched her face when she talked about you, before all this. And I watched yours just now. So spare me the bullshit."
I wince, mostly because he isn't wrong.
"Yelena," says Lukas, inducing another wince from me, "is gone. That's harsh but true, brother. You don't have to carry that burden with you anymore. Your vow to her ended. And your vow to me ended, too. What happens next is up to you."
My thumb seeks the band without my permission. I make myself stop.
"I'll take it off when it's done," I growl. "When the war's over and Caroline knows everything and she's still standing in front of me. If she still is."
Lukas studies me a long moment. Then he stands, slow and enormous, his knees cracking the same way mine do now.
We're both old men. We were young men together, and we did terrible things, and now, we're old men, but the terrible things are still there, clinging to us with the last of their strength.
"Get some sleep, my friend," he says. "The war starts tomorrow. But first, you get married." He puts his hand on my shoulder on his way past, heavy and warm. "Try to let yourself have one good day. Before the bad ones come back."
He leaves. I hear his footsteps fade down the hall, and then a door, and then nothing.
I stay in the chair. The fire burns down. I don't sleep. I never do, not the night before something.
The satellite phone is in my jacket pocket.
I almost left it in the truck, almost handed it back to Lukas, almost did a hundred things with it.
But a man like me keeps the phone. It's habit.
It's reflex. It's the same reason I leave the key in the ignition and the same reason I built a cairn full of cash in the snow.
And then…
… it buzzes against my ribs.
I go very still.
Only one number ever called this phone, and that was Lukas. Lukas just walked out of this room. So who could this be?
No one else has the contact.
No one is supposed to have it.
I pull it out. The screen glows. UNKNOWN.
I answer it without speaking. I press it to my ear and I listen, because that's how you learn the most, by giving the other man nothing and letting him fill the silence.
At first, there's only static, the hiss of distance, of mountains and snow and miles.
Then a voice.
"Afon Satyrin," it purrs, familiar and horrible. "Playing the quiet game, eh? You always were good at that. The patient one."
Twenty years drop away. In the blink of an eye, I'm in a back room in Kingston, and there's a hungry, scrawny kid scarfing cold dumplings out of a takeout box, watching everything and saying nothing. Gervasii's hand on the kid's shoulder.
He's sharp, Afon. Sharper than both of us. We could use sharp.
"Reznik," I say.
"Bingo." He laughs. "Took you long enough to say it. You and Gervasii, you two never could just say the damn thing. Always dancing around it. Always the slow approach."
"How did you get this number?"
"Does it matter?" The static crackles. "There's no number that can't be bought if you know whose pocket it's sitting in." He pauses, then adds, "Though I'll admit, this one cost me. You had it tucked away somewhere expensive."
I growl, "What do you want?"
"I have something of yours," Reznik says.
"I don't have anything you could've stolen. You burned the only thing I owned. Congratulations."
"I'm not talking about the cabin, friend." He sounds entirely too pleased with himself, and that's how I know that whatever's coming next is very, very bad. "I have your nephew."
I keep the phone steady against my ear and my breathing level. Outwardly, I do not make a sound, but inside, something old and terrible cracks open, the same thing that cracked when I knelt in the snow at Saratoga Springs and looked at the place where her car went off the road.
"Matvei," I whisper.
"Bingo again," Reznik agrees. "You're good at this! Gervasii's boy is all grown up now. A lawyer, can you believe it? Soft hands. Fancy suit. He fought, though, when my men took him. I'll give him that. The blood runs true."
"He's not involved," I snarl. "He got out. He's got nothing to do with any of this."
"And yet…" Reznik lets that hang. "Funny how that works.
You think you can pull a thread out of the cloth and it'll just be free.
But the cloth remembers where the thread used to be.
" Another soft laugh. "You and Gervasii pulled me out of the gutter and stitched me into something.
You think I forgot? You think I don't remember every single one of you? "
My hand is white-knuckled around the phone. "You leave Matvei out of this. This is between you and me."
"Yes," Reznik says. "It is. Which is exactly why I called."
I close my eyes.
"Here's how it goes," he says, and now his voice is brisk, businesslike, the voice of a man who's run a thousand deals and knows that the moment after you have someone by the throat is the best time to set the terms. "You come to me.
Alone. No Lazarevs. No Bratva. No dog, though I hear the rabid little pup is out of commission anyway—shame, that.
I liked the look of him. You come alone, on foot, unarmed. "
"When?"
"Tomorrow. At noon." I can hear the smile on his end of the line.
"I understand you have somewhere to be at noon.
A wedding, I'm told? How nice. The Oglethorpe girl, eh?
Bill's daughter, all grown up and getting married to the man who put her father in the ground.
There's a poem in that somewhere. Pity that I never had the head for poems. Gervasii did. Though look where it got him."
The cold spreads from my chest down into my arms, my hands, my legs. He knows. He knows about the wedding, knows the hour, knows everything, which means he has eyes inside or near or close enough.
Which means none of us were ever as hidden as we thought.
"You come at noon," Reznik says, "and you walk into my camp with your hands open, and the boy walks out. He goes home to his pretty wife and his soft life and he never hears my name again. You have my word."
"The fuck is 'your word' worth, Reznik?" I grit out.
"It's all I've got, and it's better than yours ever was.
" The smile is gone now. "I'll say this last part even though it's unnecessary: If you don't come, or you bring company, or you're so much as a minute late, I will take Gervasii's son apart one piece at a time and mail him to you. Do you understand me?"
I understand him. God help me, I understand him completely, because I taught him, along with Gervasii. We made him in our own image and then we left him for dead. Since then, he's spent twenty years becoming the worst of everything we ever were.
"I'll come," I vow.
"I know you will." The warmth returns to his voice.
"You always were the loyal one, Afon. Gervasii ran his mouth and got himself killed, but you—you crawled back and paid and paid and paid.
You never could stand to lose anyone." He sighs, full of misplaced melancholy.
"Noon. At the camp where you found your girl. We'll be waiting."
The line goes dead.
I sit in the dark for a long time with the phone in my hand. The fire is almost out. The amber glass on the table still has a finger of liquor in it, Lukas's, untouched, and I slug it back without tasting it.
I meant what I said: I'm going, and I'm going alone.
There is no version of this where I bring Lukas's men. Reznik will have a watcher on the road. He'll know if I try to cheat, and then he'll kill Matvei and come for Caroline anyway, because the only thing that ever satisfies a man like Reznik is death heaped on top of death.
So I'll go alone. Maybe Reznik keeps his word and lets the boy walk. If it means that Matvei lives, that Caroline lives…
… then whatever happens to me is not so important anymore.
If there's anything I've learned, it's that you can't have a thing and keep it safe at the same time.
But you can die for it.
That is something a man can always do.
I stand. My knees crack and my back aches. I'm going to die an old man, in the snow, where I was always meant to die. There's a rightness to it that I can't argue with. A nice, clean full circle.
I go down the long halls on silent feet. The house sleeps around me. I find the room they gave Caroline. The door is unlocked, and it makes no noise when I ease it open.
She's asleep. The ivory wedding dress she chose today hangs on the closet door, pale in the dark. She's curled on her side under the blanket with one hand tucked beneath her cheek, looking like all the beauty in the world put together.
I stand over her for a moment. I don't touch her. If I touch her, I won't be able to do this.
I take the ring off.
It takes a few hard twists and jerks. Twenty years of wearing it has worn a groove, and the skin beneath is pale and soft, untouched by sun or weather. I hold it in my palm and gaze down at it.
I hope she knows what this means.
I take the folded granola bar wrapper out of my breast pocket—the one I picked out of a drainage ditch in Pike Hollow, the one I smoothed flat and carried fourteen miles down a mountain, the one I never told her about because there are no words for what it is, for why a man like me would keep a thing like that.
It's the first piece of her I ever held. A piece of garbage. The most valuable thing I own.
I set them both on the pillow beside her head. The ring and the wrapper. The past I thought defined me and the thing that showed me I could still have a future.
I look at her one more time.
"Eyes open," I whisper, so quiet it isn't even a sound. "On purpose. I chose you, too."
Then I go.
I walk out of the room, down the long halls, and out the great doors into the cold, which has always been waiting for me. The snow has stopped and the sky is clear and hard and full of stars.
I don't tell anyone, not Lukas, not the men, not anyone, because the only way to keep them safe is to keep them out of it, and the only way to keep her safe is to walk into the dark alone and not come back out.
I get in the car and find, as I expected, that the keys are waiting in the ignition. The engine turns over quickly and quietly.
Noon, Reznik said. I've got hours. Enough to drive north and walk into that camp at the appointed hour with my hands open and my heart already given away.
I'm sorry, I think to her. I love you, and I'm so sorry.
I put the car in gear and I drive north, toward the mountains and Reznik, toward the place where it started and the place where it ends.
I don't look back.