Chapter 19 #2
I walked up to the chair. I did not speak. The room waited with me. Pyotr's good eye, the one that still tracked, dragged up to meet mine, and I saw the moment he understood who had just arrived.
I punched him.
A clean right, square into the soft place under the cheekbone. His head snapped. The chair creaked.
"That is for ruining my car."
I shook my hand out once. Set my feet. Came at him from the other side, a left this time, lower, into the rib. He made a noise that was not quite a word.
"That is for being a traitor."
I let the third one build. I pulled it from the floor. It went into his jaw and his teeth clicked and a fine spray of red dotted the concrete by his shoe.
"That is for helping kill the old people."
I meant the grandparents. He knew which old people.
I saw him know. Rhea's last home before us.
Two soft, gray, gentle people who had raised her through the worst year of her small life, who had fed her and braided her hair and read her stories, and who had been put in the ground because a man like the one in this chair had told a man like Tomasz where their door was.
My blood ran through Rhea. Their love had walked her to me.
He had touched both ends of that line with dirty hands.
I stepped back. I rolled my shoulders. The men by the wall thought I was finished. Mikhail thought I was finished. I thought I was finished.
Then a small clean thought walked in late and sat down in my chest.
I reached behind my back, drew the sidearm, leveled it, and put one round through his right foot.
The sound bounced off the concrete and came back twice. Pyotr screamed in a register I had not heard from a man in years. The chair rocked against its bolts.
"That is for letting my girl kiss you."
For a beat, no one spoke. Then Mikhail laughed. It was the loud, surprised kind, the kind he saved for things he had genuinely not seen coming. He doubled at the waist and pressed a knuckle to his mouth and laughed again.
"Never thought I'd see Daniil Sorokin go this petty over a girl."
"Shut up," I said, "or I will put the next one through your mouth."
He was still laughing when I walked out.
The hallway air felt cooler than the room. I holstered the sidearm. I shook my hand out a second time. The knuckles would be raw tomorrow. I did not care.
I went looking for her.
I checked the kitchen first, because she sometimes stood at the back window when she needed two minutes. Empty. I checked the small sitting room with the books. Empty. I went up.
Rhea's door was cracked. I came up to it soft.
Through the gap I could see the back of a small head with two braids, headphones snug over the ears, the dark shape of Beom-Beom sitting square on the corner of the desk with his one chewed ear bent forward like he was listening too.
On the screen in front of her, a teacher's face moved in a small box, and smaller student faces moved in smaller boxes around it.
Chloe stood just behind Rhea's chair, hands folded in front of her, listening with her. She turned her head, sensed me, and her whole face softened and sharpened at the same time.
I stepped forward. I had a sentence coming. I was going to say several things at once and none of them were going to come out clean, but I was going to say them anyway.
She crossed to me in three quick steps. Her palm came up gentle and warm and settled over my mouth.
"Not now," she breathed. "She's in class."
She kissed the back of her own fingers, pressed that kiss against my lips through her own hand, and was gone again, back at Rhea's shoulder, leaning down to point at something on the screen, before I had drawn a full breath.
I stood in the cracked door like a man someone had hit with a small hammer. Then I went down to the garden.
The air outside had teeth. Late autumn had stripped the long row of birches by the wall, and the bare branches scratched at a sky gone the color of pewter. I walked the gravel path to the far bench, pulled the cold into my lungs, and let it sit there. My hand still smelled faintly of gun oil.
Mikhail did not give me long.
His boots crunched up the path behind me. He came around and dropped onto the bench at my left like a man with nothing on his afternoon.
"Same old Daniil," he said. "Still ready to die of jealousy."
"Go away, Misha."
"No."
"I'll tell Alek you are bothering me."
"He will laugh."
"He does not laugh."
"He laughs at you."
I cut him a sideways look. He had his head tipped back against the bench, gray-green eyes on the pewter sky, his hair doing the thing it did when he had been outside for ten minutes.
"You shot a man in the foot over a peck," he said. "I'm going to dine out on this for the rest of my natural life."
"It was strategic."
"It was deeply, deeply strategic."
I let the corner of my mouth go. Just the corner. He saw it and his grin widened.
"So is she your girlfriend already?"
That one landed sideways. I had not braced for it. The word girlfriend in his mouth sounded too small for what was sitting in my chest, and too right at the same time.
"Not yet?"
It came out a question. I heard it come out a question. My own face tightened at the sound of it.
Mikhail laughed.
"Idiot. Why not? You want someone else to take that seat?"
"Hell no." It was out before he finished the sentence. He nodded once, satisfied, like a man who had set a trap and watched it spring. I made myself slow down. I made myself give him the honest version. "I have not found the right time."
"She waited for you a long time, brother." He was not teasing now. His voice had gone to the place it went when he meant a thing. "She deserves a label."
I did not answer. I did not need to. He let the silence sit, and after a minute he stood, brushed the cold off the back of his coat, and walked back toward the house without making me say it.
I stayed on the bench. The pewter sky moved. A single dark bird crossed it.
I knew what I was going to do. I knew when.
I knew how. I would finish what we had started in the holding room.
I would let Ivan finish what he had started with the phone.
And then, before the night turned over again, I was going to find the woman who had walked into a meeting of three Sorokin brothers and laid a traitor on the table like a deck of cards, and I was going to give her the word she had already earned twice over.
The cold air in the garden tasted different now that I had decided.