He's going to talk to me. He didn't say it outright, but the coffee is an olive branch, and I know one of those when I see it.
I rub Wolf's belly and let myself smile at the ceiling.
I did it. I actually did it. Plan Z, baby. Caroline Oglethorpe, one. Catskill Mountains, zero.
And then Afon is standing over me.
I didn't hear him cross the room. Not one single, solitary floorboard creak. One second, he was at the counter with his back to me; the next, he's right in my grill,close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to see his face.
He holds a chipped ceramic mug out to me. Steam curls between us.
I reach for it, but his hand doesn't move. His fingers stay wrapped around the mug, and when mine brush against them, he holds.
My grin falters.
His eyes are locked on mine, and the almost-laugh from a moment ago is gone. Whatever warmth had crept into the room has been strangled. What's left in its place is a hell of a lot less cozy.
"I'll tell you what you want to know," he says. "But I'm only going to do it once. And once I start, I don't stop. Not for tears, not for feelings, not because you decide halfway through that you've heard enough." His grip tightens on the mug. "Do you understand?"
I nod meekly. I don't feel so confident anymore. Not by a long shot.
"Your father was a good man, Caroline," he murmurs. "But good men keep secrets. And his are going to break your heart."
With that, he lets go and returns to cooking the breakfast. I watch him, huge and imposing like a boulder caged within these four unstable walls, and wonder if I made a terrible choice in coming here.
Trapped in a cabin with the ex-mafia mountain man.
What could go wrong, right?
4
AFON
The eggs are done.
Two of them, overeasy, same as I've done every morning for the last six months, ever since I left the city and all its demons behind me. The yolks sit golden and trembling on the cast iron like they're wary of moving too fast. I understand the impulse.
I slide them onto a plate with the spatula and set it on the counter next to the coffee pot. Then I stand at the kitchen window and look at the snow.
It hasn't let up. If anything, it's coming down harder than when I first noticed it around four this morning, which is when I stopped chopping wood and went to sit on the porch with Wolf and watch the world go white. I sat out there for two hours in the cold, not because I enjoy suffering—that's Caroline's department, apparently—but because the inside of the cabin had become unbearable.
Every time I glanced at the couch, the girl was there, curled up under my blanket, breathing softly through her busted nose, and looking so much like her mother that it made my lungs seize.
Susan Oglethorpe's pale green eyes.
Bill's stubborn jaw.
Christ.
She's got both of them in her face but neither of them left in her life, and she wantsmeto explain why.
I press my palms flat against the edge of the sink and lean my weight into them. The porcelain is cold. The water I ran earlier has long since drained, and a single coffee ring stains the basin. Outside, the snow fills in the footprints I left on the porch steps this morning. It'll keep doing that all day if it doesn't stop, and if it doesn't stop, she's not going anywhere, and if she's not going anywhere…
I kill that thought dead.
It's been a long and lonely six months up here. Then again, that's how I wanted it. I left all my tools of the trade in Lukas Lazarev's office, broke my phone into pieces and jettisoned those pieces into the Hudson, and then drove north until the cell towers stopped working and the road turned to dirt.
I came here to disappear. Not poetically and temporarily, but literally and permanently. I came here to stop being Afon Satyrin, the man who did things for powerful people. I wanted to start being nobody at all.
