Chapter Fifty-Four
Fifty-four
The Italian soldier stood facing her. He was scrawny from hunger, black-eyed with loathing.
Katerina did not dare move. Her arms went protectively over the swell of her stomach. They were not far from the ridge where she had first set eyes on Stefanos. Those days felt otherworldly to her now, trails of a dissolving dream.
“Buonaséra,” he said.
She would not speak to him, not after what he had done to her, to her sister.
Katerina turned away, but Lio reached out a hand and clamped it on her wrist, pulling her around to face him.
He was still strong—far stronger than she.
She could smell alcohol on his breath and wondered where he had found such contraband, whom he’d hurt in order to get hold of it.
“Leave me alone,” she said with as much authority as she could muster.
Lio sneered at the Greek words and spat on the ground. She watched as he slowly slid his pipe into the pocket of his army-issue coat and drew out another object. A blade. Katerina’s breath caught in her throat as she looked at it, gleaming in the thin light of the half-moon.
Lio gestured behind her, his meaning clear. Lie down, submit, allow me to do what I want.
Katerina did not move. She pictured her sister, frail and sick, waiting for her to return; she saw Stefanos, somewhere on the mainland, fighting for freedom; she imagined their baby, who would surely die with her if she did not succumb to her enemy’s demands.
Yet she could not bring herself to cower; her limbs would not obey her.
Lio raised the saber, drawing it slowly through the air, showing her how she would meet her end.
She could give in to him, lie back and let him crawl across her as an insect would, although Katerina suspected that he would murder her whether she did so or not.
Better to die undefiled than give him the satisfaction of having bettered her.
“No,” she said, the word loud, unequivocal.
A breeze tore across the hillside, whispering its awe.
“No?” Lio’s brow tugged upward, a slug caught on a hook. The sigh he relinquished was one of disappointment. He had a particular game in mind, and she was in no mood to play.
The baby kicked, and Katerina glanced down, her hand tightening on her abdomen.
“No,” she said again, and with a sudden burst of energy, she pushed him hard on the chest. Caught off guard, Lio stumbled backward.
It was enough.
Katerina put her head down and ran, ignoring the scream of pain in her joints, the burn in her lungs, the fear that snapped at her heels.
The house was in sight, a glow of amber light in a downstairs window, salvation within grasping distance.
She cried out as Lio thundered toward her, felt his boot connect with the back of her legs, saw the glint of his blade as she fell, tumbling over and over.
He loomed above her, straggly hair obscuring the stars, malevolent grin opening wide.
Katerina groped desperately at the ground, gathering nothing but wet turf until at last she found something.
She had one chance, only one. Katerina took it, hurling the small rock at Lio’s head as hard as she could. A crunch sounded, then a grunt as he staggered backward, falling to one knee.
She crawled onto all fours, transformed, a snarling wildcat hunting for prey.
Lio touched his head. A damp patch of blood was spreading, and his bewilderment turned instantly to fury.
With a great roar, he swung the saber, missing her face by a mosquito’s breath.
Katerina ducked away, flattening herself into the mud as he advanced.
She raised an arm, the hot fire of the blade slicing through her flesh.
It cut from wrist to elbow, and she cried out in pain.
He would slice her into pieces where she lay; they would find her corpse in the dawn light, battered and bloody, the baby dead inside her.
Stefanos’s words came to her: You must use your head, not your body.
But he was not here. Nobody was. She was the one who must protect their child.
Before Lio could raise the saber again, Katerina surged up from the ground. A raw cry tore from her throat as she hurled herself at him, driving him backward. He hit the ground with a sickening thud, air ripped from his lungs.
Her breath rasped in her ears.
Lio twitched, his legs kicking out like a severed puppet, and then nothing. Stillness.
Katerina approached slowly, kicking away the blade he had dropped into the dirt.
The rain began to grow heavier, droplets streaming across his frozen cheeks, his open mouth, his staring eyes.
She dropped to her knees, saw the rock she had thrown at him lying beneath his head, understood that it was over.
“No,” she said quietly—to him, to the world, to whatever god may have been watching—“means no.”
Another sound came, the scuffling of feet, hushed voices.
Katerina scrambled upright. It was too late to run, or to hide.
The Italians would not believe it had been an accident.
They would take her to the square in Chora and shoot her.
With a sob, she bent and raised the saber, the blade trembling in her hands.
Two figures emerged on the shadowy pathway, and she charged forward, letting out a wail of relief when she saw who had come.
Phaedra, her cloak swaddled around her, the young Esther by her side.
“We heard screams,” Phaedra said. “What has ha—” She fell silent as Katerina stepped aside.
“He was going to rape me,” she said. “Kill me. I pushed him. I did not— It was not—”
“He is dead?” Esther asked, her tone measured, curious not afraid.
“Yes.” Katerina whispered.
Esther nodded. The moonlight had painted her eyes into something feline.
“Good,” she said. “I am glad.”
Katerina glanced at Phaedra.
“We cannot leave him here,” her friend said. “If the soldiers find him…”
“I know.” Katerina agreed. “How shall I do it?”
Phaedra put a hand on her arm.
“éla,” she said. “We will do it. There is a cart. I will fetch it and some cloth to put around the body.”
She turned and went back down the hillside, leaving Katerina and Esther alone. The young Jewish girl was crouched beside the body, examining the wound. With careful fingers, she eased the rock from beneath Lio’s smashed skull and held it out.
“Take this,” she said with quiet authority. “Hide it or throw it away.”
The girl was only fourteen. How could she be so calm?
Katerina’s hands would not stop shaking.
Blood ran from the cut on her arm, dripping onto the earth.
She took the stone, weighed it against the flimsy blade she still held.
The enemy had come from a foreign land with a foreign weapon, and Folegandros, her island, had provided the only tool required to defeat him.
She heard the crunch of wheels. Phaedra was back, pushing a small cart.
“Take his feet,” Esther said. “If you drag him from his head, he will soil himself.”
“How do you know this?” Katerina asked as they moved into position. It was difficult for her to maneuver around her bump, but she managed to grab Lio’s boots.
“My father was an undertaker,” Esther explained. “I would help him sometimes with the bodies.”
“Is it best that we bury him?” Phaedra asked.
The girl shook her head.
“If there is no body, there is no crime,” she said firmly. “A buried body can be discovered. No, we must put him into the water. Let the sea take him.”
It took them some time to lift Lio into the cart and longer still to make the slow journey out to the highest cliff point. Esther ran ahead, checking for patrolling soldiers, but the island was theirs, clear but for the scraggly outline of trees, the humpbacked line of low walls.
Katerina threw the rock in first. She did not hear it land. It was impossible to hear anything but the roar of the water, the whistling of the wind, the irregular beat of her frightened heart.
“We tell nobody,” she said, turning first to Phaedra, then Esther. Each gave her a solemn nod.
“Not even our families.”
“What family?” Esther said. She kneeled beside the cart and began to unbutton the dead man’s coat.
“What are you doing?” Phaedra asked in alarm. “Leave him.”
Esther tugged hard at something, rocking back onto her heels.
“Take these,” she said to Katerina.
Dogs tags, a gold cross on a fine chain.
“Hide them, bury them, burn them—do whatever you must. They cannot remain on the body. If the tide brings him back to shore…”
“I understand.” Katerina slid both into the pocket of her skirt.
She had planned to throw the saber off the cliff, though that seemed foolish now.
It had been his, just as the other items had been his.
She would keep it. Bury it in the garden of the house that the brothers had abandoned. Nobody would find it there.
“Should we say a prayer?” Phaedra murmured.
Katerina looked at Esther.
“No,” she said.
Another hour passed before Katerina made it home.
She had left the house as one woman and returned as another. Would her sister know? she wondered as she hung up her father’s coat. Would she take one look and see her for what she was now—a killer?
But Leni did not look.
She did not speak.
In the time Katerina had been gone, her sister had died.