Chapter 5 #2
Every time Luka's hands gentled, the man braced — a flinch so deep it was nearly invisible, the reflex of someone who'd learned that tenderness was only ever the setup for the worst of it.
And every time, Luka made himself slow instead of speed, made his murderer's hands into something that only asked.
Raskov didn't know what to do with being wanted.
He kept trying to turn it into something he understood — service, surrender, a debt being paid — kept offering himself up like a thing to be used, and Luka kept refusing it, kept turning it back into the other thing, the thing with no use in it at all, until the man's careful control began to come apart at the edges and something real and shaking showed through the place where the training had always been.
"I've got you," Luka said, into the ink at his collarbone, and felt the man shudder apart under him at the words, three words, like they were the thing he'd been dying without. "I've got you. I'm not letting go."
Nobody had held this man, Luka thought, in the whole of his ruined life.
Nobody had said I have you and meant stay — not obey, not serve, not go and do the terrible thing and come back and I'll have a warm word ready for you.
Luka said it again, and again, into the sweat and the old scars, three words like a line thrown to a man going down for the third time, and felt the killer's body answer them the only honest way it had, by coming apart, trusting, in his arms.
It was not gentle, in the end, because they didn't have gentle in them, either of them, not yet.
It was hard and it was desperate and there was blood from Raskov's lip smeared between them and grief in every second of it and Luka's own eyes were wet and he didn't care.
It was two ruined men in a cold boat clinging to the one impossible thing the world had put in reach.
He was appalled at himself the whole time, and he did not stop; could not stop; would not have stopped for anything short of the word he'd promised to honor.
His hands knew this body was a killer's body and moved over it anyway, greedy and reverent at once.
His grief was in the room with them, in the bed with them, a third presence with its own weight, and still the living thing in Luka reached and reached.
It was the most shameful hour of his life and the most honest, and it was both at once, and somewhere in the middle of it he stopped trying to pull the two apart.
Raskov made almost no sound — a man trained past sound — until near the end, when something in him gave all the way, some last seawall, and he said Luka's name, just Luka's name, Luka, broken open around it, not Beridze, not an offering, not a killer's flat economy, just his name in a voice with a whole person finally in it, and Luka held him through it and after it and did not let go, exactly as he'd said, and told himself the wet on his own face was sweat, and knew it wasn't.
***
After, the boat rocked them slow on the mooring, and the heater ticked, and the marsh breathed at the hull, and for a little while — a few minutes, ten, Luka didn't measure — there was a peace in the cabin that Luka had not felt in two years, a quiet with no grief loose in it, Raskov's head heavy on his chest and Raskov's breathing gone finally, actually, deep, the man asleep before he'd meant to be, undone into it, trusting, and Luka lay there under the weight of him in the yellow dark and let himself, for those few minutes, simply have it.
Then the grief came back. It always came back.
It came back the way the tide comes back, on its own schedule, indifferent, and it came in over the little peace and drowned it, and Luka lay in the dark with his brother's killer asleep and sated on his chest and thought, with a clarity that was almost calm:
What have I done.
He moved Raskov off him — careful, so careful, the way you move a sleeping child, and hated the tenderness in his own hands even then — and he got up off the berth naked in the cold and he stood at the little cabin window where the grey was just starting at the edge of the marsh, and he put his hand flat on the cold glass, and he looked at his own reflection, and he could not hold his own eyes.
Two years he'd knelt at a stone off Ocean Parkway and promised his brother the one thing he had left to give him, the only love a dead man can be given: I'll find the hand that did this and I'll make it answer.
Two years. And here was the hand, and Luka had just — Luka had taken the hand into his own bed, into Dato's boat, had said I've got you to the mouth that killed his brother, had wept holding it, had felt more like a living man in the last hour than in the last two years, and every bit of that living had been bought with a coin stolen straight off his brother's grave.
He thought about the promise. He thought about Irakli, who'd spent his temper and his money and two years of his life on the hunt beside Luka, who was out there right now believing the channels were dead, who had said say his name, say Dato's name — who did not yet know that Luka had found the hand and put it in his mouth instead of the ground.
He thought about the fact that he could not, standing here in the cold with his own body still warm from it, honestly say he wished it undone.
And the not-wishing-it-undone was the worst betrayal of all, worse than the act, because grief you can't help, but this — this was a choice, and Luka had made it with his hands, and he would go on making it, he already knew he would, and there was no version of that he could kneel at the stone and confess.
He tried, standing there in the cold, to summon the old clean rage — to put his hand on the memory of Dato's face and feel the thing that had gotten him out of bed for seven hundred mornings.
It came. It would always come. But it came changed now, adulterated, because the same hand he wanted to close around the killer's throat had, an hour ago, been gentle in the killer's hair, and Luka could not make the two hands be different hands.
They were the same hands. They were his.
That was the whole horror of it — not that a monster had touched him, but that he had reached for the monster with his own two hands and found, underneath the monster, a man, and had wanted the man, and wanted him still.
Behind him, on the berth, Raskov slept the sleep of a man who had put down a weight he'd carried past the strength of his arms, and even that — even the man finally resting, finally trusting the dark enough to go all the way under in it — even that was Luka's doing now, and Luka didn't know if it was the first decent thing he'd done in two years or the worst, and he stood at the cold window until the grey came up full over the marsh, and he could not look at himself, and he did not go back to the bed.
***