CHAPTER 21
Amara
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The front goes through Sokol House like a hand pulled off a wound, and what it leaves behind is so clean it hurts to look at.
I feel it before I understand it. I've been at the dress form in my workroom for two hours, basting the bodice of my own gown by lamplight because my hands won't be still while there's a war being planned three doors down, and somewhere in the second hour the rain just — stops.
It doesn't taper off the way rain is supposed to.
It stops the way a sewing machine stops when you lift your foot off the pedal: mid-stitch, the whole long roar of it gone, and the silence after so total it has a shape.
I look up. The window over the chaise has gone from a smear of running water to black glass, and behind the black glass there are stars.
Hard, scattered, cold as struck pins. I haven't seen a star over this house since I came to it.
I set down the needle. I close my fingers over the small dented shield at my throat, the steel of it warm from my own skin, and I tell myself I'm only going to the window to look at the weather.
That's the first lie of the night, and I smooth it flat against my thigh like a seam that won't lie down, and I go.
The house is quiet in the way it gets after the men have decided something.
The war-council broke up an hour ago — Emil to his monitors, Gael to the gate to walk the wall like he can frighten the dark off the property, the plan laid out between the four of us like a pattern pinned to cloth: finish the digoxin proof, take it to the Council, turn Pyotr, strip Lev before he can strip Mateo first.
Inés's surgery locked for the sixth. Everything braided so tight that to pull one thread is to pull them all.
I should be in bed. Instead I find Nadia's kitchen dark, and the great hall dark, and the study dark with its door ajar and the watch — I check, I always check now — gone from the desk where Mateo left it lying open two days ago like a vow he didn't dare close.
Which means he's taken it with him. Which means he's gone somewhere to decide something alone.
I know where. I knew before I asked the dark.
I pull a coat over my work clothes and go out the side door into a cold so clean it scrapes.
The gravel forecourt is wet-black and starlit, the stone falcon on the gate streaming, and the air smells of nothing but salt and washed stone and the green ozone the storm left behind it. The cliff path is slick.
I go down it anyway, one hand on the cold iron rail, and the sea comes up to meet me in its old order — first the sound, the long suck and break of it on the cove stones, then the smell, then the bell-buoy out on the black water tolling its slow time, marking the silence the way I mark a hem. Two pins. Three. There.
He's at the bottom of the sea-stair, on the wet stone above the boathouse, exactly where Gael showed me the way out, the night he taught me how to run.
The Pakhan with his back to the house and his face to the Sound, alone with the cold clean shock of the stars over the cove, so still he could be carved there. The boathouse rope creaks.
Salt spray comes off the rocks and beads on the black boards of the boathouse wall behind him and on the shoulders of his coat, and he doesn't move to wipe it away. Mateo Sokolov, who controls everything, letting the sea throw itself at him.
I read him the way I read everyone, before he knows I'm there.
The set of his shoulders is wrong. Where he usually wears the squared, load-bearing line of a man being a wall, tonight his shoulders carry the curve of a man holding something too heavy to put down because there's nowhere to set it that the cold won't get it.
There's a tremor in him I've never seen, fine, banked, under all that stillness — and I understand, with the small sick lurch of recognizing a thing I've felt in my own body, that the controlled man is afraid.
"You'll catch your death out here," I say.
He doesn't startle. He's the Pakhan; he heard me on the third stair. But he goes very still in the particular way that is the most he ever gives, and he says, without turning, "Go back up, Amara."
"No."
"It's not safe on these stones in the dark."
"Then come up with me."
"Go back up. " His voice is even. That's how I know it isn't. An even voice on Mateo is the smooth water over the deep cold. "I'll be up when I've finished thinking."
I come down the last three steps instead, onto the wet flat stone beside him, close enough that the spray that beads on him beads on me, salt on my lips when I press them together.
The stars are unbearable. The whole sky has been wrung out and hung up to dry and there is nothing soft anywhere, no fog to forgive the edges, just black and salt and that brutal scatter of light, and the slow toll of the buoy, and him.
"You've decided to send me away," I say. I know it for fact. I've watched him do the arithmetic of it across the table for two days, the way Emil watches his monitors. "From the war. From the house. You've been standing down here building the reasons."
The muscle in his jaw moves. "It would be the careful thing."
"Of course it would. " I let the salt sit on my tongue.
"You're a careful man. You told me that yourself.
You called yourself careful and stopped short of good.
" I turn so I'm in his line to the sea, so he has to take me in or stare straight through me, and his storm-gray eyes find mine, and in the starlight they're the only warm thing on this whole cold shore.
"Here's the trouble with careful, Mateo. I've been the careful thing somebody set aside for safekeeping before. I held my father's coat in a courthouse corridor while careful men decided what was best. I'm done standing in that corridor, for any reason you can build down here, even for you."
"You don't understand what I'm afraid of."
"Then tell me. Stop standing in front of it like a wall and tell me what's on the other side."
And the thing cracks.
I see it go. I'm watching his face the way you watch cloth on the true grain, for the exact place the tension will give, and it gives there, around the eyes first, the stillness coming apart from the inside.
He turns from the sea entirely. He takes my face in both his hands — and his hands are cold from the spray and they are shaking, the Pakhan's hands, shaking — and for a second he just holds me there in the starlight like a man making sure of something with his whole body.
"I have buried everyone I was ever supposed to protect," he says, low and ruined.
"My mother. I carried her out of that house and she died anyway, and I have the arm to remember it by.
My father. I knew it was Lev and I couldn't prove it and I buried him under a lie about a stroke and I let the lie stand because I was careful.
I am very good, Amara, at burying the people I love.
I have a great deal of practice. And then you walked up the aisle of that cold chapel in your dark oxblood coat and you struck a clause out of my contract with your own pen, and you have undone every careful thing in me, and now there is a war coming, and all I can think, all I have been able to think standing on this rock, is that I cannot do it again.
I cannot stand at the bottom of another hole with a name in my mouth.
I would rather send you away and be a wall again forever than learn what the world is like with you gone out of it. "
The buoy tolls. The sea breaks. The stars don't care at all.
"Then don't send me away," I say, and my voice isn't steady either.
"Stand beside me. Not behind. Beside. You said it yourself, the first time.
You said it like it cost you teeth. Stand beside me.
God help us both. I'm holding you to it.
You don't say a thing like that to me and then carry it down to the water to drown it. "
He makes a sound I've never heard out of him, something torn loose from under language, the opposite of a word. And then his mouth is on mine, reckless and wide open, every shred of care burned out of it.
This is the thing that lives under the man from his monastic room, the one who undid me by inches and made me wait and watched my face like a vow — the raw creature beneath all that.
The kiss is salt and cold and desperate, his cold shaking hands fisting in my hair to tip my head where he wants it, and I grab the front of his coat and haul him in harder, because the fear in him has found the only door out of him that there is and I am going to hold it open for him.
He breaks off just enough to get the words against my mouth. "Tell me to stop and I stop. Even now. Even like this. " A breath. The control trying, in the wreck of him, to hold. "Say yes, Amara. Give me the word."
"Yes," I say. "Yes. Don't you dare be careful with me now. Yes."
His mouth comes back hard. He walks me backward off the wet stone the two steps to the boathouse wall and the black boards are cold and slick at my back through the coat, spray-wet, salt smell rising off the wood, and he pins me there with his whole body and I feel exactly how much of the control was holding the fear in check, because none of it is holding now.
His hands shove the coat off my shoulders.
I'm in my work clothes underneath, the thin shirt I baste in, and he gets it open with no patience at all and his cold mouth finds the warm skin of my throat, my collarbone, lower, and he isn't worshipping me by inches tonight.
He's claiming the proof that I'm here, that I'm warm, that I'm breathing under his hands.
"Mine," he says against the soft rise of my breast, and the word lands nothing like the leash his men would flinch from.
It sounds like a prayer said by a man who's seen too much to believe in prayers and is saying it anyway, terrified, because it's the only word big enough.
"Say it. I have to hear you let me have it. Mine."