Ivan looked at me across the table.
“That,” he said softly, “is not an expression I would use lightly in this family.”
The specific quality of the words. The specific quality of the silence that followed them.
My mother’s face. Twenty-nine. A mountain road.
Before either of us could say another word, Vlad appeared in the dining room doorway. He looked at my father, not at me. Hehad stopped looking at me since yesterday, which was its own kind of information.
“Sir.” His voice was even. Professional. “There is a man at the front gate. He says his name is Jared Kane.”
The dining room went very still.
I watched my father’s face. Watched the calculation run, faster than I could follow, variables assessed and weighted and discarded in the time it took me to draw a breath. His eyes moved from Vlad to me and in them I saw something I had not seen before, something that in a different man might have been called uncertainty but in Ivan Morozov was the specific quality of a situation not proceeding according to plan.
Then his face closed.
“Get her things,” he said to Vlad. “The car, now. She goes out the back. She is on a plane to Moscow tonight.”
“Father—“
“Now, Vlad.”
Dimitri appeared behind Vlad in the doorway. They crossed the room and I felt a hand close around each of my arms and I did not fight it—not yet, because fighting in the dining room with my father watching accomplished nothing and I was not going to waste the only move I had on something that couldn’t work.
I let them move me.
Through the kitchen, past Molly who pressed herself against the counter with her eyes down and her hands shaking, out the back passage and into the gray morning air. A black car waited in the rear drive, engine already running. Dimitri opened the rear door. I got in because the alternative was being put in, and I had some choices left and I intended to use them strategically.
The door closed.
Vlad got in the front. Dimitri walked around to the other rear door.
I looked at the seat between us. Looked at the door handle. Looked at the distance between the rear drive and the front gate where a man whose name I had just said out loud in my father’s dining room was standing on the other side of a wall.
Dimitri’s door opened.
He was halfway into the seat when I moved.
Not toward the door, there wasn’t time for the door. The dividing screen between the front and rear of the car was a solid panel, not glass, which meant Vlad couldn’t see what was happening behind him. I had noted this the first time I’d been put in this car three weeks ago, because I noted things, because my mother had taught me that knowledge was the thing they couldn’t take from you.
Dimitri’s elbow caught the headrest.
I caught the door handle.
The door swung outward.
Dimitri swore in Russian and grabbed for my arm.
I pulled against his grip with everything I had and the grip held and for one suspended awful second we were simply two people locked in opposition, and then the car lurched forward. Vlad reacting to the sound, pressed the accelerator by instinct, and the movement broke Dimitri’s balance and mine simultaneously and the world tilted.
The impact arrived before I heard it.
The front of the car met the cement pillar of the rear gatepost with a sound like a gunshot and everything stopped.
Silence.
Then: pain in my temple where it had hit the window. Dimitri’s weight against me. The smell of deployed airbags from the front seat and the sound of Vlad swearing and the distant sound of the front gate alarm and somewhere further, the sound of voices.
