I start jogging toward it.
I don't let myself think it's him just yet. I can't bear the letdown that would follow if it isn't. After six months, I've learned not to let myself think anything is anything, because hope, it turns out, is the bug bite of emotions—small, persistent, maddening, and capable of ruining your entire week.
It's probably some retired dentist from Poughkeepsie. Or, if not that, a meth lab. It might even be—and I would, at this point, settle for this—a very large bear who has learned to make a fire.
If so, fuck it.Eat me up, baby.
One way or another, this journey has reached its conclusion.
I keep charging through. No mosquito or pine needle whip to the face can slow me down now. The woods thin, little by little, and then all at once, sending me rocketing out into a clearing.
In that clearing is a cabin.
It's straight out of Hansel and Gretel. Cedar shingles, a stone chimney, a weathered tin roof. A hefty woodpile is stacked neatly against one outer wall and a pair of boots rests on the porch. I wouldn't be surprised to look down and find a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the front door.
There's also a window.
And in that window is a man.
He's shirtless. I would like the record to reflect that I notice this aspect last. I'm a serious woman on a serious mission, and the shirtlessness of any man encountered during the prosecution of said mission is incidental, irrelevant, and?—
He turns toward the window.
—Okay, fine, it's very, very relevant.
Because it is him.
Afon Satyrin, in the flesh, quite literally, standing at a kitchen sink with a dish towel over one shoulder. He's thinner than I remember from the foyer of my parents' house. Or no—not thinner.Harder.Like the city softness has been sanded off him. His shoulders are still broad, though, and the lines of his muscles are stark and undeniable.
His chest is riddled with the proof of bad decisions. Tattoos I can't read from here run alongside scars I can read just fine—a long one down his sternum, a shorter one across his ribs, and a third, raised and pale, on his left shoulder. His beard and hair are long and dark, though shot through with more gray than I remember. The eight-pointed star inked on the side of his throat looks darker against skin that has clearly seen a summer of sun.
He looks good.
Too good, for a man with a decade on me.
Definitelytoo good for a man who is a known associate of some very dangerous organized criminals, with a rap sheet longer than my arm that still doesn't fit even a quarter of his many, many sins.
As I watch, he turns his head to reveal half of his face in profile. His brow is heavy and knotted downwards, his mouth set in that ever-present frown.
I feel a prickle of fear race through me. I'm twenty yards from the cabin, half-hidden behind a tree, and it's dark out. There's absolutely no way he can see me, and yet the back of my neck tingles like he can, like he's known I was coming for the last six months, like he's been waiting at that window for the precise moment a silly girl from Manhattan would crash out of his woods with leaves in her hair and undergarments to ruin his hard-won peace.
I take a step forward to tell him why I've come.
That, I realize immediately, is the fatal mistake.
There've been a lot of little ones along the way—the lone granola bar comes to mind—but this is the metaphorical straw that breaks the camel's back.
Or, to shape that metaphor a bit more closely to this situation, it is the metaphorical tree root that breaks the city girl's neck.
We are not on the same page, my foot and this root, and the negotiation between them is brief, brutal, and not in my favor.
My ankle goes one way.
My knee goes the other.
My center of gravity makes a break for it and leaves me sideways in midair, arms windmilling like a cartoon coyote who has just realized there is no more cliff.
There's only time for one coherent thought, and to my complete embarrassment, it is notHelporMom!orRoll to protect your face from smashing into the earth.
