"The fuck is 'your word' worth, Reznik?" I grit out.
"It's all I've got, and it's better than yours ever was." The smile is gone now. "I'll say this last part even though it's unnecessary: If you don't come, or you bring company, or you're so much as a minute late, I will take Gervasii's son apart one piece at a time and mail him to you. Do you understand me?"
I understand him. God help me, I understand him completely, because I taught him, along with Gervasii. We made him in our own image and then we left him for dead. Since then, he's spent twenty years becoming the worst of everything we ever were.
"I'll come," I vow.
"I know you will." The warmth returns to his voice. "You always were the loyal one, Afon. Gervasii ran his mouth and got himself killed, but you—you crawled back and paid and paid and paid. You never could stand to lose anyone." He sighs, full of misplaced melancholy. "Noon. At the camp where you found your girl. We'll be waiting."
The line goes dead.
I sit in the dark for a long time with the phone in my hand. The fire is almost out. The amber glass on the table still has a finger of liquor in it, Lukas's, untouched, and I slug it back without tasting it.
I meant what I said: I'm going, and I'm going alone.
There is no version of this where I bring Lukas's men. Reznik will have a watcher on the road. He'll know if I try to cheat, and then he'll kill Matvei and come for Caroline anyway, because the only thing that ever satisfies a man like Reznik is death heaped on top of death.
So I'll go alone. Maybe Reznik keeps his word and lets the boy walk. If it means that Matvei lives, that Caroline lives…
… then whatever happens to me is not so important anymore.
If there's anything I've learned, it's that you can't have a thing and keep it safe at the same time.
But you can die for it.
That is something a man can always do.
I stand. My knees crack and my back aches. I'm going to die an old man, in the snow, where I was always meant to die. There's a rightness to it that I can't argue with. A nice, clean full circle.
I go down the long halls on silent feet. The house sleeps around me. I find the room they gave Caroline. The door is unlocked, and it makes no noise when I ease it open.
She's asleep. The ivory wedding dress she chose today hangs on the closet door, pale in the dark. She's curled on her side under the blanket with one hand tucked beneath her cheek, looking like all the beauty in the world put together.
I stand over her for a moment. I don't touch her. If I touch her, I won't be able to do this.
I take the ring off.
It takes a few hard twists and jerks. Twenty years of wearing it has worn a groove, and the skin beneath is pale and soft, untouched by sun or weather. I hold it in my palm and gaze down at it.
I hope she knows what this means.
I take the folded granola bar wrapper out of my breast pocket—the one I picked out of a drainage ditch in Pike Hollow, the one I smoothed flat and carried fourteen miles down a mountain, the one I never told her about because there are no words for what it is, for why a man like me would keep a thing like that.
It's the first piece of her I ever held. A piece of garbage. The most valuable thing I own.
I set them both on the pillow beside her head. The ring and the wrapper. The past I thought defined me and the thing that showed me I could still have a future.
I look at her one more time.
"Eyes open," I whisper, so quiet it isn't even a sound. "On purpose. I chose you, too."
Then I go.
I walk out of the room, down the long halls, and out the great doors into the cold, which has always been waiting for me. The snow has stopped and the sky is clear and hard and full of stars.
I don't tell anyone, not Lukas, not the men, not anyone, because the only way to keep them safe is to keep them out of it, and theonly way to keephersafe is to walk into the dark alone and not come back out.
I get in the car and find, as I expected, that the keys are waiting in the ignition. The engine turns over quickly and quietly.
