"I'm not most people," I say.
"No," Lukas agrees. "You're not." He releases my hand. "Go. Rest. There's a library if you can't sleep. But Caroline…" He uses my first name, and it stops me at the door. "When this is over, there are things you'll want to know about your father. Afon'sbeen carrying them a long time. He'll tell you in his own way. But know that, whatever you hear, your father loved you. Everything he did, he did with you in mind. Don't lose sight of that."
I don't know what to say. So I just nod.
We walk back through the enormous house, past the art and the fireplace and the men in the halls. Afon's quiet. I am, too. We get back to the room and I sit down on the edge of the bed and look at him.
"You're going to do it?" I ask. "Go after Reznik?"
"Yes."
"And then it's over."
He stands by the window, looking out at the snow, exactly the same way Lukas did. "One way or another, yes."
I let myself believe it. Just for a minute, I let myself picture how it could be. Reznik gone. The Lastochka pulled up by the root. Wolf healed up, chasing butterflies in some sunlit yard somewhere. Afon and me, on a porch perhaps, no snowmobiles in sight. The whole rest of the story finally told, and me still here, choosing him, eyes wide open.
"Hey," I say. "Come here."
He comes without argument, sitting next to me and cuddling me against his side.
"It's going to be okay," I say.
"Don't say that," he chides. "You'll jinx it."
"I believe it," I insist. "Stupid, brave idiots always find their way to a happy ending."
30
CAROLINE
The next two days pass in a strange kind of peace.
We eat, we sleep, we sit with Wolf, who gets a little less groggy each time we visit. By the second afternoon, he's lifting his head when he hears Afon's boots in the hall, and his tail goesthump-thump-thumpagainst the padded floor of his medical room. The vet tech, a quiet young woman named Olga, says that's a very good sign. Tails are the windows to a dog's soul, or something like that.
Afon spends his mornings in a room I'm not allowed into, holed up with Lukas and his son, Kir. I met Kir briefly once with Cass and Matvei, but he intimidates me a little bit, especially when he's in business mode, like he is now. I get it: After all, they're planning a war.
I decide it's best if I don't ask about. Some things really aren't my business—which is a sentence I never thought I'd think, given my well-documented inability to leave a single stone unturned.
But there is one other stone left.
I feel it the whole time. It's there all the time, whether I'm whiling away the mornings in Lukas's vast library or doing yoga on the veranda, whether I'm lying in Afon's arms at night or sitting for hours on the floor with Wolf's head in my lap. It's there, under everything. The promise that was made to me.
When this is over, there are things you'll want to know about your father.
I'd thought, up on the mountain, that I'd grown patient. It wasn't an easy thing to become, but I found a way to let Afon parcel out the truth in his own time, in his own order.
But I'm realizing now that I was only patient because I had no choice. The snow made the choice for me. The cold and the men in the trees did, too.
Now, there's no snow, and there are several thick stone walls between me and the cold and the men with the guns. So that patience, that hard-wonIt'll come on its own time?That shit is looong gone.
So on the third night, after dinner, after the dishes are wheeled away and Afon comes out of the shower with his hair wet and his hip freshly taped, I'm sitting on the edge of the enormous bed with my hands folded in my lap, and I drop the hammer.
"It's time."
He stops. He knows exactly what I mean. To his credit, he doesn't pretend otherwise.
"We're still?—"
