Page 9 of To Clutch a Razor
It takes all of Niko’s willpower not to give him a lecherous smile at the mention of having a body.
“What you have is a wealth of knowledge about our enemies that she would otherwise be unable to access,” Niko says. “And trust me. There’s nothing she wants more than to access that knowledge, no matter what she says.”
Dymitr looks thoughtful. He relaxes against the brick and releases the lapels of Niko’s jacket.
“You didn’t really come here just to return my bow,” Dymitr says, and Niko remembers, suddenly, why he’s here.
“I leave tomorrow. I just wanted to see you before I go.”
“You’re leaving? Where are you going?”
Niko tilts his head. Dymitr’s ash-brown hair has floppedover his forehead, skimming his eyebrow. It makes him look younger.
Niko says carefully, “I don’t think you really want to know the answer to that question.”
“Why wouldn’t I—” Dymitr’s eyes sharpen with understanding. He looks down. “Oh. You’re going on a—mission.”
“I prefer to call it ‘going hunting,’” Niko says, and he watches Dymitr’s face to see his reaction. After all, if it bothers Dymitr that Niko’s job is to hunt down Dymitr’s old Holy Order friends and exact bloody vengeance, whatever is between them may fizzle out before it even properly catches fire.
Dymitr doesn’t meet Niko’s eyes.
“It bothers you?” Niko says, stepping back at last.
“It shouldn’t.”
“But it does.”
“That’s not your problem, that’s mine,” Dymitr says curtly.
Niko tastes something bitter in the back of his throat. He rarely thinks of Dymitr as a Knight. Dymitr is someone he wants his hands on, someone he misses when he’s alone. Dymitr introduced him to the leszy of Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary like the forest guardian was an old friend, and knows every word of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But if Niko lets his mind drift, he can still see the purple-red that spilled into Dymitr’s hands when he picked up his sister’s bone sword, the red glint in his eyes, and thatquestion, that question.Do you know how many of your kind I’ve killed?And the answer he gave:Neither do I.
“Be careful.” Dymitr meets his gaze, then, and he looks painfully sincere, as always. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
It should be comforting, maybe, to know that even though Niko’s off to murder a Knight, Dymitr is still concerned about him. But the damage is done, the spell of the warm summer night and the buzz of insects broken by memories of past deception.
Still, when Dymitr leans in and touches a featherlight kiss to Niko’s cheek, Niko doesn’t pull away.
4A DESPERATE PLEA
Elza’s journey home is long. O’Hare to Zurich, nine-hour flight. Two-hour layover. Zurich to Warsaw, two-hour flight. Warsaw to Gdansk, one-hour flight. And her mother was waiting for her at the airport, behind the wheel of an old, boxy Škoda. The car’s air-conditioning has been broken since they bought it, so the windows are down, and Elza prefers it that way. It means they won’t have to talk.
But Marzena is drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, so Elza knows she’s agitated. Thanks to the Knights’ slow aging, they look like they could be sisters, though Marzena’s hair is a deeper brown than Elza’s. They both have the high cheekbones and soft, ruddy cheeks of fairy-tale princesses lost in the woods.
Marzena lights up a cigarette once they’re outside the city, on the country roads.
“So you ran off, and for what?” Marzena asks, smoke spilling over her lips as she talks. She’s wearing sunglasses even though it’s cloudy. There’s a protective symbol tattooed on the back of each of her fingers. A five-petaled redflower on one. A white eagle from the Polish coat of arms on another.
“I tried to help him.” Elza scowls. “Just because he wouldn’t accept it doesn’t mean it was the wrong thing to do. We travel in pairs for a reason.”
“If he wants to get himself killed, let him. The weak should weed themselves out.”
It’s strange, Elza thinks, that a way of looking at a person can be a habit as surely as biting your nails or cracking your knuckles. When Dymitr was young, he was small for his age, with a soft voice and an even softer heart—he cried whenever mice got caught in the traps, so their father made it his job to set them and empty them. But then he got older, and bigger, and harder, and their grandmother started paying special attention to him, and no one could call him soft after that. But sometimes, it’s like her mother forgets that he’s no longer a child.
“He’s not weak.”
“Then he really doesn’t need your help anyway, does he?” Marzena flicks her ash out the window. Elza is just considering whether she could fall asleep even with the warm wind blowing through the car’s interior when her mother speaks again. “Filip is dead.”
She delivers this so casually that Elza hardly notices it, at first. It’s just another fact, like what time dinner will be on the table or how warm the weather is. When she finally hears it, she stares at her mother, eyes wide, and all she feels is rage. Filip isn’t Marzena’s brother, he’s their father’sbrother, but she’s still known him for decades. How can she speak of his death so casually, as if it’s nothing?
