Page 106 of Red Rooster

She touched his face again, skimmed her thumb along his lower lip. “Not ever. Not for a second. I just wanted you to know that this isn’t something we can talk about out loud. No one can hear.”

His gaze moved over her face, measuring her seriousness, and eventually his pain looked smoothed…became another kind of pain. That constant worry and guilt that had plagued him since the Institute’s phone call months before. “Alright,” he agreed.

Anna shifted closer, leaned into the place he made for her, automatically, within his arms. She pressed her lips to his ear, because she had no idea who might be listening, and told him what Val had said about the others. The ones who were coming for Sasha.

24

Buffalo, New York

He remembered giving it to her: folding Katya’s fingers around it and noting the way he left bloody fingerprints on the back of her hand. He’d squeezed her grip tight around the bell, hard enough that he’d felt her bones shift, slender and fragile as a bird’s.

“Keep it,” he’d said, and he’d made the mistake of looking at her face, seeing, beneath the bruises and the scratches and the exhausted dark circles under her eyes, the fear in her gaze. Everything else he’d intended to say – that he loved her, that he was sorry, that he was doing this for her own good – had shriveled and blacked on his tongue, a mouthful of the best intentions gone to ash.

He smoothed his thumb over the dented bronze surface now. It had been tarnished the first moment his mother handed it to him as a boy, but had aged well since; it had obviously been kept safe in drawers and boxes.

It was Valerian’s? It made sense. And in some ways it was an easier truth to swallow than the one he’d assumed: that it had belonged to Philippe. Philippe may have given it to Alexandra, but it, like so many things, had had a life before that.

He clocked a human scent emerging from the back door behind him and was flooded with a sense that this day was going to be one unbroken chain of repetitions. First Steve, and now Kolya, his footfalls quiet, slow, but sure.

With his free hand, Nikita gripped the top rail of the split-rail fence he leaned against, gaze pinned to the view that stretched out below him: cascading green hills contoured with morning shadows, outbuildings and barns, a massive corrugated steel structure that must be a warehouse. All the while he hummed with awareness as Kolya came to stand beside him, mimicking his posture with his forearms braced on the rail.

For the past seventy-five years, Sasha had been his constant companion – his only constant companion. They’d experimented with their hair, their clothes, their overall aesthetic, but neither of them had aged a day. Immortality was a burden in the way that all constants were, but it wasn’t until now, standing beside his son who was an old man, that Nikita realized howfleetingtime was.

Nikita didn’t think he would speak – he had no idea what to say – but suddenly the silence welled up around him, tight like arms around his ribs, and he said, “It’s beautiful here.” Which…how stupid. He wanted to kick himself. He felt…helpless. That was all he’d seemed to feel in the past forty-eight hours, and he hated it.

“Hmm,” Kolya murmured in agreement. “Mom and Dad paid a song for it in 1950. They couldn’t believe their luck. That was the original house, there.” He pointed off to his left, a small cabin of dark logs, half-screened from view by a stand of birch trees.

Mom and Dad. Nikita swallowed. “They were able to leave Russia?” he asked, hearing the waver in his voice.

Kolya nodded. “I was just a little thing, so I don’t remember all the details. But I think that we were snuck out. Some American friends they made at the end of the war. I remember Siberia, all the white, and the cold.Suchcold. And the ship that carried us to Alaska.”

Splinters bit into Nikita’s palm and he forced his grip to ease.

Kolya turned to face him, then, with his lined face, and white hair, and his eyes the color of the Moscow sky in winter. He smiled a little brokenly. “I don’t know if it would help to hear, but he never tried to replace you. Pyotr was a wonderful father – to all of us – but he never asked Mother not to tell me about you. He used to tell stories about – you and Dima together, from his memories as a boy.”

Nikita couldn’t look at him.

“I always hoped I would get to meet you.”

Nikita snorted. “How could you believe the stories? That I was even real?”

He saw Kolya shrug in his periphery. “Boys believe more readily than men. By the time I was old enough to question it, it had already become truth in my mind.”

It hurt – hurt in a way that was thorny, and conflicted, and guilt-riddled, because a part of himdidn’twish that he’d stayed – but it eased something in him to know that Katya and Pyotr had acknowledged him. That he wasn’t a dirty, shocking secret.

He cleared his throat. “Do you know who you’re named for?”

“The dancer whose preferred partner was a knife,” Kolya said with sad fondness. “Of the three brothers you lost, Kolya’s death hit Mother the hardest, I think.”

“We didn’t bury them,” Nikita said, and felt, to his relief, a creeping numbness begin to overtake him. His mind was throwing up a shield, and he was grateful for it. There was too much…of everything. His family, Sasha, the Institute – he couldn’t cope otherwise. He took a deeper, freer breath, the words coming out cold and impersonal. “Of all the horrible things I’ve done in my life, I think maybe that was the worst. Leaving them there like that.”

“It was a war zone,” Kolya said.

“That’s not an excuse.”

A faint chuckle. “Pyotr said you were like this. I guess nothing’s changed in seventy-five years.”

“Said I was like what?” He finally turned his head, and Kolya was looking at him with open warmth and amusement. A touch of nostalgia.