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 moved before he could think. Hands that were not entirely his tangled in her hair. He pulled her toward him. The kiss that followed was not gentle. It was panicked, clumsy, a claim made by someone trying to banish a void.
Kato gave a little sound—startled, confused. He shut the door with a boot and pressed her against it. He could hear his own mind shrieking: this isn't you. Stop. But the body answered with a force he couldn't rein in.
Kamo watched. Not with surprise. With the tired acceptance of a man who knew what desperation could look like. He turned and moved into the kitchen as if to give them privacy and to acknowledge the darker rules of their life.
Jake's hands were rough on her arms. Her breath quickened; her voice thinned into bewildered whispers. He pushed her into the small bedroom. It felt obscene—an emergency stoked by shame rather than intimacy.
When it was over, there was no tenderness. Only a hollow that widened inside him like a wound. He lay beside her and listened to her small, uncertain breaths. She was silent, stunned, maybe afraid. The realization hit him like a physical blow.
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.
He had wanted to save her from the monster. The monster had already touched her. The monster was, impossibly and horribly, him.