BLOOD AND ASHES

The Night Petrov Dies

The night had a smell.

She would never be able to explain it to anyone who hadn’t been inside it the specific compound of smoke and cold air and something metallic that she eventually understood was blood, though she would not allow herself to think the word blood until much later, until she was far enough away that the word could not touch her. That night it was just a smell. A fact of the air. Something to breathe through while she walked.

Marco she did not yet know his name was Marco, she only knew he had a more approachable face than the other one and had said the word safe with a conviction that she had chosen, strategically, to believe kept his hand at her shoulder. Not gripping. Not dragging. Just present, the way a guide keeps contact on dark terrain, informational rather than controlling.

She was grateful for the distinction, and hated that she was grateful, and filed the hatred away for later.

The hallway through which they moved was enormous and ruined. Petrov’s house had been built to project power, all that marble and those high ceilings, and power, she was learning, had a particular quality of spectacle when it collapsed. A chandelier had come down on the left side of the entrance hall, shattering into what must have been ten thousand pieces that caught the smoke thickened light and held it. There were men on the floor that she didn’t look at. She made a specific, deliberate choice not to look at them and she held to it.

She looked at the tall man instead.

He was ahead of her by six or seven paces, which told her something that he did not consider her a flight risk, or that he was confident the man behind her was enough, or that he simply did not find her interesting enough to monitor. He moved through the devastation of Petrov’s hallway the way a person moved through a room they had arranged themselves: with ownership, with a kind of spatial authority that made every other person in the vicinity peripheral.

He was on the phone. Speaking Russian in low, clipped sentences, orders, she guessed, from the quality of them, though she hadn’t learned enough of the language yet to know for certain. He did not look back at her once.

She was trying to put him together from the pieces she had. Tall, well over six feet, she thought, with the proportions of someone who had learned to occupy space rather than someone who had simply grown into it. Dark in the way of men with Russian or Slavic heritage, the combination of black hair and light eyes that she would have drawn, if she had a pen, with very precise attention to contrast. The jaw she had already noted. The gun at his hip that he still had not drawn.

She noted the not drawn gun. It seemed important, as data points went.

Who came to a firefight and didn’t draw their weapon? Someone who didn’t need to.

Or someone whose reputation meant the weapon was unnecessary. She filed this too, in the case she was building, and followed him out the front door of Petrov’s house and into the Moscow night.

———————————————————————

The cold hit her like a physical thing.

She had lived in London her whole life, had known cold in the wet grey specific way of English winters, but this was different, this was a cold that had philosophy behind it. This was cold that meant it. She had on the thin cardigan she had been given three weeks ago and nothing else, and the air went through her like she was made of gauze.

She did not make a sound. Three black vehicles were waiting in the drive. Men moved efficiently around them professional, purposeful, the quality of motion that came from training. No one was running. No one was panicking. The chaos inside the house had been something they had caused, she understood it had been their chaos, imported and deliberate and now concluded.

They had come here to do something. They had done it.

She was, apparently, part of the doing.

The tall man stopped beside the middle vehicle and turned for the first time and looked at her.

Up close he was worse. Not ugly, the opposite, in the specific way that people who were built for severity could be beautiful in a way that gave you no comfort at all. His eyes were grey. Not grey like her father’s eyes, which were the soft equivocal grey of someone who hadn’t decided anything. These were grey like metal. Like weather coming in.

He looked at her for approximately three seconds.

She looked back. She had decided, somewhere in the cargo hold, that she would not be the first to look away. It was a small, possibly meaningless form of resistance, but she had so little available that she was taking everything she could get.

He spoke to Marco in Russian.

Marco translated

“He wants to know if you’re hurt.”

She thought about the past twenty three days in a house that had smelled of new paint and old threat. She thought about the ways she had learned to divide herself.

“Define hurt,” she said.

Marco blinked. Translated this, apparently, because the grey eyes shifted slightly in a way that she couldn’t read.

The tall man said something. One word.

“Get in,” said Marco.

She got in.

____________________

She slept.

She didn’t mean to, her body simply confiscated the decision, the way it had started doing recently, taking things out of her hands in the interest of basic maintenance. One moment she was sitting in the back seat of the car watching Moscow go past and Moscow at night was something she would have drawn, if she had a pen, the particular combination of Stalinist grandeur and modern glittering excess that made it look like two cities layered on top of each other and the next moment she was somewhere else.

She didn’t dream. She was grateful.

She woke to stillness. The car had stopped. Marco was turned around in the front seat, watching her with an expression she couldn’t categorise, not threatening, something almost careful.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Home,” he said. And then, as though he heard how that sounded

“The compound. Mr. Volkov’s compound. You will have a room. You will be —” He paused on the word, in a way that suggested it was complicated. “You will be cared for.”

Mr. Volkov.

She looked at the building beyond the car window.

It was large. Everything here was large, large in the way that money that had stopped apologising for itself was large. Stone, and glass, and a perimeter wall that was high enough to be architecture and functional enough to be a fortress. Lights in the windows, pale and steady.

She looked at it and thought: so this is the new cage, then.

And then she thought: but you’re alive. You walked out the door. You counted to this.

“Alright,” she said.

She got out of the car. The cold received her again. Above the compound, the Moscow sky was doing something she had never seen before a faint greenish luminescence in the black, shifting, impossible.

Northern lights. In Moscow. She had not known you could see them this far south.

She stood in the driveway of a crime lord’s fortress and stared at the sky, and the northern lights moved above her in their slow, uncanny way, and she thought: draw this. Remember this. Whatever happens next, remember that you saw this.

The tall man Volkov walked past her toward the door.

He didn’t look at the sky.

She wondered what you had to have lived through to stop looking at things like that.

She followed him inside.

_________________

She was taken to a room.

It was not like Petrov’s room. That room had been the specific category of room for a captive functional, minimal, the door lockable only from the outside. This room was large. There was a bed with actual pillows.

There was a window barred, yes, but a window, and through it she could see the compound’s interior garden, which was bare in the November cold but which had the structural bones of something that might, in a different season, be beautiful.

There was a desk.

On the desk, someone had placed a sketchbook.

She stared at it.

It was not fancy, a standard spiral-bound, the kind she bought herself when the budget allowed. The cover was black. Beside it, a small collection of drawing pencils, graded H to 6B.

She picked it up.

She turned to Marco, who was waiting in the doorway.

“Who put this here?” He said nothing.

“Was it him? Was it —” She stopped.

“Did Mr. Volkov tell someone to put this here?”

Marco had the face of a man choosing between truth and discretion, and settling on a third option.

“Get some rest,” he said. “There will be food in an hour.”

He left. The door closed.

She sat on the bed with the sketchbook in her lap and the pencils beside her and the Moscow night outside the window. Her hands were shaking, she noticed this with a kind of distant interest, as though they belonged to someone else, as though the shaking was data rather than feeling.

She opened the sketchbook to the first page.

She picked up the softest pencil, the 6B, the one that gave you the richest black.

She drew the northern lights.

She drew them from memory, which was still fresh twenty minutes ago, she had been standing in the cold watching them, she could still feel their shape in her eyes. She drew them the way they had looked above the compound wall, spreading, uncertain, lit from inside.

Then she turned the page and drew the tall man’s face.

She drew it from memory too, three seconds of direct eye contact in a burning hallway, and she had it. She was good at faces. She had always been good at faces.

His came out severe and angular and, in the pencil, somehow more human than he had seemed in person, the pencil didn’t do the grey of his eyes, couldn’t capture the metallic quality of them, and so it captured something else instead. Something underneath.

She looked at what she had drawn.

“Who are you?” she asked the drawing.

The drawing did not answer.

She closed the sketchbook and held it to her chest and lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and breathed, and after a while the breathing became regular, and after a while she slept again, this time with something that was almost her own decision.

___________________

At three in the morning, she heard it.

She had not been deeply asleep, she was not capable of deep sleep yet, might not be for a long time, her body had decided to sleep only as far down as it could while still maintaining watch. She heard it clearly, footsteps in the corridor outside her room.

One set. Single, even, unhurried.

They stopped outside her door.

She lay very still. Every muscle locked. The sketchbook was beside her on the bed and she put her hand on it without knowing she was going to.

The footsteps did not come in.

A pause of twenty seconds, maybe. Thirty.

Then they moved on.

She lay staring at the ceiling for a long time after that.

She had no way to know, then, that this would become a pattern. That she would wake to those footsteps many nights, and that they would always pause, and always pass. That he moved the corridors of his own compound at night the way some people moved when sleep was something they had arranged a complicated truce with.

She had no way to know it.

But in the morning, when she looked at the drawing she had made of his face, the severe lines, the thing underneath she thought about the footsteps stopping outside her door in the middle of the night, and she traced the line of his jaw with her fingertip, and she thought, something happened to you.

Something broke and you are living in the wreckage of it. She recognised the wreckage.

She was living in hers.