I nodded even though she couldn’t see it. “I will. I promise.” She’d been so good to me over the years. One day I was going to find a way to pay her back properly.
Maxim
I walked away from the reporters and the fire trucks, ducking into the shadows the way I always do without the slightest raise to my pulse, but standing on the doorstep, with the keys in my hand, I hesitated.
There was a difference between wanting to kill someone and being on the other side of it. I wondered whether I shouldn’t have held her back, done the deed myself. I was so proud of her when she took the gun out of my hand. Everything in her eyes told me it was what she needed. I couldn’t have taken it from her.
But maybe I should have.
It was late by the time I got back to Belgravia, so late it was almost early. I hadn’t been back to my London abode for more than the occasional change of clothes and a shower since I’d received the file on Sutherland and Valentin’s accompanying orders.
It was the company address. One of the perks of the level the company had taken me to, along with the multiple cars in the garage in the basement below. I kept another flat, for nostalgia. But I hadn’t sent Elizabeth there. She deserved luxury not the cramped, narrow set of rooms so close to the run of train tracks sweeping into Victoria Station from the south that you could lean out of your window and read the newspaper over the shoulder of the morning commuters while the carriages were slowed to queue up waiting for a platform or a signal change.
The balconies nearly brought you close enough to touch the trains, and their shunting, hissing progress over the tracks was the soundtrack I’d grown up to. The shuddering burnt-black bricks of the block and the windows rattling in their frames were what I’d known when we arrived from Russia. The better life my father strove for came with No Ball Games signs and parking lots instead of grass to play on.
It was better than the alternative. And I still held a fondness for what I’d grown up with, but Elizabeth didn’t need to see it. Here in London, and back in St Petersburg, I’d grown well beyond my roots.
I’d learnt to hide my Slavic accent and then obliterate it, first with the vowel sounds of all the inner city kids, and then to temper it with a smoother edge – something like the boys who came into our unit before we shipped out, all tidy, smart and officer class. They were the blokes who made it through college. The ones who were smart enough to get themselves in places where life didn’t take much toll.
Life handed them a good roll of the dice, but I knew how to make my own luck. I had every mark of success any of them could have ever wanted – the money, the houses, the cars – but I felt the most alive, the most real, when I was sleeping on a cotbed in some abandoned building or other, some squat or building site or empty office, spending hours looking out of windows through high powered binos, pinpointing targets in the crosshairs of my scope.
And lately, I’d felt that same vitality whenever Elizabeth was with me.
Half of me wasn’t expecting her to be inside. She could have gone anywhere. She had her plans, I was sure of it, and with Sutherland out of the way, she had nothing holding her back.
But there she was, sitting in the living room in the chair opposite the door, with her legs crossed at the knee, waiting for me to come in. A single lamp lit up the side of her face and she was just as beautiful as she always had been.
I closed the door behind me and shrugged out of my jacket, like I was just coming in from the office.
She stayed exactly where she was, eyes fixed onto mine.
“I saw you on the news.”
“Did you?”
“Your torched my house.” Unsurprisingly, she didn’t look pleased about that. I’d hoped she’d understand why I had to do.
“Yes, I did. I don’t want questions. It wasn’t a good place for a hit.”
Her jaw rippled and she got to her feet, eyes burning into mine.
“You destroyed everything I own! What the hell is wrong with you? I have nothing! What kind of rescue do you call this?”
I stepped closer and her fists found my chest, drumming against it before I took her wrists in my hands.
“Elizabeth…”
“I hate you! Everything that was my Mum’s is gone! I can’t ever get it back.”
I felt my eyes soften, a ripple of hurt chasing through me at those words, even though I knew she didn’t mean it. I knew what it was like to be forced to leave a life behind before you were ready to let it go. “Not everything.”