He must have read the shock in my face. I couldn’t voice anything, not here in this room where there might be wires and listening ears, so I only shook my head mutely. He switched off the radio, then leaned back to cup my face in his hands. I don’t know what we might have said, but there was a key rattling in the lock, and suddenly the door swung wide.
Alexei Pavlichenko stood there with an armload of pink roses.
He could have been an illustration in a romantic novel. The suitor in a sharp suit, flowers in his arm, a charming half-smile on his handsome features. But the smile disappeared like a doused light, and a wave of dead anger swept over his face.
I was already near tears, brimming with various churning emotions. I did not, not, need Alexei added to the mix. “No,” I snarled before he could say a word. “Not now. Not today. Not ever. I don’t care what you want, just get out.”
He stood looking at Kostia as if he were vermin. “How long have you been fucking your pet wolf behind my back, Mila?”
Kostia sat up slowly, the sheet sliding to his waist as he rested his elbows on his raised knees, and maybe my husband missed how that movement put my partner closer to his Finnish combat knife lying on the nightstand, but I didn’t.
I threw the sheet back and got out of bed. My naked skin was crawling, but I refused to cower in the bed like a guilty wife caught in an illicit romp. “How did you get in here?” I knew I’d locked the door.
“I charmed the housekeeper into giving me a passkey. So I could leave these as a surprise.” He tossed his armload of roses to the floor, a careless scatter of thorns and petals over the carpet. “I wonder how many other men you’ve paraded naked for in this room.”
Kostia tensed behind me, silently asking me what I wanted. My fingers tapped against my leg twice, as if we were back in a sniper trench communicating in silence: wait. I stalked across the room naked, head held high, and pulled my robe off the wall hook. “Don’t pretend you’re jealous, Alexei. This grown woman’s body of mine is ten or twelve years too old to arouse you.” I knotted the sash about my waist with a snap. “Now get out.”
“No.” He took a step closer, turning away from Kostia now. Kostia hadn’t moved from the bed, stone still and watching everything . . . but his combat knife had disappeared off the nightstand.
“I am the one saying no, Alexei.” The storm of roiling emotions in me was tipping rapidly in favor of rage. From the damp-handed Mr. Jonson’s blind insistence to Alexei’s smug persistence to Laurence Olivier’s hand returning over and over to my hip—why could I not seem to make anyone hear the word no?
“You’re still my wife.”
I made myself laugh in his face. “Who do you think you are? I’m the famous sniper; the war heroine; America’s sweetheart. I’m the one being feted all over the world, helping Comrade Stalin get his second front. You’re the delegation pill pusher. A dog being towed behind on a leash.”
“Shut your mouth. You sound like a spoiled little girl having a tantrum.”
“Spoiled little girl, is that all you can call me? What about all those lovely things you wrote in your unsigned notes? Red bitch, murdering slut—”
“Act like a slut, don’t be shocked when you’re called one.” His eyes tightened. “But I didn’t write those damn things. I answered enough questions about them from delegation security; I won’t stand here and listen to you—”
“You had better listen to me, Alexei.” Now I was the one to overrun him. He’d once loomed in my life like a mountain, the biggest obstacle I faced in making a new life. Now, after everything else I had confronted this last year and a half, he was a pebble. Yet that pebble was still lodged in my shoe, doing its best to prevent me from moving forward. I was done with it. “You’re not my husband anymore, and as soon as we get back to Moscow, we will make it official. Because I’m the one with friends in high places now, and I will make you stop stalling.”