TWENTY-ONE
CAIDEN
They pull me into the briefing with no warning, which usually means something has been royally fucked up. The room is windowless, and there are two officers I don’t know well enough to read. I stand where they tell me to stand, with my hands loose at my sides, already shitting a brick.
Then they say Russia.
I blink once, just to confirm I heard correctly.
Temporary reassignment.
Six months.
Effective immediately.
It takes a second for the words to sort themselves into something my brain accepts as real, and when they do, the reaction catches me completely off guard. Relief hits me first, so fast it’s dizzying, followed by something dangerously close to joy.
Not just because it’s Russia, though that would be enough. Because it’s him. Same country. Same sky and the same bit of frozen miserable earth under our feet again, instead of months of emails, phone calls, and me lying awake afterwards feeling like I’ve been haunting my own damn life.
Six months.
I repeat it in my head because it sounds too good to be true the first time.
Six months means shared geography, which isn’t the same as shared space, but it’s close enough that my whole body seems to unclench around it anyway.
It means I can see him, I can stop picturing him and hoping memory is doing him justice.
It means I can look at his face when he says something cutting and unhelpful instead of reading it in twelve flat lines on a screen three days later.
The officers explain the rationale. They say it’s prior experience, familiarity with the region and continuity. I nod where I’m meant to nod, sign where I’m meant to sign, and get through the rest of the briefing on automatic because all the useful bits of me are already halfway to Murmansk.
I pack faster than I ever have before. Kit, papers, and whatever I can throw in a bag without regretting it later. By the time I’m sitting outside on the truck with my kit stacked by my feet and the engine humming underneath me, the cold doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
Murmansk.
Six fucking months.
Ari is still away on exercise. So he won’t know I’m coming. For all of ten seconds, I consider writing to tell him. Then I realise it’s pointless. By the time he gets a chance to get anywhere near an email, he will probably already be back on base.
Another surprise it is then.
The road stretches out in a wet grey in front of us. It’s all mud, frost, and military scenery so ugly it becomes almost abstract if you stare at it long enough. The men around me doze in the way soldiers always do, folded into themselves at impossible angles.
Ordinarily, this sort of journey drags. Today it doesn’t, or at least, not in the same way. I’m too busy imagining the look on Ari’s face when he sees me and realises I’m not a phone line or a half-finished email away anymore.
At one of the stops, when everyone loosens up enough to stretch, breathe and complain, I glance around and realise I don’t hear Mason and Bennett bickering like they usually would. In fact, I don’t see either of them.
I check again because habit can be a stubborn little bastard.
Still no sign of either of them.
They ought to be here, near enough that I can at least see the back of their heads and hear one of them moaning about the cold. Instead, there are two other faces where they should be.
Hall is standing a few feet away with a clipboard, looking as if the existence of paperwork has offended him on a spiritual level. I hop down from the truck and head over before I can overthink it. “Sir.”
“Varrik,” he says, looking up.
I glance once over my shoulder at the men spread around the vehicle. “Where are Mason and Bennett?”
“Bennetts gone. Contracts up. He went back home, from what I've been told.”
“And Mason?”
The answer comes too quickly to be good. “Gone too.”
“Where?” I ask, staring at him in shock.
Hall’s expression barely changes, but there’s the slightest tightening around his mouth.
“Elsewhere.” Which is no answer at all, obviously.
I look at him for another second, and because he’s Hall and not thick, he understands what I’m really asking.
Why? His voice drops half a notch. “It was dealt with.”
A cold feeling slips in under all the excitement I’ve been running on since this morning.
Dealt with.
I’d known, in the way everyone knew without saying it.
I knew from the silence and the sideways looks.
From the atmosphere on base changing, going sour and watchful in a way I recognised too well.
Still, hearing the outcome said aloud, however vaguely, leaves something bitter in my mouth.
Hall glances at me more directly then. “This doesn’t concern you anymore, Varrik. You’re wheels up.”
There’s a warning in that, or maybe advice. It’s hard to tell with him. I nod because what else am I going to do — start a righteous scene beside a fuel drum and get myself reassigned somewhere even more useless? “Yes, sir.”
He looks back at the clipboard, conversation over.
I stand there for a second longer, watching the men climb back into the truck, and feel the earlier excitement change slightly. Russia is still Russia. But Mason is gone, and the speed with which the system has swallowed him up leaves a nasty, sick feeling in my stomach.
By the time I climb back in the truck, I’m quieter. Not because I’m less glad. But because now there’s something else travelling with me.
Anger.
The rest of the journey goes by in a blur. When the base finally comes into view through the muck on the glass, my whole body goes stiff.
The familiar shapes resolve themselves as we pass through the gate. It’s the same ugly, practical layout, same buildings, and the same stretch of road I could probably walk half-asleep.
I jump down when we stop, unload my gear where I’m told to, and head inside to get my bearings.
My first stop is a habit more than anything. The briefing room door is open, and a few officers linger inside, talking quietly, papers in hand. Ari isn’t there, of course. He’s still away on exercise, that much I expected, but Niko isn’t there either.
That catches me off guard.
Niko missed things sometimes — everybody did, of course.
But rarely briefings, and not without good reason.
I stand there a moment, scanning faces, waiting for him to come out of some side office with a mug in hand and a look on his face that says the coffee’s undrinkable and the company isn’t much better.
He doesn’t.
I ask one of the officers I recognise, someone neutral enough that the question shouldn’t mean much beyond curiosity. “Where’s Niko?”
The answer doesn’t come straight away. He looks at me, then away, then back again, as if he’s trying to decide whether I’m serious. “You didn’t hear,” he says.
Something cold starts low in my gut. “Hear what?” he tells me quietly that Cassie — his fiancée — is dead.
Suicide.
For a second, I just look at him, not because I don’t understand the words — because I do — but my brain still seems to think that if it waits a little longer, the outcome might change into something less impossible.
The officer says something else after that.
About timings, arrangements, and how Niko's handling it.
He tells me Niko's practically locked himself away with Vladimir since it happened, barely speaking to anyone unless he has to.
Then he seems to realise there's no point carrying on because I'm not really hearing him anymore.
Not past that first blow of it, at least.
I thank him, then walk out of the briefing room in a bit of a daze.
The corridor feels longer than it did on the way in.
I stop once with my hand against the wall, not because I’m about to keel over dramatically, but because my body has decided this is where it needs to catch up to the fact that while I’ve been halfway delirious with the thought of seeing Ari, Niko’s fiancée has died.
The officer told me where Niko is without me needing to ask, pointing me in the direction of the military housing — a flat next to the barracks.
Cassie had lived there with him and the baby.
Toddler, really. Vladimir isn’t a baby-baby anymore.
He’s bigger now, old enough to know familiar faces, and old enough that his mother’s absence will matter.
I get to Niko’s door and knock twice. The door opens slowly, and there he is.
Niko looks... ruined, for lack of a better word.
There isn’t really a nicer word for it, and he’d probably tell me to piss off if I tried to find one.
His face is thinner, his eyes are red and unfocused in a way that goes beyond crying and sits somewhere in the territory of broken.
He stares at me for a second, then something in him gives. “Caiden?” he asks, but he doesn’t sound surprised.
He sounds relieved.
That nearly breaks me on the spot.
I step inside and pull him into a hug before either of us can make it awkward. He doesn’t hug me back at first, not properly. He... folds, the way men do when they’ve run out of energy to hold themselves up and someone else arrives at exactly the right moment.
Over his shoulder, I can see the flat is painfully orderly. Toddler things are lined up with the sort of precision that subconsciously suggests that if everything stays in the right place, maybe nothing else will fall apart.
Then I hear Vladimir making noise from the back room. It’s not a newborn baby scream. It’s a cross between a cry and a tired little grumbling that’s about three seconds from becoming a proper howl.
Niko doesn’t move; he stands there and hugs me. I let him for a few minutes, then I let him go gently and head through without thinking. Vladimir is in the cot, flushed and annoyed with life in the general way toddlers are when they’ve woken up and no one has yet arranged the world to their liking.
He’s bigger than the last time I saw him, obviously.
It’s been almost a year. He’s got more weight to him when I lift him, all warm little limbs and offended dignity.
He immediately twists round to glare at me as if this interruption had better be worth it, and I’d laugh under other circumstances because he has exactly the sort of face that suggests his uncle is not the only Zakirov born prepared to take issue with existence.
“All right, mate,” I murmur, adjusting him onto my hip.
He goes quiet almost at once, the grumbling dropping to small, suspicious breaths against my shoulder while he decides whether I count as acceptable. I rub a hand over his back and feel him soften by degrees, as if he’s familiar enough with me not to object for long.
Behind me, Niko sinks onto a chair and covers his face with both hands. “I don’t know how to do this,” he says into them. “She did everything right. I don’t—”
He doesn’t finish, but he also doesn’t need to. I stand there, with his son against my chest, and look at him properly. He’s not Senior Sergeant Zakirov, the officer version of him. Just Niko. Broken, alone, trying and failing to make any of this look manageable.
“I’m here,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can think to say.
That gets us through the next few hours.
I feed Vladimir when he needs feeding, which is less dainty than it used to be because he’s at the age where he wants to help, and his help is well...
destructive. He nearly gets mashed potatoes in my hair and looks offended when I object.
I wash his hands. I wipe his face. I walk him around the room when he gets tired and stubborn, then doesn’t want to admit he is either.
Niko dozes in short, ugly bursts on the sofa and wakes up looking guilty every time, as if sleep itself has become indulgent somehow.
I make tea, but he doesn’t drink it. I stack dishes because they’re there.
I move things from one side of the room to the other if it looks as though doing so might stop the place from grinding to a halt.
None of it is big enough to matter on its own, but together it keeps the evening moving.
At one point, Niko looks up from the sofa while I’m crouched on the floor trying to persuade Vladimir that my watch is not, in fact, his by right, and says, “You were just posted back?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to do this,” he says. The words are quiet, but I can hear the embarrassment behind them. That’s the bit I can’t stand.
“Yes,” I say, more firmly than he probably expects. “I do.”
He looks at me for what feels like minutes after that, then drops his eyes. Not in an offended way, in a way that says he’s too tired to keep fighting the offer of help now it’s already here.
Later, when the flat has gone quiet and Vladimir has finally worn himself out enough to sleep, I sit in the armchair by the window with him tucked against me and think about Ari.
I think about him still away on exercise, not knowing any of this yet, and about the fact that when I woke up this morning, the version of the world I was in still had Cassie alive in it and Niko functioning in something close to one piece.
It doesn’t now.
I’ll have to tell Ari, but not like this. Not in a letter and not in some half-finished message. And definitely not while Niko is sitting ten feet away looking like someone has scooped the centre out of him and left the rest standing by accident.
For now, a man is breaking apart on the sofa, an eleven-month-old is glued to my chest, and I am exactly where I need to be, even if none of this is anything like what I imagined when they said Russia.
Outside, the base carries on as if nothing has changed.
But inside, everything has.