He opened my door himself.
The grass under my boots was wet. The cold came up through the leather sole and into the bottom of my foot in a single rush. I followed Mikhail down the bank.
The blood was in the seat.
The blood was on the inside of the door.
The blood was in a thin track on the dirt that started at the lip of the doorframe and went down the bank and stopped at the line of the trees.
The track in the dirt led into the tree line. The dogs were already in. I could hear them, low and panting, somewhere a hundred yards in. The men with the dogs were already gone.
I put a single hand at my mouth. I did not speak. I did not have any words for it.
Alek came up behind me. He did not touch me. He stopped at my shoulder. His voice when it came was not raised. It was the flat voice the Pakhan uses when the decision has already been made inside him and he is only saying it out loud because the men need to hear it.
"Find my brother. Kill the man who took him."
The words went into my chest like a stone dropped into a well. I felt them go down. I felt them hit.
I turned without thinking and Lily was already there. Jade was already there. Sienna was already there. Three sets of arms closed around me at the same time, at the shoulders and the back and the side of my head, and I let myself be held the way a child lets itself be held.
I cried.
I have not been a person who cries. I have been a person who keeps the thing behind the teeth and breathes through it and writes it into a notebook later when no one is looking. I was not that person on the bank of an upstate road in the cold of a morning that smelled of wet leaves and gasoline.
Lily cried with me. She did not make any noise about her own crying. She did not make it a thing of hers. She put her wet cheek against my temple and let her tears go where mine were going.
Jade kept her hand at the back of my neck. The pressure of her fingers there was the only steady thing in my body.
Sienna's hand stayed in my hair. She had taken the elastic out without my noticing and she was smoothing it back from my face with the flat of her palm in long slow strokes the way a mother would.
The men kept working around us. Voices in two languages. A radio crackled on a hip somewhere behind me. A dog called from inside the trees and a man called back. Somewhere a car door closed. Somewhere Mikhail said a name into a phone in a voice I had never heard him use.
They took me back up the bank to the sedan when the worst of it had gone through me. My legs were not quite mine for the first ten steps. Jade had me at the elbow on one side and Sienna had me at the elbow on the other and Lily was a half step ahead, opening the back door, holding it.
Lily slid into the back with me instead of going to the wheel. Jade got in front in the passenger seat and turned the whole of her body around to face us. Sienna got into the driver's seat to keep the heat on. The doors closed. The cold of the outside dropped out of my skin in a wave and the warm of the car came up around me and my body started shaking.
Jade reached back between the seats and put a hand on my knee.
"They are going to find him, Chloe."
"What if they find him dead?"
Lily's voice was wet at the edges, but it was steady underneath. "He had better not be. He will fight for it. I know him."
I sat with that for a second. Then I let the thing I had been holding under my tongue for three days go.
"I never told him I like him. I never said it. We have not been okay for three days and I let him sit in three days of not being okay. I should have understood him better. I should have called."
Sienna's eyes found mine in the rearview. She did not turn her head. The eyes were enough.
"He isn't angry with you. He has been drinking on our couch for three days because he is scared you are going to leave him. He didn't handle it well. He doesn't handle a lot of things well. He loves you that much, Chloe. He was driving to you when this happened. He is coming back to you."
Lily's arm was around my shoulder. Jade's hand was on my knee. Sienna's eyes were on mine in the small rectangle of the rearview. Outside the windshield the men were a long dark line of coats around a wreck the color of wet steel, and beyond them the bare trees, and beyond the trees the place where the dogs had gone in. My right hand was in my coat pocket. The cold of the gold pendant inside the velvet had warmed against the inside of my hip.
11
DANIIL
