“Is he dead?” Alexei asked, coming a step closer.
“Dead under Boulder Bridge,” I said wearily, and that was when my husband shot me.
The bullet whisked through my hair. It should have sunk through my left eye socket but I’d seen his arm rise, seen the glint of metal where there shouldn’t have been metal, and that dark claw-rake of instinct sent me lurching sideways before I’d registered what was happening, so the bullet grooved the tip of my ear instead of burying itself in my brain. There was nothing controlled this time about my flight; I went half scrambling and half galloping into the thicket of brush on all fours, crashing like a panicked deer.
“You’re wondering how I got a weapon.” Alexei’s voice was shockingly conversational. “The Colt that fell under the seat . . . along with a few rounds of ammunition.”
I fetched up behind a big half-rotted tree stump, both hands clamped over my mouth to stop my ragged gasps from escaping. The tip of my earlobe dripped hot blood down onto my shoulder. My husband had shot me. Alexei had shot me. And I wasn’t even surprised. He knew he’d never win me back, and even if he had, he’d never have been satisfied living the rest of his life hanging on the arm of a more famous wife. Maybe he wouldn’t have thought to kill me on his own, but the marksman had handed him a chance on a silver platter: either I’d have died in the duel with the President’s would-be assassin and Alexei would get to raise the alarm alone, the grieving widower and heroic messenger—or I killed the marksman, Alexei killed me when I was exhausted and off guard, and the rest went according to script. Either way, he didn’t have to share the glory with me, and he was free of his bitch wife.
Or maybe he hadn’t even thought it through that much. Maybe he just wanted me dead and thought he could get away with it.
“Don’t run, Mila.” I heard Alexei reloading his Colt, and I scrabbled for my own in my sodden pocket. “I saw how wet that coat was. You’ll freeze to death out here if you run, and it won’t be pretty. I’ll make it quick.”
I got my pistol into my cold-numbed hand, frantically reloading, still fighting for breath. I risked a glance over the stump, and he was nowhere in sight. He wasn’t stupid; he knew not to give me a silhouette. I’d be foolish to underestimate him simply because he wasn’t the marksman I’d just left dead. My husband was no sniper, but he’d already winged me in near-total darkness, from thirty paces, with an unfamiliar weapon. And he was warm, rested, alert, committed; a man with dry clothes, sturdy shoes, and the prize of a lifetime—freedom, fame—within his grasp. Not an exhausted, half-frozen woman with two broken ribs and pulverized feet, who’d left a blood trail clear from Rock Creek while driving herself to the breaking point dispatching another man bent on killing her tonight.
For an instant, I felt my whole shivering body contract in on itself, and I understood why animals sometimes froze in a predator’s path and waited with dulled eyes for death to claim them. I was so tired. I’d shot so many enemies in Odessa, in Sevastopol—now I’d crossed half the globe and I was still shooting enemies. When did they stop coming? When would I look around and see no one advancing to kill me? Could I just close my eyes and let it all stop?
But Alexei wasn’t any enemy; he was the first enemy. The one I’d outgrown, the one I’d stopped being afraid of a long time ago when larger monsters entered my sights . . . but still the first. The one whose gaze had prickled me as I pulled a five-year-old Slavka away from him at the shooting range, the one who made me think perhaps it would be just as well if I learned to shoot. Not only so I had a father’s skills to teach my son someday, but if the moment came to defend us.
Well. Here it was. Die here, and Alexei would try his best to swan home a hero and claim my son.
“Mila?” His voice sounded again, impatient, taut. “Don’t play dead. I know I didn’t hit you. If I had, you’d be screaming.”
I drew a deep, slow breath. “You have no idea what makes me scream. In battlefield or in bed, you pathetic sad sack of a man.”