‘A blind sniper?’
‘Echo, echo, echo,’ Blaire says, unafraid of him in every way, ‘exactement comme une chauve-souris, mon cœur.Is that all you know how to do?’
Lachlan, whose French is rudimentary at best, catches the “blind as a bat”drift regardless but is dragged away by Danya before he can dig up a response in kind.‘Yes, yes, very sexy language I don’t speak, wonderful,’ Danya says, clipped and cheerful.‘We go train now.Talk later, Bee.Great chat.’
?
Vasily gradually opens up a little.
Losing his brother seems to be a loss too vast to contain.It cannot fit inside his body, so it lives outside for now like a cloud, atmospheric tears for rain and sadness in storms.Both his brotherandhis father too… gone forever.
Lachlan quietly asks Vasily what he wants to do.‘I want to stay,’ he says, unsurprisingly.‘I am happy here and he would have wanted it.’
Vasily is seventeen years old, eighteen come end of year, but it’s a long road until twenty-one, the only age that carries any meaning in the elite echelons.
‘Whatever you need,’ he tells the kid, hand on his shoulder, ‘I’m your man, OK?Always.’
Vasily almost smiles.‘He really did like you.’
Maybe it’s a way to honour Roman.
Maybe there never will be one.
For now, Lachlan does what he can and without too closely analysingwhy,he begins putting gradual distance between himself and Jules.
The rain stays for weeks.
Alistair is gone before it ebbs.
Savannah is walking again.
Vasily joins them for meals.
Blaire and Lachlan are not really speaking.
Mimi draws a lot more now, has started to paint too.
Lachlan loves seeing her express herself this way, always looks at each one she shows him from the pile and praises each piece accordingly.
Her collection is a verifiable menagerie of animals.The more she reads about them in books, the more accurately she can draw them.
When she shows him a shark, Lachlan’s throat closes up.
‘Wow,’ he says, keeping the smile in place.‘That’s… that’s beautiful, baby.’
‘Look, I did the fin so perfect, see?’
‘Yeah, you did.It’s…’cold ocean at dawn‘So well-drawn, with the…’lax arms leaving his middle‘The gills right there and just look at the…’water turns rose red‘Those teeth too, wow.’
Of all that has scarred him from that place, of all the animals and wildlife that crept in during those three days that seemed like months, it’s the shark he never fully saw that haunts him.
Whenever Lachlan thinks of it, he recalls Mikhail Sorrenko, a man he’ll never understand, telling him,I don’t swim in warm water,and Lachlan sees himself handing over the gun that he would use to shoot and kill his own son.
He feels all of it, and then he can’t breathe.
It’s Jules who notices, who pulls him aside, pressing his thumb into Lachlan’s wrist.‘Are you OK?You’ve gone shock white.’
It’s not OK.
