Chapter 4 #3
"He said we go to water next," Pavel said, when the outboard's noise gave them cover to speak. "He knows what you are. He'll get a boat and he'll learn the channels and it'll take him time but not enough. The water was safe for one night. It won't be safe for three."
Luka steered them into the marsh, his jaw set, the cut on his arm dripping black in the dark.
"Then the road has to open faster," he said. "And it has to open for two."
Pavel closed his eyes. There it was, said plainly, the thing he'd spent the afternoon not-saying and Luka had just laid on the table between them like a landed fish.
For two. Because Vadim's man had seen them together now — two shapes in a lane, a big one and a small one, a diver and a dead man — and that was the end of Luka's furniture.
Proximity was the whole of the sin; Pavel had told him so in the shop and the shop felt like a year ago.
Luka Beridze was a marked man now too, marked by nothing worse than pulling a killer into the dark instead of letting him die, and there was no going back to the boat and the yard and the ordinary grief, not anymore, and Pavel had done that to him.
Pavel had walked into another Beridze's life and taken the shape of it away.
The guilt should have been the whole of what he felt.
It wasn't. Underneath the guilt, in the place he'd sealed off for two years and longer, the small animal thing that had lifted its head in the shop was fully awake now and it was not sorry, it was glad, God forgive him, glad that the door back to Luka's safe furniture life had closed, because it meant Luka was in this with him now, tied to him by the one knot Pavel understood — a shared death sentence — and Pavel had wanted, since the grey morning under the borrowed blanket, not to do this alone.
"You should hate me for it," Pavel said. "I've made you into what I am. A dead man. You had a life and I—"
"You didn't make me do anything." Luka cut the engine as they came up on the mooring, and the sudden quiet was enormous, just the water and the reeds and the two of them breathing.
He turned in the dark and found Pavel's face, and his voice had gone down to the almost-gentle place that Pavel had stopped being afraid of and started being undone by.
"I had a wall and a way over it and I chose the dark.
You didn't choose it for me. I'm tired of people acting like I don't get to choose things.
" A silence. The boat rocked. "Two years I chose the grave.
Every day, I chose it. This morning I woke up under a blanket you put on me and I couldn't find the man I built the grave to hate, and tonight I had thirty seconds to be free of the whole thing and I spent them keeping you alive instead.
So don't tell me what I've been made into.
I know what I chose. I chose it with my hands. "
Pavel sat in the dark of the boat he'd been afraid of and looked at the man who kept, impossibly, choosing him over the clean thing, and felt the last of the plan — the one man, one name, one road, the solitary disappearing he'd been walking toward since Baltimore like a penance — come apart in his hands and drift off on the black water.
"Then it's two," he said. His voice wasn't steady.
He let it not be. "Two names. Two roads that are one road.
And you understand what that means, Beridze — it means there's no version where I hand myself to the finder to save you, and no version where you hand me to your cousin to end it, because we're the same knot now, we come apart or we don't come apart together.
" He made himself say the rest, the true and terrible rest. "It means I have to start trying to live.
And I don't know how. I unlearned it a long time ago. "
Luka reached out in the dark — slow, telegraphed, a man reaching toward something that might go off — and put his big scarred hand flat against the side of Pavel's neck, over the pulse, where a blade goes, and left it there.
Warm. Not gripping. Holding, the way you hold a line you don't intend to let run.
Pavel's whole body wanted to flinch from it, and didn't. A hand at his throat should have tripped the oldest, clearest signal his training owned — threat, act, end it — and instead the pulse under Luka's palm did something traitorous and slow.
He had given this throat away in a yard, freely, as a thing he was finished with.
He had not known there was another way to hand it over.
He was learning it now, in the cold, badly, his heart going under the palm of a man who had every reason on earth to close that hand and simply rested it there instead.
"I know a little about the cold," Luka said. "I'll teach you to breathe in it."
And Pavel, who had offered this man his throat four days and a lifetime ago and meant it as an ending, let the brother of the man he'd killed hold him by it in the dark — and, for the first time since he was a boy being taught which door in a room to watch, did not count a single exit.