“You know Slavka needs a father. Why else did you take up with that lieutenant?” Alexei asked, reading my mind even if he couldn’t see my face ahead of him. “But he’s gone now, and that made me realize I let a good thing slip away.”
I came to the middle of the bridge, looking out. A beautiful spot: huge trees spreading across either bank, the creek with its happy babble and scatter of stones, red-gold arches of autumn leaves fluttering overhead. Part of me marveled to see something so beautiful in the middle of a city, wilderness left pristine and perfect to restore a soul tired of stone buildings and pavement. And part of me was as wary as I had ever been, conscious of my husband beside me, his every move and glance.
“What do you want?” I asked at last, levelly. I knew perfectly well what he wanted, but I refused to make this easy for him.
“I want you back, Mila.” Alexei laid his hand on the bridge parapet, palm up in invitation. “You, me, Slavka. A proper family again. And what better time for you and me to make a new beginning than on this tour?”
“No,” I stated. “No a thousand times. No.”
His smile didn’t budge. “I know I’ll have to win you back, kroshka. Court you properly, the way I should have done the first time.”
“Aren’t I a little old for you by now?” I’d seen the way his eyes followed the barely curved hips of the teenage girls we passed on Decatur Street.
“You were a girl then. Now you’re a woman. A man gets to a stage in his life when he appreciates a woman—”
“When he appreciates a war heroine, you mean. A woman in line for privileges from the Party.” If Alexei was already thinking about the overseas trips I’d earn if I survived the war, I was certain he was also thinking about a big apartment in Moscow; Party functions where caviar and champagne flowed; gifts and bribes and seats at the high table with glittering officials. Fame, comfort, wealth—maybe he’d rather have earned those things in his own right, but if it took hitching his troika behind a star rather than becoming one himself, he’d get out the harness and start buckling straps.
All he needed was for the mare to walk into the horse collar he was holding out.
“Imagine the life we’d have,” he was saying softly, persuasively. “The gowns and jewels I’ll give you, the privileges for Slavka—”
“I’m not as famous as you seem to think. This luxurious life you think is mine for the taking—”
“Ours for the taking.”
“Even if it were possible”—I didn’t believe my notoriety had any more staying power than the strike of a match—“why would I need you? Anything you promise for our son, I can already give him myself.” I ignored Alexei’s outstretched hand. “These privileges you’re talking of, they all flow from me.”
“Except the name.” Something in his smile flickered. “The name under which you got famous, Mila. That’s still mine.”
“The world knows me as Lady Death, and I earned that myself. I don’t owe you for your name.”
“You owe me for something. Didn’t I let you have your lieutenant in Sevastopol?”
Rage choked me momentarily. “Let me—”
“Anyone could see it wasn’t going to last, so I let you have it. He was going to get the chop sooner or later, or you would, so I didn’t make a fuss . . . and really most husbands wouldn’t have been so understanding. But things are different now—”
A thrush exploded out from the nearby bushes as the birdwatcher with the binoculars came tromping along the bank, lenses flashing. I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sudden noise, and Alexei’s smile widened just a little. “I’m going to divorce you the moment I get back to Moscow,” I told him, wishing I hadn’t shown any weakness, and reversed course back toward stolid Yuri on the bank. I wanted out of these woods. I wanted my private Washington hotel room. Somewhere both my husband and any anonymous hate-scrawling enemies could be safely locked on the other side of a stout door.