The Nightingale Ledger

Chapter 4: Wet Ink

Nora

“Nora,” Lev said again, quieter this time. “Don’t touch the wall.”

I had already touched it.

My fingertip came away blue.

The ink was still wet. Not “yesterday” wet. Minutes wet. It smeared across my skin, bright and glossy, and the smell of it hit me a second later, sharp and chemical.

“Someone was in this room,” I whispered. “Someone was in this room while we were in the kitchen.”

Lev didn’t answer. He was looking past me at the cot, where the thin gray blanket had been pulled back, and at the dent in the pillow, still warm enough to hold its shape.

Then, somewhere below us, a floorboard creaked.

We both froze. The kettle ticked as it cooled. Outside, the elevated train thundered past, shaking dust from the ceiling, and under cover of that roar I heard it clearly: the soft, careful click of a door being closed.

Not the front door. The basement door.

“The house has a basement?” I breathed.

“It does.” Lev’s hand closed around my wrist, hard enough to hurt. “And I locked it myself fifteen years ago.”

He pulled the pistol from his coat. I had never been this close to a gun that was about to be used, and my whole body went cold and strangely clear, the way it does just before a car crash.

“Behind me,” he mouthed. “Shoes on.”

I jammed my feet into my pumps with shaking hands. Lev eased the bedroom door shut, then dropped to his knees and yanked the cot sideways. Under it, set into the floorboards, was a square iron hatch I’d never have noticed.

“You’re joking,” I whispered.

“My grandfather smuggled vodka. Every house on this street has one.” He hauled the hatch up. A breath of cold, damp air rose out of the black, smelling of earth and old bread. “It runs under the neighbors to the bakery on the corner. Go. Count twenty steps, then turn left.”

“Where are you going?”

“Right behind you.”

A crash exploded from downstairs.

It wasn’t a creak this time. It was the front door, all three bolts tearing out of the frame at once, and then boots, many boots, pounding into the hallway where the old photographs hung.

“Go, go, go!”

I dropped through the hatch. The ladder was slick with damp, and I slid the last few rungs and landed in ankle-deep water. Lev came down after me and pulled the hatch shut over our heads just as the bedroom door burst open above us.

Darkness again. The second time tonight, and I was starting to hate it.

Heavy steps crossed the floor over our heads. Dust sifted down onto my hair. A man spoke in Russian, rough and satisfied, and another answered with a short laugh.

Lev pressed his hand over my mouth, not roughly, just enough to remind me to breathe quietly. His palm was warm and smelled of tea and gun oil. I could feel his heartbeat against my back, steady as a metronome, and I hated how much that steadiness helped.

“Twenty steps,” he breathed in my ear. “Now.”

We ran, bent double, through a tunnel so low the stones scraped my shoulders. Water splashed. Something small and alive skittered over my foot, and I bit down on a scream. Behind us the hatch crashed open, and a flashlight beam stabbed down the passage and swung wildly across the walls.

“There!” a voice shouted.

A gunshot cracked, deafening in the narrow stone. A chunk of the tunnel wall blew apart beside my head, and grit stung my cheek.

“Left!” Lev roared. “Left, Nora!”

I threw myself sideways into a gap I hadn’t seen, and my hands hit a wooden ladder. I climbed like I was being chased by the devil, because I was. At the top, a trapdoor pushed open onto warmth and light and the smell of baking bread so overwhelming it almost made me cry.

I tumbled out onto a flour-dusted floor. An old woman in a white apron stood at a long table, kneading dough, and she didn’t even look up.

“Lev Andreyevich,” she said calmly, in thick English. “You are late.”

“Hello, Baba Zina.” Lev pulled himself out behind me, breathing hard, and slammed the trapdoor shut. He dragged a sack of flour across it. “Is the back door clear?”

“The back door is always clear for you.” She finally looked at me, and her sharp black eyes took in the glass cuts on my hands, the mud on my skirt, and the ink on my finger. “This is Mikhail’s girl?”

I stared at her. “You knew my father?”

“Everyone knew your father. He ate my pirozhki every Thursday.” She wiped her hands on her apron and pushed a warm paper bag into mine. “Eat. Run. Do not look back.”

We ran.

The back door let out into a narrow alley, then onto a wide gray street under the elevated tracks. The sky had gone the pale pink of early dawn. The train screamed overhead, sparks flying from the rails, and beyond the last row of shops I could see the boardwalk and the long flat shine of the sea.

“My phone,” Lev gasped, pulling his out. It was buzzing. He read the screen and went completely still. “Misha.”

“Is Claire all right?”

“Misha says he’s at her door.” Lev’s voice was strange and flat. “He says he knocked twice, then once, exactly as I told you.”

Relief hit me so hard my knees almost gave. “That’s good. That’s good, right?”

“No.” He looked up. “Nora, what did you text your sister?”

“What you told me to. Two knocks, then one. Don’t open for anyone else.”

“And who else could have read that message?”

I opened my mouth to say no one, and nothing came out.

Because Misha hadn’t just knocked twice, then once. He had knocked twice, then once because he’d been told to. The code was meant to prove he was ours. And Claire had written back that she was scared and didn’t know what was going on.

If the wrong person had been reading my texts, then they knew the signal too.

“Someone is inside my phone,” I whispered.

Lev reached for it. “Give it to me. Now.”

But my screen was already lighting up in my hand, a new message from an unknown number with no name and no photo. The preview was only a few words long.

Nice sunrise, Solovey. Turn around.

Every hair on my arms stood up.

Slowly, so slowly I could hear my own pulse, I turned.

At the far end of the boardwalk, a figure stood in the pink light with his hands in his coat pockets, perfectly relaxed, as if he’d been waiting there all night. I couldn’t see his face. But I could see the tiny red dot of a laser sight, and it was resting, steady and patient, in the center of Lev’s chest.

And the man in the distance raised one hand and waved at me like an old friend.

Nobody moved.