"Svoloch'," he says, under his breath. Just that. One word in Russian that I understand completely.
"I started planning the night I saw what he did to her hands," I say. "She was eight years old and I looked at her hands and I understood that I was going to take her out of that house or I was going to spend the rest of my life knowing I didn't."
I look at him directly, not shrinking myself, or the strength I’ve gained. "So I planned. For eleven months. I skimmed money from the household accounts — small amounts, nothing thatwould be noticed. I copied a key. I memorized bus routes. I found a shelter. And when the right night came, we left."
He doesn’t react, just waits, listening.
"With four hundred and twelve dollars and a change of clothes and a photograph we took in a pharmacy booth." I pause. "I left everything else. Everything I'd had before. The name, the history, all of it. We went to a shelter in Pilsen and I spent six weeks building something new and then we started moving, city to city, until I was sure the trail was cold enough to stop."
"And then you came back to Chicago," he says.
"Yes," I say. "I thought — I thought we'd gotten far enough. I thought the cover was solid enough." I look at the window again. "I promised her we weren't leaving again."
The room is quiet for a moment.
"She told me," Victor says. "On the Ferris wheel. That you weren't always her mother."
"I heard her." I had and I had stayed very still and looked at the city and let it happen because Evie's trust is hers to give, and I have never once tried to take it back from her.
"They found me," I say.
"I know," he says. "Your co-worker called me. I was behind you before you reached the third block."
"You followed me?"
"I was protecting you; they were following you," he says. "There's a difference."
He moves then, and he stops close enough that I would have to step back to create distance, which I don't do, which has never once been the thing I do with this man.
"I know," he says. "I know who sent them. And I know why." He holds my gaze. "You're not running again, Yarina."
My name. My real name, in his voice, with that accent underneath the English that surfaces when he's saying something that matters to him, and it does something to me that I was not prepared for — something that has everything to do with the specific relief of being known, of having the thing you've been hiding held by someone else for a moment.
"You can't promise that," I say.
"Watch me," he says.
He reaches up and does what he did in the alley — his hand at my jaw, fingers curved against my face, tilting my chin up with the specific deliberateness of a man who knows exactly what he's doing and has decided to do it — and this time there is no phonecall coming, there is no Evie at a sleepover one building away, there is no reason to step back that I am willing to use, and I don't step back.
"This is a terrible idea," I say.
"Znayu," he says quietly. I know. "I've thought that from the beginning."
He kisses me. Not like he did in the alley. This is different. This is a man who has made a decision and is implementing it with the same total commitment he brings to everything else in his life. I make a sound against his mouth, and I kiss him back with everything I have, which turns out to be considerable.
His hands move — one still at my jaw, one finding the small of my back and pulling me closer with a certainty that bypasses negotiation entirely, and I go, because this is the choice I've been not-making for weeks and I'm done not making it, and the warmth of him is immediate and total and exactly what I knew it would be from the first moment in the storage room when he held a jacket between us and I was still somehow more aware of him than I'd been of anything in three years.
"The jacket," he says, against my mouth.
"What about it.”
"Take it off."
I take it off. He takes his off. We do this with the particular efficiency of people who have been thinking about this long enough that the logistics are already solved, and then his mouth is at my throat — not gentle, never gentle with this man, always that specific quality of certain want that bypasses gentle entirely — and I tip my head back and let it happen and my hands are in his hair and he says something in Russian against my skin that I catch every word of and do not translate aloud.
“Ty moyo.”
You are mine.
