The safe house in Königsberg felt like another world. The bridge, the gunfire, the ice — all of it seemed distant now, replaced by the quiet hum of a bourgeois apartment. Polished floors. Velvet curtains. The soft ticking of a clock. After the chaos, it should have felt safe. To Kato, it felt like a coffin.
There was stew on the table, rich and hot. She couldn't eat. The clean sheets felt strange against her skin. Even the wool dress laid out for her seemed foreign. Everything about the place was warm, but the warmth only made her feel colder. She was free, yet somehow still trapped.
Koba moved through the room like a shadow that refused to settle. His arm was bandaged neatly, his sling clean, the work of an efficient German doctor who had already left. The pain didn't seem to reach him. His eyes were always on her — sharp, hungry, desperate. He tried to speak, to reassure her, to talk of plans and futures. But his words meant nothing. They were just noise from a stranger wearing the voice of someone she used to know.
When they were finally alone — just Koba, Kato, and Pavel standing silent by the door — the quiet grew heavy. It pressed on her until she had to break it.
"Who were those men, Soso?" she asked at last. Her voice was calm, almost gentle, but every word cut like glass. "The Germans. The ones who looked at you like you were their trophy. And that other man — the one on the bridge. He called you 'Koba.' He said he was acting for the Central Committee. He was one of ours, wasn't he?"
Koba's jaw tightened. "It was complicated. A matter of Party discipline."
"Was it?" she said, stepping closer. "Stolypin told me things. About Malinovsky. About an exchange." The puzzle was fitting together now — every piece sharp and cruel. "You didn't just rescue me. You traded him. You sold one of our own to the Germans."
Her words landed like a blow. Even Pavel shifted, uncomfortable.
Koba knew then that comfort and promises meant nothing. She didn't want safety. She wanted truth. So he gave it to her.
"Yes," he said. "I sold him."
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't defend himself. He simply began to explain, slow and cold, as if laying out a lesson from a book he'd already memorized.
"The world we dreamed of — it's gone, Kato. It never existed. The real world is a machine. It grinds everything, everyone. You can't survive it as a poet. You have to become a mechanic. You break the parts that don't work. You use the parts that do. Malinovsky was broken. I just replaced him with something useful."
He gestured toward the walls, the warmth, the comfort. "The Germans are another machine. They don't care who I am, only what I can do. The Party is no different. They would have left you to die for a theory. So I made a deal. I used one machine against another. And I won."
He took a step closer, his voice rough with conviction. "You were the only real thing left. The cause, the Party, the Revolution — all ideas. You are not. You are flesh, blood, breath. I chose reality over dreams."
His words fell like stones into silence.
Kato stared at him, and the anger drained away, replaced by something far worse — understanding. Not agreement, but the recognition of what he had become. The boy she had loved was gone, replaced by this hollow creature who spoke of betrayal like it was arithmetic. He had torn the world apart, and all that was left was this.
Her stomach turned. He hadn't saved her. He had bought her. The price was everything he'd once been.
She looked at him — the man who had damned himself for her — and said, almost softly, "You didn't save me, Soso. You just built me a bigger cage."
The words hit him harder than any bullet. The hope in his eyes flickered and died.
"The man I loved," she whispered, turning to the window, "died in a forest in Vologda long before I was ever arrested."
Koba said nothing. He couldn't. The clock ticked on, slow and merciless. The stew cooled on the table. And in the warm, quiet room that had been meant as a refuge, he stood alone — surrounded not by safety, but by the echo of everything he had destroyed.