Chapter 15
NORA
The kitten has decided my husband is its mother, and my husband is letting it.
His name is Waffle. He came to Halo in a shoebox with his eyes still shut, the runt nobody thought would make it, so I brought him home to bottle-feed against Maggie's standing advice.
He fits in my two hands, gray, with a white bib and a tail like a pipe cleaner.
Out of everyone in this house of dangerous men, he has selected Isaak Radulov to love.
They both get up before dawn, and one morning they met in the dark kitchen over the question of who was feeding whom. Now a pakhan on the West Coast keeps a kitten in the breast pocket of a four-thousand-dollar jacket and won't admit it.
"He climbed in," Isaak says, when he catches me watching. "I'm not going to fight a cat in my own kitchen. I'd lose."
"You'd lose."
"He has no fear and nothing left to take from me. It's the only kind of opponent that frightens me." He says it flat, into his coffee, a gray head poking out of his lapel like a boutonniere that bites.
"You're going to be a wonderful father," I say, before I can stop it. "It's very upsetting."
"He's a cat."
"He's practice." I pour my coffee with my back to him so he can't see my face.
I came into this house carrying a grudge and a sealed box, ready to find the man who put my father in the ground.
The case I built against him is coming apart one ordinary morning at a time.
I don't know what scares me more, that I might be wrong about him, or that I want to be.
By dusk the warm part of the day is over and the chores are mine.
It's the hour I like best. The estate quiets, the men thin out, the long blue light comes down over the ridge where the property runs into state-park forest. I do the round.
Water the mare, who tells me with her whole sleepy face that I'm late.
Top off the dogs. Count the barn cats, feral things that won't be touched but show up for dinner like clockwork, four of them, gray, orange, the mean tortoiseshell I call Mrs. Doyle.
I count three. I count again. Three.
The fourth, the orange tom, is at the bottom of the yard near the fence line, low, flat to the ground, ears pinned, tail fat.
Waffle is tucked in my jacket where I carry him on chores.
Past the tom, in the gray scrub at the tree line, something moves that is the wrong size to be anything I want near my animals at nightfall.
I grew up on ground that backs onto wild country.
That's a coyote, and where there's one at dusk this close to a fence there are more.
"Hey," I say, loud, the way you make yourself big. I clap once, hard. "Get on. Go."
The orange tom bolts for the barn. Smart cat.
The coyote at the tree line doesn't get on, doesn't go.
It steps into the open, unhurried. Two more come out of the scrub behind it, then a fourth, fanning out along the slope, and I understand all at once that I have miscounted the danger by a wide margin.
Drought year. Hungry. Somewhere in the barn behind me, a one-pound kitten and a twenty-year-old mare who can't run.
The smart thing, the thing Maggie would scream at me to do, is to go inside and let the wild have a barn cat.
I don't go inside. I put my body in the gap where those teeth want to be and make myself the biggest, loudest, most annoying obstacle on this hillside, a grown woman screaming at the dark like it owes her money.
It works on three of them. It doesn't work on the big one.
The big one comes at an angle, fast, low, silent, not at me, around me, for the barn door and the soft things behind it. I turn to cut it off and I already know I'm too slow. This is the flaw that kills me.
Then the dark moves. It isn't me. It isn't the coyote.
Nothing above the waist. The fear takes a moment to catch up.
Isaak comes off the back step at a dead run with no shirt, no shoes, which means he was already up before I screamed.
He doesn't shout. He doesn't slow. He hits the coyote like the coyote is the one trespassing here, and they go down together in the dust in a knot of noise.
The sound that comes out of him isn't a sound I have ever heard a person make.
I grew up around hard men and harder horses. I have never seen anything like this.
He gets a forearm under the animal's throat, a hand in its scruff, and he doesn't flinch when it turns on him, when it gets his hands, his arms, opens him up in three places I can see from here, more I can't. The dogs hit the fight a half-second behind him, Borscht and Pelmeni gone from house-soft to what they were bred for in a single stride.
It's fast. It's so fast, four of them scattering back into the dark with their tails down, the big one not scattering at all, because Isaak won't let it.
It's over in under a minute. It's the longest minute of my life.
Then it's quiet, the wrong quiet, the dogs panting and circling, the coyotes gone, the creek still running like nothing happened.
Isaak is on one knee in the dust at the bottom of my yard, chest heaving, hands raw, head down.
Each breath drags in and out of him, loud, ragged. He doesn't look up right away.
When he does look up, he looks at me.
There is still an animal up behind his eyes. The fight hasn't gone out of him yet, it's right there at the surface, lethal, wide awake, not remotely safe. Every instinct I own says take a step back from a man with that much violence still running in him.
I take a step forward, because the violence is aimed. Every terrifying thing he just did, he did between me and the dark. The look he gives me now goes through me low and total, puts heat between my legs with blood still on the ground.
"You came out with no shoes," I hear myself say. My voice has gone to gravel.
"You went out with no sense." He's still breathing hard. The animal is still there, want climbing up underneath it, his pale eyes gone dark in the blue light, dropping to my mouth and back up like he can't help it either. "You put yourself between a pack and a barn. For a cat."
"For four cats. And the mare. And." I stop. The rest of it's and you, which I am not ready to say with my heart going like a trip-hammer.
"And?" He says it soft, finishing my sentence for me, because he heard exactly where it was going.
"Don't," I warn him.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to look at me like that and I can't have it right now, you're bleeding everywhere." Waffle is a small warm lump against my sternum, somehow asleep through all of it, the one thing keeping me from doing something I can't take back in a dirt yard over a dead coyote.
He gets up, slow, and comes the three steps to me, then stops closer than he needs to, close enough that the heat is coming off him in the cold, close enough that I have to tip my head back.
He's a wall of bare skin gone to gooseflesh in the dusk, ribs still working, a long scrape down one side I want to put my hands on, his torn hands hanging at his sides because he won't lift them to me bleeding.
I want his hands on me. He won't put them there. Those two facts are doing more damage to my concentration than the coyotes did.
Neither of us says anything. The almost of it's so loud I can hear it over the dogs. One of us moves an inch, it's done, we both know it. The stillness between us is louder than anything we could do with our clothes off, here, in a dirt yard at the end of the world.
Waffle wakes up, yawns, digs four sets of needle claws into my collarbone. The sound I make is half pain, half a startled laugh I can't swallow. Whatever was about to happen snaps, and it's gone.
Isaak looks down at the kitten in my jacket. He looks at his own ruined hands. He starts, very quietly, to laugh, the one I've only gotten out of him twice, shoulders going, and it's the best thing the West Coast has ever produced.
"Inside," he says. "Now. Both of you."
"You're the one bleeding," I tell him.
"I'm aware."
"You're going to let me look at those." I nod at his hands.
"I'm going to wash them and forget about it."
"You're going to sit on a stool and let me look at those, or I'm calling Dr. Anand and telling her the pakhan lost a fight to a dog.
" I'm already steering him toward the door with a hand flat on a back that's still too hot, still trembling under the calm, and he goes.
Nothing tells me how rattled he is more than that. "A medium dog."
"It was a coyote."
"I'll let her decide."
I clean his hands at the kitchen island because he won't go to the doctor, and I won't let him not be tended. We bicker about it the whole time. The bickering is the surest sign we're fine.
"This needs Dr. Anand," I say, turning his right hand under the light. It's bad. Not stitches-bad, mostly, but the heel of his palm is opened up and there's a puncture between two knuckles that I don't love. "This needs a tetanus shot and probably a person with a medical degree."
"It needs soap, water, and for you to stop fussing." He's sitting very still on the stool, watching me work, his eyes gone wide and fixed on my hands like he's bracing for something. "I've had worse than a dog bite."
"It's a coyote bite, and don't tell me what you've had worse than, I'll lose my evening.
" I run the warm water over the puncture.
He doesn't so much as twitch, this man who flinches at nothing.
I dab it dry, reach for the kit Maggie made me keep in my truck, the one I never thought I'd open in a billionaire's marble kitchen. "Hold still."
"I am holding still."
"Hold stiller." I get antiseptic on a cotton round. "You know there are men whose entire job is to stand between you and exactly this. Big men. Armed. They were right here."
"They were watching the gate."
"And you were watching a cat."
"I was watching you scream at a hillside in the dark." He says it without heat, like a simple fact about his evening. "It seemed more urgent."