Chapter 10
CHLOE
The gravel under my boots made the small clean sound it makes when the morning is still cold and nothing has been driven across it yet. I had asked the cab to leave me at the gate. I wanted to walk the rest on my own. I wanted my own feet between me and the front door of the Sorokin house.
The willow Lily had planted by the fieldstone wall was dropping the last of its yellow. A small pile of it had gathered against the stones, and a few of the long thin leaves were lifting off the pile each time the wind moved. I watched it for a second and then I made myself keep walking.
I had come to forgive him. That was the whole shape of the morning in my chest.
I did not get to deliver any of it.
The front door opened before I was up the top step.
Sienna was on the other side of it in jeans and a soft cream sweater with the cuffs pushed to her elbows, a wide white mug of coffee held in both hands at the level of her mouth.
The smile she gave me was the one she had given me in her kitchen the afternoon I had first sat at her island and let her feed me a piece of warm bread with butter on it.
It was the smile of a woman who likes you and is glad to see you and is going to make you sit down.
Then her eyes moved past my shoulder to the empty step behind me, and the smile rearranged itself.
"Where is Daniil?" I said.
The mug came down off her mouth a half inch. It did not make it to the side table by the door. It hung there in both her hands.
"He is not with you?"
"He hasn't answered me in three days."
"He left here last night to drive to you."
"Are you sure?"
She did not answer me in words. Her face did the arithmetic instead. The eyes narrowing. The mouth going thin. The mug coming down the rest of the way, set on the small console without her looking at where she was setting it, the coffee jumping once against the inside of the rim.
She turned and was already moving through the front hall before I had finished the breath of the last question. I followed her. My coat was still on. The pendant was still in my pocket.
She went the length of the long hall past the sitting room and the open archway of the dining room and the tall narrow painting of a black horse, and she stopped at a closed door at the far end. She knocked once with the flat of her hand and pushed it open without waiting.
Mikhail was at a wide dark desk in a button-down shirt rolled to the forearms, two folders open on either side of him and a third in his hands.
He looked up at the door with the small wash of irritation a man gets when his work is interrupted, and then he saw his wife's face, and the irritation went out of him in the same blink.
"What is it, wife?"
"Daniil. He never made it to her."
"Fuck."
He was up out of the chair before the word was all the way out. He came past us in the doorway in two long strides and he had a phone at his ear before he was back into the hall.
Three calls in a row. Alek first. Two words and a question.
Then Ivan. Two more words. Then a man whose name I did not catch, something short and Russian, and the call to him was longer and lower and in a language I did not have.
By the time he came back to the hall table by the staircase, Sienna had pulled a folded map out of a drawer and spread it flat.
She had a phone of her own in her left hand and was already speaking into it in Korean, short flat sentences, the kind of voice she would use in a courtroom.
The house had been a quiet house thirty seconds earlier. It was a war room now.
Lily came down the wide front staircase first. She was in soft black leggings and a long gray cardigan and her feet were bare on the runner, and she came down the way a dancer comes down stairs, no weight on any one step, both hands on the banister only because she was making herself slow down.
Her dark eyes were already wet. She had heard.
The house had told her in some way I had not seen.
Jade was two steps behind her in jeans and a Henley, a glass of water in one hand and the other hand already reaching out for me from the third step. She did not stop coming until she had me.
They put themselves on either side of me in the hall the way the men were going to put themselves around a map in a minute. Lily took me by the elbows and turned me so I was facing her.
"We are with you. Breathe."
I tried to. The breath came in shallow and went out shallower.
Jade's hand was at the back of my neck, cool and steady. She brought the glass up between us.
"Drink."
I drank half of it. The water was very cold. It hurt going down, in the good way a thing hurts when it is making you remember you have a body. I gave the glass back to her and she set it on the console next to Sienna's coffee mug without taking her hand off me.
Sienna stayed in the hall with Mikhail. She made one more call in Korean and one in English and one in a language that was neither. Her free hand stayed flat on the map.
The brothers came through the front door together inside five minutes.
Alek first. Long black coat already on, the collar up, the leather eyepatch sitting where it always sat over the scarred side of his face.
The working blue eye took the front hall in one pass.
It found Mikhail at the table. It found Sienna with the phone.
It found the three of us against the wall.
He gave me one nod. It was not a soft nod and it was not a hard nod.
It was the kind of nod a man gives a woman he has decided is going to be family. It went into me and stayed.
Ivan came in behind him, the doorframe seeming smaller for a second because he was in it.
Coat on. Phone at his ear. He was finishing a call in a short clipped voice, and he did not look at me, and I understood without being told that he was not looking because it would slow him down by the small amount he could not afford.
The three of them were at the hall table inside thirty seconds.
The map between them. Alek's finger on one line of road.
Ivan's finger on another. Mikhail talking low and fast, switching between English and Russian inside the same sentence.
They had done this before. You could see they had done this before in the way none of them needed to be told where to stand.
Mikhail broke off from the map after a minute and came across the hall to me. The other two stayed bent over the paper.
"Stay here with the girls. We will come back with him."
"No. I am going with you."
"Chloe..."
"He is mine. I am going."
He stopped for half a beat. The half beat where a man looks at a woman and adjusts what he had thought she was. His head tilted a quarter inch. The gray-green of his eyes went from the soft of brother-in-law to the harder thing that he was the rest of the time. Then he looked past me at Lily.
Lily's voice was steady. "I'll drive. The four of us in my car behind you. We won't be in the way."
Mikhail looked at Alek. Alek did not stop reading the map. He nodded once without lifting his head. Permission granted.
Mikhail looked back at me. "Stay behind Yuri's car. Two minutes back. You do not get out of the car until we tell you the scene is clear."
"Okay."
"I mean it."
"I heard you."
We went in three cars.
Yuri leading. Mikhail in the passenger seat next to him, Alek and Ivan in the back.
A second sedan of Sorokin men behind. Lily's small dark sedan third, the four of us inside it.
Lily at the wheel. Sienna in the passenger seat with her phone face up on her thigh, the screen on, the screen dim, the screen on again every time it pinged.
I was in the back with Jade. The seat was warm from the heater.
Jade had not let go of my hand since the front step.
The parkway light was the morning kind. Weak and silver. The trees over the road were bare. The shoulders were strewn with the brown of old leaves. No one talked for the first ten minutes.
Then Jade slid her hand fully into mine and laced our fingers and squeezed once, hard, and did not let go.
Then Sienna spoke over her shoulder without turning her head. "They are going to find him."
Lily drove.
I watched the trees go past. I watched the back of the second sedan. I watched the small red dot of a brake light on the lead car when Yuri tapped his brake at a bend. I tried not to think about the three days. I thought about the three days anyway.
We came around a long bend twenty miles up the road and I saw the Sorokin cars pulled onto the shoulder ahead of us before Lily had finished the turn.
Two black sedans, doors open. Men in long coats on the soft dirt of the bank. Beyond the bank, off the road, down into the trees, the Maybach.
The front of it was folded into the trunk of a tree the way a tin can folds when you step on it. The hood was up at a wrong angle. The driver's door was open.
Lily braked smooth and slow and pulled in behind the second sedan and put the car in park.
"Stay in the car until they wave us up."
I did not answer her. I was looking at the open door of the Maybach.
Mikhail came back to us after a minute. He bent to Lily's window and Lily lowered the glass. He said one short thing to her in Russian that I did not catch. Lily's mouth pressed flat. She nodded.
Mikhail looked past her at me through the open window. His face was the brother-in-law face again, but only barely.
"Come."
He opened my door himself.
The grass under my boots was wet. The cold came up through the leather sole and into the bottom of my foot in a single rush. I followed Mikhail down the bank.
The blood was in the seat.
The blood was on the inside of the door.
The blood was in a thin track on the dirt that started at the lip of the doorframe and went down the bank and stopped at the line of the trees.
The track in the dirt led into the tree line. The dogs were already in. I could hear them, low and panting, somewhere a hundred yards in. The men with the dogs were already gone.
I put a single hand at my mouth. I did not speak. I did not have any words for it.
Alek came up behind me. He did not touch me. He stopped at my shoulder. His voice when it came was not raised. It was the flat voice the Pakhan uses when the decision has already been made inside him and he is only saying it out loud because the men need to hear it.
"Find my brother. Kill the man who took him."
The words went into my chest like a stone dropped into a well. I felt them go down. I felt them hit.
I turned without thinking and Lily was already there. Jade was already there. Sienna was already there. Three sets of arms closed around me at the same time, at the shoulders and the back and the side of my head, and I let myself be held the way a child lets itself be held.
I cried.
I have not been a person who cries. I have been a person who keeps the thing behind the teeth and breathes through it and writes it into a notebook later when no one is looking. I was not that person on the bank of an upstate road in the cold of a morning that smelled of wet leaves and gasoline.
Lily cried with me. She did not make any noise about her own crying. She did not make it a thing of hers. She put her wet cheek against my temple and let her tears go where mine were going.
Jade kept her hand at the back of my neck. The pressure of her fingers there was the only steady thing in my body.
Sienna's hand stayed in my hair. She had taken the elastic out without my noticing and she was smoothing it back from my face with the flat of her palm in long slow strokes the way a mother would.
The men kept working around us. Voices in two languages. A radio crackled on a hip somewhere behind me. A dog called from inside the trees and a man called back. Somewhere a car door closed. Somewhere Mikhail said a name into a phone in a voice I had never heard him use.
They took me back up the bank to the sedan when the worst of it had gone through me. My legs were not quite mine for the first ten steps. Jade had me at the elbow on one side and Sienna had me at the elbow on the other and Lily was a half step ahead, opening the back door, holding it.
Lily slid into the back with me instead of going to the wheel.
Jade got in front in the passenger seat and turned the whole of her body around to face us.
Sienna got into the driver's seat to keep the heat on.
The doors closed. The cold of the outside dropped out of my skin in a wave and the warm of the car came up around me and my body started shaking.
Jade reached back between the seats and put a hand on my knee.
"They are going to find him, Chloe."
"What if they find him dead?"
Lily's voice was wet at the edges, but it was steady underneath. "He had better not be. He will fight for it. I know him."
I sat with that for a second. Then I let the thing I had been holding under my tongue for three days go.
"I never told him I like him. I never said it. We have not been okay for three days and I let him sit in three days of not being okay. I should have understood him better. I should have called."
Sienna's eyes found mine in the rearview. She did not turn her head. The eyes were enough.
"He isn't angry with you. He has been drinking on our couch for three days because he is scared you are going to leave him. He didn't handle it well. He doesn't handle a lot of things well. He loves you that much, Chloe. He was driving to you when this happened. He is coming back to you."
Lily's arm was around my shoulder. Jade's hand was on my knee.
Sienna's eyes were on mine in the small rectangle of the rearview.
Outside the windshield the men were a long dark line of coats around a wreck the color of wet steel, and beyond them the bare trees, and beyond the trees the place where the dogs had gone in.
My right hand was in my coat pocket. The cold of the gold pendant inside the velvet had warmed against the inside of my hip.