The Nagant felt like a sickness in his palm. Cold metal. Heavy. Unforgiving.
Kamo's question hung between them: run, or some other way?
Jake's modern brain, the one that taught students to argue and de-escalate, scrambled for something that didn't involve consigning a man to torture.
"We make a diversion," he said. The words sounded clumsy even to his own ears. "Set the old cooperage on the next street alight. Smoke, chaos—maybe Mikho slips free in the confusion."
It was a movie plan. It was hopeful. It was probably stupid.
Kamo stared. The wind whistled at the open window. For a second all Jake could hear was the blood in his own ears.
"A fire?" Kamo's laugh was a rasping grind. "A diversion? Soso, has the cold gone soft in your head?" He stepped in so close the room seemed to shrink. "Who puts out your fire? The brigade comes late. They will tear Mikho alive before the smoke clears. They don't chase smoke; they take names. They have him already. That is the fact."
His voice pounded the room. "This isn't a child's poem. It's life or death."
Whistles carried up from the street. Dogs barked. Time was gone.
Kamo's eyes sharpened into something like accusation. "What happened to you tonight? The Soso I know calculates. He knows what sacrifices are necessary."
Jake felt the net tightening. Every impulse from back home—every belief in human life, in small mercies—argued against what the revolution demanded. Hesitate, and they would suspect. Hesitate, and they might kill him as an informer. Hesitate, and dozens might die because the press got discovered.
He swallowed. The words scraped his throat; they were not his, but they had to be spoken in the mouth that wore this face.
"We run," he said, and the voice was thin, rough with something he did not recognize. "He is lost."
Saying it was like swallowing glass. The sentence hung—final, simple, brutal.
Kamo's shoulders eased. Approval, ugly and quick, crossed his face. "Good," he grunted. "Now move."
Everything after that was a blur of motion. Kamo cracked the door, peered down the corridor, then shoved Jake forward. Jake jammed the revolver into his coat. It banged against his hip like a guilty secret.
They avoided the main stairs. Kamo led them down a servants' staircase that groaned under their weight. The air outside the stairwell hit them like a slap—cold, rotten, sharp. The alley below was a mouth of refuse and ice. Jake's feet slipped and found purchase anyway; the body he wore moved with a low, familiar hunger. He was a passenger to its memory, his own thoughts trailing behind.
They threaded the city's dark veins. Shuttered windows. Huddled figures. The sound of boots receded. For once, movement felt less like escape and more like ritual.
At last, Kamo stopped in front of an ordinary door in a slightly better block. He knocked a quick code on the wood.
The door opened. Warmth rolled out—tea, boiled laundry, human noise. A woman stood there with a small shawl twisted in her hands.
She looked like the photographs. Gentle face, wide dark eyes rimmed with worry. Ekaterina Svanidze. Kato.
She saw him and the whole room rearranged. Her face brightened. "Soso," she said, and the syllable was a hush, a relief. She stepped forward and took his hand without question.
The touch hit Jake like a current. Warm. Immediate. Human.
Something inside him broke.
The careful, pleading voice from his twenty-first-century life splintered. The nausea, the shame—too raw to hold—coalesced into one animal need: to feel connected, to feel something other than the cold calculus he had shoved through his teeth.
He had come into this life to prevent monsters. He had convinced himself he could steer this skin away from what it would do. He had told himself he could be different.
Instead, the first thing he did after deciding to save millions was to steal warmth from a woman who had trusted him.
It had begun with a touch—his hand finding hers in the dark, an instinct more than a choice. But the current that passed between them wasn't comfort. It was collision—two wounded souls burning against each other.
His mouth found hers. The kiss tasted of desperation and cheap whiskey. It wasn't gentle. It was a crash of fear, guilt, and grief masquerading as passion. Her stillness broke, and what replaced it wasn't tenderness. It was defiance. She met him with equal force, as if fighting for the memory of a man she barely recognized. Her fingers twisted in his hair, pulling him closer, demanding the truth of the stranger wearing her husband's face.
Clothes fell away in rough motions, clumsy, angry. The cold air bit at them, chased instantly by heat—raw, consuming, wrong. His hands moved with muscle memory that wasn't his. Koba's memory. Rough, sure, claiming. Jake's mind screamed behind it all, a prisoner in his own skull. He knew this wasn't love. It was something violent dressed up as connection.
Her breath came in sharp gasps. Her nails raked his back. The rhythm they found was desperate, not intimate—a frantic attempt to scrape meaning from ruin. Each touch was a plea. Each movement a lie. She searched for Soso—the dreamer, the poet. All she found was the cold, methodical strength of the man history would call monster.
When it ended, there was no release—only collapse. A shared, ragged breath swallowed by darkness.
Then, silence.
It pressed in from all sides, thick as fog. Two people breathing in different languages of guilt—hers quiet and stunned, his jagged and full of loathing. The warmth of her skin seared him. He had wanted to feel human again. Instead, he felt infected.
After a long stretch of stillness, she moved. The rustle of sheets. The faint shift of weight.
"Soso?" Her voice was soft, frightened. The sound cut through him like glass.
He couldn't answer. There were no words that would make sense in any century. It wasn't me.I'm sorry. None of it mattered.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. The floorboards were cold and grounding. He reached for his clothes, pulling them on with trembling hands. Each movement was mechanical. The silence stretched again, loaded with questions she didn't ask and apologies he couldn't give.
He left the room quietly, closing the door as though that could make the moment less obscene.
In the dim light of the main room, Kamo sat at the table, the Nagant revolver disassembled before him. His hands moved with a soldier's precision, oiling the barrel, checking the mechanism. He didn't look up when Jake entered, but his pause said enough.
To Kamo, what had happened behind that door was nothing new. Soldiers cracked. Comrades sought comfort however they could. To him, it was survival. To Jake, it was decay.
Jake sank into a chair, burying his face in his hands. He wanted to claw back time, to erase the touch, the sound, the guilt burning behind his eyelids.
The door creaked open. Kato stepped out, wrapped in a shawl, her hair tousled. She moved carefully, her gaze fixed on the stove. Her hands shook slightly as she reached for the kettle.
"You must be hungry," she said, her voice a thin thread. "There is bread. Some cheese—"
"He can eat later," Kamo interrupted, voice sharp. He didn't glance up. "Make tea. Strong."
She flinched, nodded, and obeyed.
Only then did Kamo lift his eyes. The soldier was back—the commander. The brief flicker of pity was gone.
"How many did you see?" he asked. "The patrol that took Mikho. Who led them?"
Jake forced himself to focus. He shoved the images of the bedroom aside and latched onto the question like a lifeline. "I didn't see clearly," he said. "A dozen, maybe more. Some in uniform, others in plain clothes. They moved fast. Organized."
Kamo grunted. He slid the revolver's cylinder back into place with a solid click. "Planned operation. That means they have a source. Mikho isn't the start of it—he's the first they caught." He slammed the gun down. "We have to warn the others before dawn."
A knock interrupted him. Soft, patterned. Tap-tap… tap. Tap-tap.
Kamo stood instantly, the revolver in hand. He peered through the peephole, then unbolted the door.
A boy slipped inside—seventeen at most, pale and trembling, breath steaming in the cold air.
"Pyotr," Kamo said. "What news?"
"The citadel," Pyotr panted. "They took Mikho straight there. The raid was fast, precise. They went straight for him. They knew."
Jake's stomach turned. Logic and guilt twisted together. His order to run had been the right call. The practical one. Survival rewarded the cruel.
He looked at Kato. She stood by the stove, hands clasped tight around her cross, lips moving in silent prayer. Praying for the man her husband had just condemned. The sight hollowed him out.
"And the others?" Jake asked, his voice steady by force alone.
Pyotr shook his head. "The streets are crawling. I had to double back twice. But there's more." His voice dropped. "They didn't just hit the bakery."
Kamo stiffened. "Explain."
"The warehouse by the river," Pyotr said. "The one we left last month. They searched it."
Kamo frowned. "It was empty. We cleared it."
"It was supposed to be," Pyotr murmured. His eyes flicked to Jake. "But they found something. A box. One of the dockworkers saw them take it."
The room went still. The only sound was the soft hiss of the kettle.
Jake's throat tightened. "A box? What was in it?"
Pyotr shook his head. "He couldn't see. They sealed it and left. We don't know what was inside."
The air in the room shifted, the unspoken dread creeping in from every corner.
They didn't know what was in the box.
But Jake did.
Or at least, he was beginning to suspect.