“Not bad, I suppose, for such a little girl.” He didn’t ask about Slavka. I didn’t want him to ask—I didn’t want him anywhere near our son—but it still made my blood boil that he had not even a stray thought for the beautiful boy he’d fathered. That Slavka meant so little in his eyes. He wore a lieutenant’s triangles on his collar—of course he was an officer; of course he outranked me.
“Medical battalion?” I made myself ask. He must have enlisted in Odessa around the same time I did. Surgeons of his skill were worth their weight in silver at the front.
“That’s right. I told you once, didn’t I? A man sees chances in war—this is mine.” He nodded out to the black expanse of sea ahead of us. “I have a good feeling about Sevastopol. Great things lie in wait, you’ll see.”
So confident, not a doubt in the world. He must have seen hellish things if he’d had months in the hospitals of Odessa, operating on battle wounds from dawn to dusk, but clearly it had made very little impression. He hadn’t gone to war to heal his wounded countrymen or preserve this land for his son to grow up in—he’d gone to war for a chance to rise. He clearly still had his dreams of greatness. “Alexei Pavlichenko, Hero of the Soviet Union?”
My voice came out hard and mocking. He frowned. He was used to seeing me deferential, pleading, frustrated—the wife who hated to ask him for things and kept having to ask him for things anyway. The little woman who jumped when he told her to. He was used to having the upper hand over me . . . but not anymore. I’d seen too much blood and terror in the last few months to be impressed by a man with a mean streak. He could still make me seethe, but he couldn’t make me tiptoe, and he could no longer make me jump. Alexei leaned on his elbow against the ship’s rail, and he looked like he was seeing me now. “Chapayev division?” he guessed. “We’ll be seeing more of each other in Sevastopol.”
“I doubt it.” I couldn’t resist a jab. “Unlike doctors, I don’t operate safe behind the lines.”
Another frown. “But you’re in the medical battalion, yes?”
“No.” I smiled at him. “I’m a sniper.”
He laughed. “Nice to see you’ve finally developed a sense of humor, kroshka.”
I shrugged. If he was stupid enough to miss the rifle slung over my shoulder, that was not my problem.
“No joking, now.” Alexei’s smile disappeared. “You’re not a rifleman.”
“Why not?”
“That’s no position for women, even in war. No matter what the state says.”
“Tell that to all the enemy dead I put in the ground while defending Odessa.”
I threw it at him, wanting to see the surprise in his face. Instead he just chuckled. “Aren’t you all grown up. Still want to borrow my binoculars, for one last look at Odessa?” He held them high up in the air, over my head. “Jump, little Mila!”
I didn’t stop to think. I slung the rifle off my shoulder, nipped the barrel through the loop of his binoculars, and with a wrench and a twist flipped them out of his hands over the ship’s rail. “Jump for them yourself,” I said, hearing them splash far below, and turned to go.
Not so fast I didn’t see the flash of anger go through his eyes, didn’t hear his final words behind me. “Still can’t take a joke, can you?” His voice laughed, but there was real anger underneath. “Still pretending you aren’t a joke.”
“One hundred and eighty-seven dead enemies know I’m no joke,” I shot back, and stalked off across the quarterdeck.
Alexei Pavlichenko here. My heart pounded. My husband, back in my life after years of barely thinking of him at all. On the same ship, headed to Sevastopol.
It doesn’t matter, I told myself, going below. I wasn’t afraid of him, not anymore. And in the chaos of the front it would be easy to avoid each other. I could stay out of his way and he—if he was smart—would stay out of mine.