“I have family in New York,” Kostia went on, still sitting with his back to me. “Cousins I’ve never met. They probably don’t know I exist. I’ve done some digging, very quietly. I know at least where my grandmother’s sister lives. She’s still alive, living in Ridgewood.”
“Kostia, the risk . . .” He’d managed to conceal his American ties for so long, lost or destroyed all the relevant documention—clearly he’d passed all the background checks, to be allowed to join this delegation at all. If, after all that, it were found out he had undisclosed American relations . . . I didn’t even want to imagine the consequences. They would assuredly be hideous.
“I won’t have trouble getting permission to return to Washington alone—they don’t assign minders for little fish like me. And I’ll concoct a story about missing the last train, having to stay the night in New York City. They won’t suspect.”
“And—what? You’ll just walk up to your great-aunt’s house and knock on the door?”
“Maybe I’ll knock. Or maybe I’ll just walk the streets where my grandmother grew up.” He hesitated. “I don’t know.”
I tried to imagine an Irish family in New York finding this sinewy Siberian wolf on their doorstep, a cousin from halfway around the world. They’d better not slam the door on you, I thought. “If you need a story I’ll cover for you,” I began, digging my paddle into the water again to turn us back toward shore.
“Careful,” Kostia began, “it’s got a very shallow draft—”
Too late. The canoe slewed sideways from my paddle, and before I knew it, I was in the drink.
The famous Lady Death and her sniper partner, Lyonya hooted fondly as Kostia and I floundered and splashed. May I present the deadliest shots in Sevastopol!
The water was barely up to chest height, so there wasn’t much hurt but my pride as I surfaced spitting water. Yuri, on the bank, didn’t move; his orders were to stop me from defecting, not drowning. Kostia righted the canoe, pushing back his soaked sleeves and tossing the paddles in before they could float away. “We’ll tip that over again if we try to climb back in,” I said, grabbing for my felt hat before it could sink. “Good thing the Hitlerites can’t see us like this. They’d be dead of laughter, not lead shot.”
Kostia tossed my soaked hat into the canoe too, angling the boat so it blocked out Yuri on the bank. My partner reached for my hand under the water and pulled it against his chest, then he bent his head and kissed me. He tasted like iron and rain, his other hand tangling briefly in my hair, and I felt the sniper-calluses of his trigger hand against my scarred neck before he pulled away.
“You already know,” he said. “What I feel for you.”
I did know. I’d known a long time.
“No reason to say it in Sevastopol.” He untangled his hand from my hair, reaching for the canoe before it could drift away from us. “You were my sergeant. You were my partner. And you loved my friend.” A pause. “It feels too soon, saying this to you now. Lyonya has only been dead six months.”
Lyonya. I realized my hand had bunched into Kostia’s wet shirt, and I pulled it away.
“I wish I could wait a year, wait until the grief is less. But we don’t have a year. We barely have tomorrow.” Kostia hesitated. The fire in him had always been leashed, banked; now it was blazing high in his gaze, almost too bright to look at. “I’m out of time, Mila. When we return to Moscow—in a week, two weeks, whenever it is—you’ll be headed back to the front, and I won’t. We’ll be pulled our separate ways. So I have to say this now.”
“But you’re coming back to the front, too.” I don’t know how I fastened on that first when everything he said had cracked me and tumbled me like an earthquake, but the thought of rejoining the fight without him sent a pang of utter terror through me, pushing past everything else. “You’re my partner. I’ll ask to get you in my platoon, they’ll transfer you—”