Chapter 3 #3
Luka laughed. It cracked in the middle. "You'll keep the watch."
"There's one way onto this boat and I'm sitting between you and it.
I can't swim, so I'm not going anywhere in the dark over the side; you've made that a very effective leash without meaning to.
" The dark eyes were steady. "You have my knife in your pocket.
Take anything else on the boat that worries you and put it under you.
I'll wake you if the water so much as changes its mind.
You can hate me awake in the morning. Sleep now. "
"You could kill me in my sleep. Easy. It's what you are."
"Yes."
"And I'm supposed to—"
"You're supposed to do the math you've been doing since the yard, same as me.
" Something almost gentle came into the flat voice, and it was worse than the flatness, it undid something in Luka's chest that the flatness had left alone.
"I've had a dozen chances to run tonight and a dozen to make you finish it and I've taken none of them.
I keep telling you to kill me and I keep not making you.
Whatever I am, Beridze — and it's bad, it's the worst thing you've ever had in your hands — I am not, tonight, going to hurt the one person left alive who knew my— who knew Dato.
Now sleep, or I'll have to watch you fall down, and I've had enough of watching men run out of road. "
The one person left alive who knew Dato. Not your brother. Not a job. Dato. The Georgian weight of it again, the name said like a name.
He should refuse. Every hard-won rule he had said refuse — you do not close your eyes with a killer between you and the door, you do not hand your throat to the hand that took your brother's, there was no version of this his cousin would forgive and no version he forgave in himself.
And under all the rules was the flat animal fact that he was going down whether he chose it or not, the battery empty, and that some part of him he didn't want to look at had already done the sum: that if Raskov wanted him dead he'd had it a hundred quiet times tonight and hadn't reached for it once.
That part of Luka was tired too. That part of him wanted, obscenely, to lie down in the presence of the one man alive who understood the exact dimensions of what he'd lost.
Luka lay down on the berth he'd built with his own hands for the version of his life where he was no one, and he put Raskov's folded knife under the flat of his own hand, and he watched the killer sit motionless between him and the only door, hurt and open-palmed and awake, and he thought, this is insane, this is the most insane thing I have ever done, he'll kill me or he'll be gone or both, and the crisis battery went all the way flat and took him down under the surface before he'd finished the thought.
***
He came up hard, the way you come up from deep, disoriented, grabbing.
Grey light in the cabin. The heater ticking low.
The knife still under his hand. The tide had turned twice while he was under; he could feel it in the way the boat lay.
He'd slept — really slept, hours of it, the black dreamless kind he hadn't had in two years — and for one long second he didn't know where he was or why the light was wrong, and then he turned his head and saw.
Raskov was exactly where he'd been. Back against the hull, between Luka and the door.
Awake — Luka could see the gleam of it, the dark eyes open and tracking, the man who never stopped watching still watching after a whole night of it.
He'd found a blanket somewhere in the lockers and put it over Luka at some point in the dark; Luka could feel the weight of it now, wool, smelling of diesel and salt.
He hadn't run. He hadn't reached for the knife or the throat.
He'd sat between a sleeping man and the water for a whole cold night and kept the watch, and put a blanket on the man who'd sworn to kill him, and the grey light showed Luka the grey in the killer's face, the toll of the wound and the sleeplessness, a man running on the same empty battery Luka had just refilled at his expense.
Luka lay there under the borrowed weight of the blanket and looked at him, and could not find him.
Could not find the hand. The monster at the end of the two-year road.
He looked and looked and there was only a hurt man who'd stood a night's watch over his enemy's sleep, and Luka understood, lying there in the grey with his brother's killer having just kept him safe through the dark, that the road he'd been on for two years had quietly ended somewhere in the night, and he had no map at all for the country he'd woken up in.
"You didn't run," Luka said. His voice came out wrecked.
"No," Raskov said.
"Why."
And the killer looked at him across the small grey cabin with his whole night's exhaustion open on his face for once, nothing sealed, nothing filed, and said the truest and most dangerous thing either of them had said yet:
"I'm tired of running from the only place I've ever wanted to stay."