Chapter 7
The summer turned. I made a decision somewhere in the long warm middle of it without ever deciding it, the way you find yourself already walking before you’ve chosen the direction.
I was not going to file the hinge.
More than that — I was going to make sure my father never got it from anyone, which meant the only safe place in the world for Kerra Conti was somewhere her family wasn’t, and mine couldn’t reach.
Which meant leaving, which meant a thing no son of Aleksander Zorander had ever done and survived.
I started, quietly, to build the leaving.
An account he knew nothing about, fed from the cut I skimmed running the eastern district, withdrawals small enough that nothing flagged.
A second passport through a man in Queens who didn’t ask questions.
I built it the way I built everything, in careful pieces, and I told no one.
For the first time in my life, the careful work was for me — for us — instead of for him.
It should have felt like freedom. It felt like standing on a high ledge with my back to a long drop, building the thing that would either save us or be the proof, when they found it, of exactly how far I’d fallen.
Kerra knew something had shifted in me. Of course she did. She read me the way she read everything — directly, without protection.
“You’ve gotten quiet,” she said one night, the good kind of quiet to her, the kind she didn’t yet know to be afraid of.
We were on the roof of my building, which had become a place we went when the planetarium was closed and she still needed the sky.
She’d brought a blanket, a thermos, and her endless patient willingness to explain the universe to a man who only asked questions so he could keep her talking.
“Not bad-quiet. Settled-quiet. Like you put something down.”
“Maybe I did,” I said.
“What.”
I almost told her then. The whole truth sat right at the back of my teeth — I’m a Zorander, my father is the man your grandfather has been at war with for six years.
I was sent to use you and I did, and I’m building us a way out because the alternative is your family in the ground.
I can’t, I can’t be the one who does that to you.
It was all there. I could feel the shape of it, the relief of it, the way naming it would have set something down in me that had been crushing me since January.
But naming it would also have put the truth into her hands, and Kerra did not know how to hold a truth and not act on it.
She’d have gone to her grandfather. She’d have tried to make peace, or warn him, or simply could not have looked at me the same way across a dinner table while pretending nothing was wrong — because she believed that naming a thing honestly was the first step to deciding how to live with it, and a woman like that cannot un-know that her lover is her family’s executioner-in-waiting and carry on.
The truth would have moved through her family like a current, and my father had eyes in places I couldn’t see.
The moment the Conti’s started behaving like people who knew, he’d have known they knew, and he’d have moved early, and the leaving I was building would have come to nothing.
That was the reasoning. It was even partly true.
The rest of it — the part I didn’t look at — was that I was a coward, and that telling her meant watching her face change. I would rather have died than watch Kerra Conti look at me and understand what I was.
“Z.” She’d gone still beside me, her wolf up in her eyes, reading me the way she read the sky — for the thing that moved when everything else held. “You were about to say something.”
“I was thinking about what you said. At the planetarium.” I heard myself reach for the exit and take it.
“The far side of the moon. The whole side of yourself nobody sees.” I looked at her, and I let her see as much of it as I could afford, which was the wanting and not the reason.
“I’ve got a side like that. I’m going to show it to you.
Soon. I just need to get a few things in place first.”
Something crossed her face — not suspicion, exactly. The patient attention of a person who has been handed a door, told not yet, and has decided to trust the not yet against her own better instincts.
“Okay,” she said. “When you’re ready.” She leaned her head back against my shoulder and looked up at the sky.
“But Z — whatever it is. I want you to know there’s no version of it that sends me away.
I’ve thought about it. I’ve watched you decide a hundred times that I’d run if I knew the real you, and I’ve decided I won’t, in advance, so you can stop spending so much energy being afraid of it.
” A pause. “Whatever you are. I already chose it. Months ago.”
Whatever you are. She didn’t know how literally she’d said it.
Or maybe she half-did — maybe her wolf had been telling her something about mine that her mind hadn’t caught up to.
The way two wolves who are made for each other carry a knowledge their human halves take years to admit.
I felt the bond pull taut between us on that roof, unnamed, both of us nineteen and twenty-two and stupid with it, her wolf answering mine in a language neither of us would say out loud for thirty-four more years.
I had one chance, that night, to be the man she’d already decided to forgive.
I let it go. I kissed her instead of telling her. She exhaled against my mouth the way she always did, and the truth went back down behind my teeth where I’d kept it all summer. I told myself soon, when we’re safe, when we’re somewhere he can’t reach, I’ll tell her everything then.
There was no then. I’d had the only then there was going to be, on a roof, with the sky over us and her telling me she’d already chosen. I’d used it to buy myself a kiss instead of giving her the truth that might have let her save her own family.
That’s the one I carry hardest. Not the lie I told. The truth I had teed up and ready and swallowed, because I was a coward, on the one night she’d opened the door herself and stood in it and told me I was already through.
I bought the ring two days later.
Onyx and diamonds, from a jeweler off Odim Street, because she wore dark colors, laughed at things that sparkled, and I wanted something that was both.
I carried it in my coat for a week before I could look at it without my hands going unsteady, checking it was there and then checking again, the way you do with a thing you’re afraid to lose.
I bought the tickets the same week. Two, first-class, Stockholm, an open return I had no intention of using. I had enough put aside by then to set us up properly — enough to disappear and stay disappeared, which was the only kind of disappearing that would keep us breathing.
I had a plan, a ring, a passport, an account, and a girl who’d told me on a roof that she’d already chosen me sight unseen.
What I didn’t have, yet, was the thing that would take the decision out of my hands entirely, and make the leaving not a choice, but the only door left.
She told me about that on a Tuesday.