Chapter 33
Artem
I SAW HER IN THE DOORWAY two seconds before Star ducked.
The reflection in the glass of the jade figure's case, a shape moving in the gallery entrance, the silhouette I've known for eleven years, except the posture was wrong.
The casual lean gone. The gallery-curator ease gone.
A combat stance. Weight forward. Right hand already moving under the left side of her blouse.
Star's face was in my hands. I mouthed the word.
She went down without a question. Without a hesitation. Because she trusts me, and the trust of this girl has been the single most terrifying and humbling thing I've experienced in thirty-four years.
Mila cleared the doorway with the gun already raised. Aimed at the space where Star had been standing one second earlier. I was already moving. Two steps, body between the weapon and the girl crouched on the floor, my hand closing on Mila's wrist as the gun swung toward me instead.
The struggle lasted two seconds. Her elbow found the scar on my ribs. She knew where it was, she'd known for eleven years, and the pain was a white flash that I processed and discarded because pain is not new and this isn't the pain that matters.
My hand twisted her wrist. The gun rotated between us. Her finger found the trigger.
One shot. The sound enormous in the gallery, bouncing off glass cases and stone walls, and then Mila's grip loosened and I took the weapon and she swayed and her hand went to her side, below her ribs, and when she pulled it away her fingers were dark.
She glanced at her hand. Then at me.
Then she sank. Gradual. Knees first, hip, shoulder against the display case nearest the door. The glass held her weight. She settled against it with her hand pressed to the wound and the warm spotlights falling across her face, and the face I was looking at was one I'd never seen.
The warmth stripped away. The smile stripped away.
The practised generosity she'd perfected in bathroom mirrors for eleven years, all of it gone.
This face was still. Stripped. The real one.
The one underneath everything she'd ever shown me, and I understood, in the seconds it took her to bleed on the gallery floor, that I'd never known her. Never. In eleven years, never once.
I dropped to my knees in front of her.
"The witness. The name, Mila."
Her eyes found mine. Calm in a way that had nothing to do with peace and everything to do with a woman who'd made her calculations and finished them.
"I would have done anything for you." Not an accusation. A statement of fact. Delivered like an intelligence report: clear, exact, final. "Anything. And that's what they used."
"Who?"
"You'll find them. You were always going to find them. I just..." A breath that cost her. "I just wanted to be standing beside you when you did."
"The name."
"I can't."
"You can."
"No." Her eyes were dimming, the light going out of them in increments, like spotlights being switched off one by one.
"I can't because I never had it. They never gave me the name.
They gave me tasks. Instructions. They knew—" A wet breath.
"They knew if I had the name I'd trade it for you. So they never gave it to me."
Her hand lifted from the wound. Not to press harder. To reach. Toward me. Her fingers, dark with her own blood, stretching across the twelve inches of gallery floor between us, and her hand found my knee and rested there and the weight of it was nothing, less than nothing, less than a handkerchief.
Her eyes closed.
I stayed on my knees. My hand covered hers on my knee, and the blood soaked warm between my fingers, and I thought about the person behind all of this.
The one who had found a woman with eleven years of loyalty and a love she couldn't speak and had turned it into a weapon.
Had given her tasks instead of names. Had used her devotion like a blade.
Pointed it, aimed it, let it do the cutting while they stayed clean.
That person had more blood on their hands than Mila ever did. She was the instrument. They were the hand.
One day that hand would pay.
But for now.
I closed her eyes with my thumb. One gesture. Touch once.
I stood.
I turned.
Star flew into my arms.
She flew. From wherever she'd been crouched on the gallery floor, across the space between us, and her body hit mine with the force of a person who has been holding still through terror and has run out of still and the only direction left is toward him.
Her arms wrapped around my chest and her face pressed into my shirt and she held on with the grip of a girl whose hands are the most valuable thing about her, four hundred euros an hour of trained skill and strength, and every newton of it was aimed at keeping me close.
I waited for questions. She always had questions. What happened and why and who and what do we do now. She was the girl who asked everything, who asked what did I do at a closed door and why don't you sleep on the upper deck and was Curtis using the right pressure. She always asked.
No questions came.
She just held on.
Her body was trembling against mine, fine shudders running through her like aftershocks, and my arms tightened around her, one hand at the small of her back, the other cradling her head against my chest.
My lips pressed the top of her head.
I love you.
Her arms tightened around my waist. A silent answer in return.
I love you, too.