Chapter 33
Harper missed Pav already, but she shoved the feeling down before it took shape.
Katya wiped the table clean and covered the leftover bread with a cloth. Then she opened a cupboard above the range and pulled out a bottle.
The glass was slightly green, the label faded, and the liquid inside pale gold and faintly cloudy.
“Morkovnaya nastoyka.” Katya set it on the table. “Carrot.” She said the English word as if she knew it sounded ridiculous and didn’t care.
Harper’s eyebrows rose. “Carrot vodka?”
“My grandmother’s recipe.” Katya pulled two small glasses from the shelf and poured without asking whether Harper drank or had opinions about root vegetables as a base for spirits.
She slid the glass toward Harper. Russian hospitality. You’re offered. You accept.
Katya lifted her glass. “Za vstrechu.” She met Harper’s eyes across the table. “To our meeting.”
Harper lifted hers. “Za vstrechu.”
The vodka hit the back of her throat like a lit match tossed into gasoline. Heat exploded through her chest and radiated outward, the burn reaching her fingers, toes, and even the backs of her eyes. She coughed, her eyes watering, and briefly she couldn’t breathe.
Katya didn’t smile. But her green eyes did.
“Again,” she said, and poured.
Harper drank the second one. It burned less going down, although maybe the first one had simply cauterized everything in its path. The warmth spread through her body, burrowing into her muscles, and for the first time in days, the knot of anxiety in her belly relaxed.
It felt good. The vodka reminded her she was alive.
They washed the dishes. Side by side at Katya’s deep ceramic sink, Harper elbow-deep in warm water and soap suds, while Katya dried.
They talked, easier now as if vodka had taken the edge off something between them.
Katya asked about Harper’s work. The doctoring. The aid work in Chechnya, the border camps. Real questions—not interrogation but genuine interest. She seemed to understand what it meant to do difficult work in hard places and wanted to know how another woman had handled it.
Harper asked about the guesthouse. The off-season.
The life Katya had with her cat. Katya shared with the pragmatism of a woman who’d made peace with small things.
The guesthouse had been her husband’s project—he’d died two years ago, a heart attack, quick and without warning.
She’d kept the place going because it was what she did now and because she wasn’t a woman who gave up on things.
“And the sniping?” Harper kept her voice light, testing the door.
Katya’s mouth flattened. The door was there, but it had locks.
“Shoulder injury,” she said after a moment.
She rolled her left shoulder as if demonstrating, the movement stiff and truncated at the top of its range.
“Nerve damage. I can still shoot, but the precision is gone. At eight hundred meters, the difference between perfect and good enough is a millimeter. A millimeter is a life.” She shrugged. “So I bake bread.”
She said it the way Pav would say it. Factual and without emotion. The enormous thing underneath compressed into a sentence that fit in your pocket.
The dishes done, the glasses were refilled. They sat back at the table, the kitchen warm around them. The cat had migrated to the chair Pav had vacated and was washing itself with focused dedication. Snow fell in thick blankets outside the window.
Katya turned her glass slowly on the scarred oak. “You got him here alive.”
Harper looked down.
“That is not nothing,” Katya said.
“Sasha didn’t make it.” The name came out before Harper could stop it.
She stared at the pale gold vodka in her glass.
“She was one of the women from the compound. She was shot before the helicopter went down. I thought if I got her out…” Her throat constricted.
“But I got her out, and she still died.”
For a moment, the only sound was the cat washing itself on Pav’s empty chair.
“You cannot keep everyone safe,” Katya said at last. “Not in places like this. Not when men make other people into choices.”
Harper sipped her vodka, relishing the burn.
Katya’s gaze flicked to her and lingered. “Pav learned that badly. Did he tell you about his brother?”
“He told me the watch he wears was his brother’s. That’s all.”
Katya poured another vodka for herself. She lifted the glass, angling it in the light.
“Alexei was two years younger. Same nose. Same eyes. Softer, though.” She paused. “He smiled more.” A faint frown touched her face. “Told terrible jokes.”
Harper didn’t move—worried any sudden movement would send the story back into the dark.
“Alexei followed Pav into everything. Military. Special forces. When Pav left the Teams, Alexei wasn’t far behind.”
Katya snorted softly. “Even the same haircut, for God’s sake.” Her gaze dropped briefly. “Pav wanted him to do something sensible. Engineering. Teaching. Anything.”
She sighed.
“Alexei thought his brother hung the moon.” Katya’s mouth moved in something that wasn’t a smile. “He adored Pav. He wanted to be his brother. The way younger ones do.”
She swilled the last dregs in her glass and downed them. “They served in the same theater. Different teams, but close enough that Pav could keep watch.” She looked at Harper. “You know how he is.”
Harper nodded.
“They were working together when it happened.” Katya ran a finger around the rim of her glass.
“A mission went wrong.” Her voice didn’t change pitch or speed.
“Bad intel. Compromised position because of flooding. Comms failed in the storm, and suddenly there were two objectives and not enough people for both.”
She fell silent for a moment, her mouth compressing into a line.
“Pav was the team lead. The decision was his. Save the mission—extract the primary asset, protect the team, complete the objective. Or break off and go for Alexei, whose team was pinned down and taking casualties in a position that was rapidly becoming indefensible.”
Harper’s chest tightened. She knew what was coming.
“He chose the mission.” Katya’s voice was stripped clean of anything that might soften it. She’d packed this story down into something she could carry without it breaking her.
“Alexei understood the decision. That’s the worst part.” Her mouth compressed. “He would have made the same one.”
She sighed. “The primary asset was extracted, and the mission was classified as a success.” A pause. “Alexei’s team was overrun. No survivors.”
Harper spread her fingers wide on the table.
God. His watch. His brother’s time still running on his wrist.
He’d built walls.
That was the logic of it.
Don’t let anyone matter. Then you never have to choose.
“He blames himself,” Harper said.
“Every day.” Katya traced a line through the condensation on her glass. “He thinks if he’d chosen differently, Alexei would be alive. Maybe he’s right. Maybe not. The mission would have failed. Other people would have died. He knows that.” She looked up. “It doesn’t help.”
Katya ran a hand through her hair. “He disappeared shortly after that.” She paused. “This is the first time I’ve seen him in years.”
She assessed Harper across the table. “But he’s different with you.” She said it as if stating the weather. “He’s let you in.”
Harper’s throat closed. The luminous weight of being chosen by a man for whom choosing was the thing that had destroyed him.
“Be careful with that.” Katya stood and collected the glasses. She carried them to the sink. The conversation was over. Everything that needed to be said had been said, and Katya was not a woman who repeated herself.
She rinsed the glasses, set them on the draining board and dried her hands. “Get some sleep,” she said from the doorway. “Long day tomorrow.”
Then she was gone. Her footsteps receded down the corridor. A bedroom door closed softly.
Harper sat at the kitchen table, the world outside muffled by snow.
Everything she thought she understood about him shifted. His words in the crash aftermath.
I chose you.
Now she understood what that had cost him. And what it might cost him again.
She stood and left the kitchen, not giving herself time to think about it. Floorboards creaked under her socked feet as she walked down the corridor. The door to his room was open.
He was on the bed and wasn’t asleep. She could tell from his breathing.
“Pav.”
His eyes found her in the doorway.
She closed the door behind her.
The click of the latch was quiet and final. A decision made.
She crossed the room and sat beside him on the bed. The mattress dipped under her weight, and the distance between them was inches. Neither of them moved to close it because the closing would mean something that couldn’t be taken back.
His hand found hers in the quiet as if it already knew where to go.
There was no space left for anything else.