Ivan doesn't slow until we're well out in the middle of the lake, far enough that rifles from the shore are nothing more than distant guesses.
Only then does he cut the engine.
The sudden silence is almost painful.
Water laps against the hull. The wind stirs. In the distance, the fire crackles like a beast gnawing at its prey.
Ivan climbs back toward me, soot and streaks of blood smeared across his face—some his, most not.
"Let me see."
I pull my hand away from my thigh.
The stain on my pants resembles a murder scene. Ivan doesn't react to the dramatic sight; he focuses on the injury beneath.
He tears the fabric, revealing the wound—entry and exit points, ragged edges, muscle torn apart.
"Through and through," he observes clinically, though his voice carries an edge. "Missed the artery."
"Lucky," I rasp, the word tasting bitter on my tongue. "We lost the recorder. We lost the cabin. Now we're floating in the middle of a lake with one working leg and a boat that just took a hit."
Ivan is silent for a moment.
He removes his shirt, tears it into strips, and skillfully binds my wound with firm hands. The pressure makes me see white again, but the bleeding slows. My head clears slightly as my body stops protesting the blood loss.
When he finishes, he sits back, breathing heavily for the first time since all this began.
"We're alive," he says. "Both of us. That wasn't supposed to happen."
I stare at the shore.
The cabin—his sanctuary, his contingency plan, the place he trusted enough to bring me—burns like a signal flare. Blacksmoke billows into the sky, and ash drifts over the water in tiny fragments.
"You should've left me," I say.
His head snaps toward me.
"We already had this conversation," he replies, his voice firm. "The answer hasn't changed."
"Without the recording, it's our word against Boris's," I say, hating how steady my voice sounds despite the fire in my leg. "He's spent decades building loyalty. He'll tell your father we staged everything, that the Italians did it, that we?—"
"Then we get something else," Ivan interrupts. No poetry. No speeches. Just determination. "We take it from him."
"And if we can't?"
He looks at me as if he can't believe I'm asking.
His hand finds mine—blood-slick fingers intertwining—and he squeezes hard enough to hurt.
"Then we lose together," he says. "That's the deal."
The same words echo in this cold reality, stripped of adrenaline and drama.
I feel something shift in my chest, though I can't name it.
Not hope. Not yet. Hope is clean.
This is messier.
