Fine then. We'll do this the hard way.
"He got a call last night, didn't he?" It's coming together as I say it, the pieces snapping into place. "Something happened. Someone called him." I look around the table at all their carefully blank faces. "It was Reznik, wasn't it?"
A man with the scarred eyebrow opens his mouth and Lukas silences him with one lifted finger.
"Yes," Lukas confirms after a moment. "We believe so. Afon's gone, his vehicle is gone, and the satellite phone is gone with him. He told no one. Which is exactly what I would have expected from him. To walk into the dark alone and let no one follow."
"Why?" I demand. "Why would he do that? Reznik wantshim,I get it, but Afon's not stupid. He wouldn't justhand himself overfor nothing."
"Not for nothing." Lukas exhales through his nose. He glances at Kir, then back at me, then sighs. "Reznik has Matvei."
Matvei.
Cass's husband. Afon's nephew.
The man who handed me my father's letter at a wedding six months ago, who's the whole reason I started down this insane road in the first place.
Lukas actually looks sympathetic, to my surprise. "Reznik will have made it simple. Afon comes alone, unarmed, and Mat goes free. If Afon chose not to come, or tried to strong-arm him somehow, Reznik would kill them both and come for you." He spreads his big, scarred hands flat on the table.
I stare at the ring where I dropped it on the table. This chipped, scratched little circle of worn bronze that he carried for twenty years for a woman who died in the snow, that he took off and left for me because he thought it was the closest he'd get to saying goodbye.
I can almost picture how he did it.
Standing over my bed in the dark. Whispering my own words back at me.
Eyes open. On purpose. I chose you, too.
And then walking out to go die.
A strange sort of alchemy takes place inside of me. The fear and the grief curdle into something else, something hot, clear, and almost calm. All the noise drops away and there's just the thing that has to be said and me to say it.
"No," I declare.
Lukas tilts his head. "No?"
"We had a deal." I'm not talking to Lukas, not really. I'm talking to a man who's already an hour north of here driving toward a man who wants to kill him. "Afon and me, we made a deal. He tells me everything, his way, his order, when he says so—andthenI'd get to choose what happened next. That was the whole point." I press my palm flat over the ring to cover it. "He doesn'tget to decideforme that he's not coming back. That's not the deal."
"Caroline," Lukas says, "I understand you're upset, but?—"
"I'm getting married today." I look up and down the table at all of them, these dangerous men who've gone perfectly still. "Do you hear me? At noon today, I'm getting married. Just because the groom has decided to spend the morning getting himself killed instead doesn't mean that I'm cancelling this shit. Look at me. Look at me! I am telling you, every single one of you, that is not going to happen, because I am not going to let it."
A stunned silence follows.
Then Lukas says, "There are real lives at risk here, Caroline. These things cannot be rushed."
"Bullshit. I know exactly what I'm asking." I stand up. My ankle holds. "You said the price of your help is the rest of someone's life. Fine. I'll pay it. Whatever it is, put it on my tab. But you said something else, too, in your study. You said you protect family." I lift my chin—my dad's chin, the one Lukas himself pointed out. "I'm about to be his wife. That makes me family. So protect us. Both of us. Go get my husband."
Lukas Lazarev looks at me across the length of that table, this enormous old man with his scarred hands and his gray eyes. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he almost respects me now.
And when he speaks, it isn't to me. It's to the room.
"I want eyes on that logging road within the hour, far enough back that Reznik's sentries don't see us coming. Nobody moves on the camp until I say. We do this clean, or we do not do it atall—but we aregoingto do it." He turns to Kir. "Work on getting satellites or drones over the camp so we aren't going in blind."
The room comes alive all at once—chairs scraping, men moving, the map sliding across the table, a dozen different phones lighting up. The stillness is gone, replaced by military purpose and violent poise. I stand there in my wrinkled t-shirt and my borrowed flats in the middle of it, holding a worn-out ring and a folded granola bar wrapper, watching the machine roar to life.
Lukas looks back down the table at me. Just once.
"You'll stay here," he says.
