Chapter 6 #3
"I knew you by the time I finished carrying it," Pavel said, very quietly, because it was the truest thing left.
"Two years of his voice, my brother, my brother.
When you put the knife to my throat in the yard I knew exactly whose hand it was.
That's why I didn't fight you. Of all the deaths I've been owed, yours was the one I wasn't going to make hard.
You were the one he tried to save. It was the least I could do, to let the man he loved be the one to—" He stopped.
"I wanted you to have it. The ending. It seemed right that it would be you. "
And Luka Beridze crossed the small boat in the dark — carefully, so the skiff wouldn't ship water over a man who couldn't swim, careful even now, careful the way his brother had known he'd be — and he did not put his hands to Pavel's throat.
He put his arms around him. He gathered the killer in against his chest in the freezing dark, both of them wet-faced and wrecked, and held him the way you hold the last piece of someone you lost, because that was what Pavel was now, Pavel understood: not the man who took Dato but the last living place Dato's voice had been kept, and Luka was holding the whole of it, the killer and the keeper both, one man, not needing him to be less.
"It wasn't your fault," Pavel said into the diver's shoulder, delivering it finally, two years late, the way it was meant to be delivered, arms around the one it was for.
"He wanted you to know. It wasn't your fault.
You kept him. Let it go and live. He said live, Luka. He used his last breath on live."
They stayed like that a long time, in the boat, in the cold, holding the same grief from both its sides, and it was not a kiss and it was not the berth and it was more naked than either — two men seen all the way down, with nothing left kept, the account closed, the lie gone out of the water for good.
Pavel had spent a decade being held only to be positioned, gripped only to be aimed, and he did not know, at first, what to do with arms that only wanted him to stay.
So he did the thing Luka had taught him on the other night, in the other dark, without either of them naming it: he stopped bracing.
He let the big arms hold him, and he held back — clumsy, a man using muscles he'd never been allowed — and let the last of it out against the diver's shoulder, the two years and the weight and the boy with the orange and all of it, into the one set of arms in the world with a right to it.
Then Luka's phone lit in his pocket. He didn't reach for it. It stopped, and lit again, and stopped, and lit a third time, insisting, and Pavel felt the change go through the big body before Luka even looked, the stone coming back into the shoulders.
Luka took it out. Held it so Pavel could see the screen.
IRAKLI. And under the name, a text, the preview of it bright in the dark:
i know he's alive. i know you have him. cousin we need to talk before i do something you cant take back.
"He found us," Luka said, and the peace they'd bought for ninety seconds in the dark drained out of the boat and left the old cold in its place.
"Or he found enough. And I don't—" He looked at Pavel, stricken, the man who'd just gotten his brother back and now stood to lose the other thing in the same hour.
"I don't have an answer for him. There's no version of this I can say to Irakli that he'll hear.
He's spent two years and everything he has helping me hunt you.
What do I tell him. That I closed the account by falling into it? "
Pavel looked at the name on the screen, and at the man holding it, and felt the old machine in him — the one that solved problems, that found the exits, that had kept him alive when nothing else would — turn over one more time, cold and clear.
"You tell him the truth," Pavel said. "All of it.
Dato's words. Everything I just gave you.
" He met the green eyes. "It's not just yours to close the account with.
It was for him too, in a way — for the family, for anyone who loved Dato.
Maybe it's the only thing that reaches him.
" A pause, and the harder truth under it.
"And if it doesn't — if he comes anyway, if he can't put it down — then you need to decide something before he gets here, Luka, and you need to decide it clean.
Because he's your blood. And I'm the man who killed the reason he's still hunting.
And there is a version of the next few days where you have to choose between us, and I won't be the one who makes you. So you'd better know."
"Don't," Luka said. "Don't you start doing the math where you step off so I don't have to choose. I watched you do it in the lane. We closed the account, Pavel — that means you don't get to spend yourself to make my life simpler anymore. That's not closed-account behavior."
"It's the only kind of math I know," Pavel said. It came out almost gentle. "But I'll try to learn yours."
The phone lit a fourth time in Luka's hand, insistent, in the dark, over the black water.