Chapter 5
Combustion
The second night on the boat, Luka tried to make him a monster again.
It wasn't a plan. He'd have said, if anyone had asked, that he had no idea what he was doing, and that would have been a lie and the truth both.
What he knew was that they had one more night on the water, maybe two, before the finder learned the channels; that they were sealed into thirty feet of hull with a diesel heater and a single lamp and nowhere to put their eyes that wasn't the other man; and that somewhere in the last four days the thing in Luka's chest had gone wrong, had slipped its moorings, and now every time Raskov moved in the small yellow light — reached for the kettle, turned a page of the tide book he'd found and was reading like a man learning a foreign language, pressed a hand absent to the stitches in his side — Luka wanted, and the wanting was so far past permission, so deep into the ground where Dato lay, that Luka thought it might actually kill him.
He'd spent the whole day moving them deeper into the marsh, into a blind creek even he had to feel his way into by the set of the reeds, and it had bought them nothing but time and closeness, and the closeness was the thing killing him.
On the water Luka had always been able to breathe; the water was the one place his grief would lie down and let him alone.
Now the water had this man in it — in the boat, in the small light, an arm's length away in a hull thirty feet long — and there was nowhere left in the whole of Luka's life where the wanting couldn't find him.
He'd catch himself watching the man's hands.
The scarred, careful, murderer's hands. And wanting them on him.
And the wrongness of it would go through him like cold water and change nothing at all.
So he tried to make it stop the only way he knew. He tried to put the monster back.
"Say his name again," Luka said.
Raskov looked up from the tide book. Wary. He'd learned Luka's weathers by now the way Luka had learned his. "Beridze—"
"Dato. Say it. The way you said it in the yard, like you knew him.
Do it again." Luka's voice had gone low and slow and he let it, leaned into it, wanted the danger in it to be real.
"Because I keep almost forgetting what you are.
I keep sitting here in my own boat almost forgetting that you walked into my brother's yard and put him on the ground, and I need you to remind me.
So say his name. Remind me what your mouth is. "
Something crossed the dark eyes. Not fear — Luka had stopped being able to frighten him, if he ever could. Something closer to grief, and under it a terrible patience, the patience of a man who had decided a long time ago exactly how much he was willing to bleed.
"You don't want me to remind you," Raskov said quietly. "You want me to give you a reason. It's not the same thing, and I won't—"
Luka hit him.
He was up off the bench and across the cabin and he hit him, open-handed, hard, across the face, hard enough to snap the smaller man's head to the side and split something at the corner of his mouth, and it was the worst thing Luka had done in two years and the relief of it was obscene, was almost joy, the pure clean animal relief of finally putting his hands on the hand — and Raskov took it.
Rode it. Came back to center with blood on his teeth and his hands still open at his sides and looked up at Luka and did not lift a finger.
"There," Raskov said. Soft. "Is that better? Does it help?"
"Fight me." Luka had a fist in his collar now, had hauled him up off the bench, and the man came up light and unresisting as a drowned thing.
"Fight me, you piece of— you killed him, you killed him and you sit here reading about tides in my dead brother's boat, fight me, hit me back, be what you are—"
"No."
"Fight me!"
"No." Blood on his lip, dark, and those steady eyes, and nothing, nothing, no violence, no defense, just the awful stillness and the offering underneath it that had been there since the yard.
"I told you in the yard. I won't make it hard for you.
Hit me until it stops helping. I can take more than you can give.
But I won't fight you, Luka, because if I fight you I might win, and then you'd be the one on the floor, and I've already—" His voice did the thing, thinned, held.
"I've already put one Beridze on the floor.
I'm not going to do the other. Do what you need to.
I'm not going to stop you and I'm not going to help you feel better about it either. "
Luka shook him. Slammed him back into the bulkhead, once, twice, hard enough to rattle the lamp in its gimbal, and Raskov let his head take it and kept his hands open and kept his eyes on Luka's face, and there was no fear in them and no fight in them, only that bottomless waiting.
Luka's own breath was coming ragged now, tearing out of him.
And somewhere in it his hands changed their grip without his say-so — the fists knotted in Raskov's collar went from throttling to holding, from an interrogation to the other thing, and Luka realized he was no longer trying to shake an answer out of the man but only, helplessly, hanging onto him, and that his own face had gone wet.
And that — the surrender, the deadly man going soft and open in Luka's fists on purpose, choosing it, the most dangerous creature Luka had ever touched laying itself down under his hands and refusing, refusing, to give Luka the fight that would make the wanting into something Luka could survive — that was what broke it.
Because you cannot hate a thing that won't fight you. You can only, God help you, want it.
Luka kissed him.
It wasn't tender. It wasn't anything with a name that belonged in the light.
It was rage that had run out of anywhere to go, it was two years of grief with no bottom, it was Luka's mouth crushing down on the blood on Raskov's mouth with a sound that came out of Luka like something tearing, and for one second Raskov went rigid with a shock so total it was almost fear — the terror, Luka would understand later, of a man being touched like a person for the first time in longer than he could hold — and then his hands came up off his sides at last, not to fight, never to fight, but to fist in the front of Luka's shirt and pull, pull him down, pull him in, a drowning man who'd finally been thrown the thing he'd stopped letting himself reach for.
They stayed like that, mouths crushed together, Luka's fists still knotted in the man's shirt and Raskov's knotted in Luka's, neither of them fighting and neither of them letting go, the boat rocking under them and the lamp swinging its light slow across the two of them.
And Luka thought, from very far down, this is the thing I can never take back — this is the border, and once I cross it there's no boat and no yard and no clean road back to who I was.
And he crossed it. He had already crossed it, he understood; he'd crossed it in the yard the night he didn't cut, and every hour since had only been the long slow fall after the step off the edge.
***
Luka's hands were monsters. He knew it even as they moved.
They had two years of murder in them and they had the memory of his own forearm across this man's throat in the yard and now they were pushing up under Raskov's shirt, over the cold-hot skin, over the fresh stitches and the old ink and the ridges of scars Luka didn't have the names of, and they would not stop, and Luka hated them and could not make them his own.
He kept waiting for the disgust to win — for the two years of hate to rise up and turn his stomach and make him shove the man off and be, at last, the brother Dato had deserved.
It didn't come. Or it came and stood beside the wanting and did not cancel it, the two of them side by side in Luka like oil and water that wouldn't mix and wouldn't separate either, and Luka's hands went on moving through the middle of them both.
He was not going to be saved from this. There was no version of the next hour where he came out of it clean.
"Tell me to stop," Luka said against his mouth. Ragged. It was the last honest thing left in him, the diver's discipline surfacing one final time before the deep took him. "Say the word and I stop. I mean it. I'm not — I won't be another thing that happens to you. Tell me to stop and it stops."
Raskov pulled back an inch. Looked at him.
The lamp caught the wet on his mouth and the blood and the dark unreadable eyes that were, for once, entirely readable — open all the way down, all the sealed doors standing open, and behind them something so starved and so disbelieving that it undid Luka worse than the grief had.
"I've wanted to stop existing for two years," Raskov said, low and wrecked. "You're the first thing that's made me want the opposite. Don't you dare stop."
So Luka didn't.
He took him down onto the narrow berth he'd built with his own hands, the berth he'd made for the version of his life where he was no one, and it held them both, barely, the two of them who wanted so badly to be no one and were, right now, undeniably, unbearably someone to each other.
Raskov came apart under him in a way that had nothing performed in it, nothing practiced — Luka understood, with a lurch, that whatever this man had done and been, this was not a thing he knew how to do, that the hands that had killed had almost never been allowed to simply want, and that Luka was watching a person relearn his own body from the inside, flinching at gentleness like it was the blow he'd braced for and getting, instead, Luka's mouth, Luka's rough careful hands, Luka's weight holding him down not to hurt but to keep, to say without words you're here, you're here, I have you.