Page 134 of Savage Hearts

Our nightly bath ritual continues, only now Mal speaks in English instead of Russian as he washes me. He tells me about his childhood. His family. His friends. His pets.

His brother, Mikhail.

He tells me how he saw a Clint Eastwood movie when he was little and decided he’d be a cowboy when he grew up. Then, later, he got into boxing and thought he might have a chance to do it professionally.

Until that night at the bar. Until that fateful punch. Until he met Pakhan, and all his dreams were crushed.

He paints a picture of a man living wholly alone in both mind and body, existing only to carry out orders handed down from above. He never had children or married because it wasn’t allowed.

His life wasn’t his own. Bratva first and forever. Duty or death.

Sometimes I go cold as I listen to his stories. Sometimes I want to cry. But always I wonder what he might have been had his life taken a different path.

But I’m perversely glad things went the way they did, because if his life had taken a different path, we never would have met.

I feel guilty about it, and I know it’s wrong, but it’s the truth. I’m glad for all his dark, twisted roads, because they led him to me.

It’s a secret I guard carefully.

One day as we’re finishing breakfast, he asks me out of the blue if I’d like to learn how to shoot a gun.

It frightens me. His answer doesn’t reassure. “Why would I need to know how to shoot a gun?”

“Better to know how and not need to than need to and not know how.”

It sounds like sage advice, but it also sounds like a warning. Like at any moment, our little slice of heaven in the wilderness could be torn in two.

So I learn how to shoot a pistol. Then I learn how to shoot a rifle.

When we discover that not only am I very good at hitting stationary targets, I actually enjoy it, too, Mal suggests I go hunting with him and try to hit something that moves.

“I could never shoot an animal,” is my immediate response.

“If you had my shotgun in your hands when that bear charged at you, would you have pulled the trigger?”

“Self-defense isn’t the same thing as going out and looking for something to kill.”

Mal gazes at me in silence for a moment. His eyes are endless and dark.

“Killing is killing, no matter the intent behind it. Moralizing doesn’t change the fact that you made something alive be unalive.”

He leaves it at that.

Since he’s an expert on the subject, I’m wise enough not to argue with him.

Then, late one evening, he gets a call that changes everything.

We’re in bed, lying back to front, his legs drawn up behind mine. I’m drifting off to sleep when a buzzing noise jerks me back into consciousness.

It’s his cell phone, ringing in the pocket of his coat. “Are you going to answer that?”

“I should.” He doesn’t move.

“It’s okay if you have to. I don’t mind.”

He squeezes me, murmuring, “You should.”

But then he sighs, rolls out of bed, and retrieves the phone.