Chapter 47
Pav contemplated the rain-slicked city through the car window.
Ekaterinburg carried on around them. Traffic lights cycled from green to amber to red. A woman walked a small dog along a swept sidewalk. In a restaurant window, people leaned over dinner beneath warm gold light, laughing at something Pav would never know.
The city had been here all week doing exactly this while they bled through a compound in the dark. It hadn’t noticed.
The hotel Fox had chosen occupied most of a city block, all pale stone and brass fittings beneath rain-polished lights. The doorman didn’t even blink when two vehicles full of exhausted, blood-spattered people pulled up outside.
The lobby was warm and high-ceilinged and smelled of cut flowers and money. Marble floors. A chandelier throwing amber light across everything in soft, expensive pools. Pav stepped inside and the temperature difference landed on his skin like a physical thing.
His body didn’t know what to do with it.
Fox was already at the desk, charming the receptionist in fluent Russian. Zak appeared at Pav’s shoulder, carrying two equipment cases and the focused expression of a man recovering from a firefight by thinking about food.
“I checked.” His voice was grave. “Five-star kitchen. Alina says the beef here is life-changing.” He glanced toward the dining room. “If I survived a gunfight and die of disappointment over steak, I’ll be furious.”
Behind them, the women from the compound waited in borrowed clothes. Some clutched each other while others stared at the ceiling in awe. Lena was near the back of the group, the rabbit held loosely at her side now rather than crushed to her chest. Progress.
Katya hovered near the desk with her chin up and someone else’s coat over her shoulders. Her cheek was swollen, and she was favoring her right side, but she looked like she’d won. Which she had.
Harper stood beside her with her arms wrapped tightly around her middle. She’d barely spoken during the drive from the compound—first in the stolen SUVs, then in the absurd luxury sedans Fox had somehow produced out of nowhere.
Olga’s death still sat visibly inside her.
Fox handed Harper a key and squeezed her shoulder. Something passed between them in the quick way of people who’d known each other long enough to need very few words.
“Authorities tomorrow,” Fox said quietly. “After everyone’s slept. Statements before flights. I’ve made arrangements.”
Harper’s head dipped as if she understood the words. But she was somewhere very far away from them.
His room was on the sixth floor, and it was the size of a reasonable apartment. Expensive soundproofing swallowed wind and traffic and left nothing behind at all. He paused just inside the door after it closed, mapping the room on instinct. Exits. Blind angles. Distance to cover.
Threat level: none.
The bed was vast and white, and turned down at one corner. A single foil-wrapped chocolate on the pillow. Pav looked at it for longer than it deserved. Then he sat on the edge of the bed with his forearms on his knees and stared at nothing long enough for the room to lose depth around the edges.
He stood up again before stillness turned into thought. He took his watch off in the bathroom and set it on the marble shelf beside the sink, where it sat looking very much like what it was: a Soviet-era field watch with a scratched crystal and a worn strap.
Pav turned the shower on. He stood under it with the water as hot as it would go and watched steam fill the room until his skin turned red.
He scrubbed off the compound more than once until the water ran clear and stayed there longer than necessary because he couldn’t remember the last time there had been no reason not to.
The shower at his cabin was a pipe run from a rainwater tank.
Cold eight months of the year and the other four months merely unpleasant.
This was different. This was water pressure and marble tiles and a shelf full of small glass bottles of things that smelled expensive.
He used them anyway.
Out. Towel. He wiped steam from the mirror.
The man in the mirror looked like someone he used to be. Scars he knew by their histories, but the split at the corner of his mouth was new. Bruising along his ribs. His jaw had been locked for so long that it ached now even though the danger had passed.
The dressing on his chest needed changing. His shoulder needed ice. His feet needed proper cleaning before infection found another way into him. He took two painkillers instead and called it triage. Then picked up his watch and fastened it around his wrist.
Fox had arranged clothes. Dark trousers, a navy shirt, both of them the right size. Pav dressed. This man in borrowed clothes wasn’t the one who’d lived alone in the taiga. He didn’t know yet who he was instead.
A knock came from the door. When he opened it, his brain stalled immediately.
Harper.
She wore close-fitting charcoal pants and a cashmere sweater in a gray precisely calibrated to her eyes. Her hair was loose, falling past her shoulders in soft chestnut waves. She gave him a tentative smile. “Hi.”
He took a breath. “Hi, you.”
But beneath all of it, she looked carefully assembled. As if exhaustion had been buttoned neatly beneath the cashmere. “Can I come in?”
“What? Yes. Of course.”
The room changed when she stepped into it. That was the only way to describe it.
She was the variable.
She moved to the large picture window. Ekaterinburg spread below them, gold and shimmering and indifferent. She gazed out at it, her arms loosely crossed.
Pav waited six feet away and committed the image to memory. She wore the luxury easily. As if she’d always belonged in rooms like this.
Pav understood survival. Endurance. Violence. This felt dangerously close to grace.
She turned to face him and smiled. “I took the liberty of ordering room service. I hope that’s okay?”
He stared at her for a second too long. “You ordered room service?”
She took hold of his hands. “I thought it would be nice to eat together. Just you and me.”
He nodded. “I’d like that. Very much.”
Room service arrived on a silver trolley that looked absurd after the last week. Linen napkins. Covered dishes. A bottle of wine sweating gently in a bucket of ice. The food smelled like something people ate by choice rather than necessity, which felt surreal.
Harper made a small sound that might have been relief as they sat at the little table by the window.
Pav sat opposite her. They ate without trying to fill the silence.
Without pretending either of them knew what came next.
Just two people in a warm room doing something ordinary after something that hadn’t been.
He watched her hands around the wine glass. The marks from the zip ties still shadowed her wrists. His grip tightened around the stem of his glass.
She talked about her flight home, turning the wine slowly between her fingers. Morning flight. London. A connection through a city he immediately forgot.
She wasn’t pushing. He understood that. He said nothing. The silence acquired a different weight.
She tucked her hair back from her face with one hand, and he watched it happen. Something in him aligned so suddenly that it felt irreversible. He looked out of the window for a moment, turning Alexei’s watch on his wrist, the familiar drag of the strap against his skin.
He cleared his throat. “There were two wolves near my cabin. I watched them for three years.”
Harper stilled.
“They moved together. Hunted together. When she was injured one winter, he stayed close. Didn’t range far. Brought food back when he could.” He exhaled. “She died before spring.”
The room was hushed.
“For a long time, I understood the part where he kept going alone.”
“Pav.”
He looked at her. “I don’t anymore.”
He picked up his phone from the table. Opened the flight booking.
The internal connection back to the region, the small northern city.
The life he’d constructed specifically around the absence of anyone who could be taken from him.
His thumb hovered over the confirmation screen.
Then he canceled the flight with a swipe.
He set the phone face down and didn’t explain, because there was nothing to explain. Harper didn’t look at the phone. Instead, she watched him with an expression he was still learning the vocabulary for.
“I hear London is rainy most of the time,” he said. A warning, or something like one.
The corner of her mouth trembled. “You’ll hate it.”
“Probably.” He considered. “Show me anyway.”
Her breath left her slowly, shakily. He reached across the table, and his hand found hers in the quiet as if it already knew where to go. Perhaps it had known for longer than he’d been willing to admit.
Her fingers closed around his. He looked at their joined hands. Hers still marked by zip ties. His scarred and callused. Alexei’s watch on his wrist.
By any reasonable measure, neither of them should have been sitting here.
And yet.
For the first time in a very long while, Pav stopped listening for danger.