Chapter 77 Nikolai
I found Katya sitting in the garden with a book she wasn't reading, just holding it open in her lap while she stared at the grape leaves moving in the wind.
She looked up when I came out and I could see in her face that she already knew something was wrong, that careful intelligence she'd always had picking up on the tension I was carrying even though I was trying to hide it.
"We need to talk," I said, sitting down on the bench beside her.
She closed the book and set it aside and turned to face me with her full attention, and I was struck again by how much older she looked than the sister I remembered from fifteen years ago, how the years of hiding and running had marked her face with lines that shouldn't be there yet.
"You're leaving," she said, not asking, just stating the fact she'd already figured out.
"Yes," I said, "we're leaving the house for a while, a safety precaution, nothing serious but we need to be careful."
"Because of what I said," Katya said quietly, "about Dorian, about telling him I was coming to Tuscany."
I didn't lie to her because she deserved better than that.
"Yes," I said, "because of that, we can't stay here knowing that information is out there, we can't risk someone using it to find us."
She looked down at her hands in her lap and I could see shame and hurt moving across her face.
"I'm sorry," she said, "I wasn't thinking, he seemed so friendly and I've been alone for so long that when someone showed interest I just talked without thinking about what I was saying."
"I know," I said, and I did know, I understood exactly how isolation could make you careless, how loneliness could override training and common sense, "I'm not angry with you, Katya, but I can't take chances with Marlena and Elena's safety."
"I understand," she said, but her voice was thick with tears she was trying not to let fall.
I pulled an envelope from my jacket pocket and handed it to her, watching her open it and look at the cash and train ticket inside.
"This will get you back to Moscow," I said, "it's not safe for you to stay here with us and I can't risk you being followed if anyone is watching you, so you need to leave today, as soon as possible."
She looked at the envelope and then at me and I saw something break in her expression.
"I've lost you again," she said, "just when I got you back, I've lost you again because I was stupid and careless."
"You haven't lost me," I said, reaching out to take her hand, "but we need distance right now, we need space and time for things to settle before we can see each other again."
"How long?" she asked.
"I don't know," I admitted, "months maybe, maybe longer, I'll contact you when it's safe but until then you go back to your life in Moscow and you don't try to find us."
She nodded and tears were falling now despite her efforts to hold them back, and I pulled her into a hug the way I used to when we were children and she'd scraped her knee or had a nightmare.
"I love you," I said against her hair, "that hasn't changed and it won't change, but I have to protect my family."
"I know," she whispered, "I would do the same."
We sat there for a minute and then Marlena came out of the house with Elena in her arms, and Katya pulled away from me and wiped her eyes.
Marlena crossed the garden and handed Elena to me and then wrapped her arms around Katya without saying anything, just held her tight while Katya cried harder.
"I love you," Marlena said when they finally pulled apart, "you saved my life in Monaco and I'll never forget that, but Nikolai's right, we need to be careful right now."
"I know," Katya said, taking a shaky breath, "I know, I just wish I hadn't ruined this."
"You didn't ruin anything," Marlena said firmly, "you made a mistake, we've all made mistakes, but we're still family and we still love you."
Katya looked at Elena sleeping in my arms and reached out to touch her tiny hand.
"Take care of her," she said, "and take care of each other."
"We will," I promised.
The car came twenty minutes later, a taxi I'd called from town, and I walked Katya out to it with her small bag and watched her get in the back seat.
She looked at me through the window and I could see her trying to memorize my face the way I was trying to memorize hers, both of us knowing this might be the last time we saw each other for a very long time.
Then the car pulled away down the long driveway and disappeared around the curve, and I stood there watching the dust settle and feeling nothing except the slow tired feeling of someone who'd had to make too many hard choices over too many years.
I didn't believe Katya meant harm, I truly didn't, but intent didn't keep people safe and good intentions didn't stop bullets or prevent betrayals, and I couldn't afford to be sentimental when my daughter's life was at stake.
I went back inside and started packing.
I'd done this before, too many times, and my hands moved through the routine automatically, two bags for essentials, documents and cash in a waterproof pouch that went in my jacket, everything else left behind because things could be replaced and lives couldn't.
Elena's things went in a small pink bag with a yellow duck embroidered on the side that Marlena had bought at the market last month, and something about that duck broke my heart a little because it was so normal and cheerful and completely at odds with what we were doing.
A six month old baby shouldn't have a go bag, shouldn't need to know how to disappear at a moment's notice, but here we were packing her life into a bag with a duck on it and getting ready to run again.
Marlena packed without being told what to bring or how much to take, she'd also learned how to disappear fast over the past year, and that shouldn't be something a person had to learn but we'd both learned it and now we were teaching it to our daughter just by living this way.
That was the cost, I thought, watching Marlena move efficiently through the bedroom gathering clothes and medicine and documents, the cost of the life I'd built on revenge and violence was that even after trying to leave it behind we were still running from it, still looking over our shoulders, still unable to trust that any place was safe enough to stay.
We finished packing in under an hour and loaded everything into the car, Elena's car seat in the back and our bags in the trunk and the house locked behind us like we might come back even though I knew we probably wouldn't.
I didn't tell Marlena where we were going yet because I was still deciding between two locations, one that Damien knew about through our arrangement with MI6 and one he didn't, a place I'd set up years ago as a final backup that I'd never mentioned to anyone.
I chose the one Damien didn't know about.
It was an old habit, trusting no one completely, keeping secrets even from people who were supposed to be allies, and I knew it probably said something bad about me that even after everything I still couldn't bring myself to trust fully.
But that same paranoid caution had kept me alive this long and I wasn't going to abandon it now.
We drove out before noon, taking the back roads through the hills instead of the highway, and I kept checking the mirrors for cars that might be following even though I knew we'd left clean.
Elena fell asleep almost immediately, lulled by the car's motion, and Marlena held her in her lap in the back seat with one hand on her back and her eyes on the passing landscape.
"Where are we going?" she asked after about an hour of silence.
"Croatia," I said, "there's a house on the coast, small fishing village, no tourists, the kind of place where people mind their own business."
"Have you been there before?" she asked.
"Once," I said, "years ago, I bought the property under a shell company and never registered it with any government database, as far as official records go it doesn't exist."
She nodded and went back to looking out the window, and I could see her processing what that meant, that I'd been planning escape routes and backup locations even before I met her, that paranoia had been woven into my life so deeply I had safe houses I'd never mentioned to anyone.
The road stretched out ahead of us through rolling hills that gave way to flatter land and then to mountains in the distance, and I drove steadily without speeding, just another family on a road trip, nothing to draw attention.