It takes me a moment to realize where we’re going. I haven’t been down the tiny alley in years. But it’s still here, a small space between the Russian and US walls. A gap. A no-man’s-land. A remnant of the Cold War that isn’t even wide enough for a trash can, but Alexei and I just fit. We always have.
The stones are rougher here, jutting out from the walls on either side of us, and in such a close space they’re almost like a ladder, rising to the big wall that circles the city. I can’t breathe, I tell myself. But I have always been able to climb.
“You need a leg up?” he asks with a smile, taunting me just enough to make me forget my panic and my fear. For a moment we are standing so close that I can feel the pounding of his heart.
“See you at the top,” I say.
It’s a familiar feeling as I rise slowly to my old place on top of the wall. I sit, gripping the edge, while Alexei takes his place beside me, one leg dangling over the wall’s edge, the other at my back.
I’ve been surrounded by boys and men my whole life, always there, making me feel smaller, weaker. Different. None of them has ever sat as close as Alexei is sitting now. None of them has ever leaned forward like he’s leaning forward, like life itself might hang in the balance of my every word.
“Grace” — he leans down and finds my eyes — “breathe.”
It is an order. A command. And I know that I must follow it. So I do. I close my eyes and suck the sweet sea air in through my nose and out through my mouth. I let my heart keep pounding deeply, evenly.
I am alive and strangely grateful for it. By the time Alexei says, “Just so you know, you don’t have to tell me what’s going on,” I’ve almost forgotten he is here. “You don’t have to say a thing. You just have to sit here. And breathe.”
So I do. And, true to his word, Alexei doesn’t talk again.
I listen to the ocean and feel the breeze, and soon my breath comes without thinking. Soon, it is like talking to the wind.
“My grandfather hates me. Did you know that? Is that in the Russian daily briefings? Well, he does. Really. He hates me.”
“Your grandfather adores you.”
“He used to. When I was little. And cute. I used to be cute once — not that you’d remember.”
“He called you Snowball,” Alexei adds with a laugh. It’s a detail I’d almost forgotten, how it never snows here and my grandfather would watch me run around, my white hair blowing in the wind like dandelions. Like snow. He loved me then. But now … now I am something he despises.
He’s a smart man.
I despise me, too.
“Grace, breathe. All you have to do is breathe.”
And for a second, I let myself believe him.
I am safe, high above the city. No one can find me here. No one will get me. I can run and run and run around the wall. No one — not even my own ghosts — are fast enough to follow.
“Tell me something,” Alexei says. “About you. About the past three years. Tell me what I’ve missed.”
So I say the only thing that matters. “My mother died.”
“I know.” Alexei sounds like he now regrets asking the question. He looks out at the sea. “I wanted to go to the funeral, but my father said it wasn’t appropriate. I should have been there. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I wasn’t there either.”
He doesn’t ask me why, and I am glad. I don’t want to tell him that I was in a hospital, strapped to a bed, chemicals fogging my brain and making me dream terrible dreams.
I reach down and touch my wrists. I can still feel the cuffs of the restraints, the shearling lining that was probably soft once but had grown stiff from too many years of sweat and blood and terror. He doesn’t know that I would jump from this wall and gladly break my other leg before I would ever let my wrists be bound again.
“Grace?” Alexei says when the weight of my silence becomes too heavy.
“I saw the man who killed my mother. He’s here. I talked to him.”
I wait for Alexei to tell me that I’m wrong. I wait for his eyes to say that I’m lying. But he stays silent, watching. Listening.
So I whisper, “And he’s going to do it again.”
The lecture is supposed to come now, but it doesn’t. Alexei shifts and leans slightly forward, hands braced between us.
“And you discussed this with your grandfather?”
I shake my head. “He doesn’t believe me. But I heard it, Alexei. I swear. I saw him. And I heard him. And I —”
“I believe you.”
It’s like he’s speaking to the sea. I’m almost certain I’ve misheard him. I want to lose respect for him, call him a fool. But I just keep talking. About everything. About nothing. I tell him about the tunnels and the Scarred Man’s late-night trip to my embassy, about the new threat he poses and seeing him on the street. I talk like I’m not talking to Alexei at all.
“You should have told me,” he says when I’m finished. But Alexei doesn’t know what I know: that telling people doesn’t get you help. It gets you strapped to a bed in a psych ward. It gets you three years of looks and fears and dread.
“You wouldn’t have believed me.” My voice cracks and I hate myself for it. I hate myself so much.
“Yes, I would have. And then you wouldn’t have been on your own.”
I think about Noah and Megan and Rosie. Telling Alexei about them feels more like telling a grown-up. Like maybe I might get them in trouble. But I don’t want to hide anything from him either. So I tell him.
“Now” — I wipe my runny nose on my sleeve — “not even they believe me.”
“Listen to me, Grace. Listen to me,” he says slowly. “You don’t talk to Dominic again. You don’t go in the tunnels by yourself. You don’t go anywhere by yourself. Do you hear me? You’re going to be careful. And you’re going to include me.”
“I —”
“No, Grace. You don’t get to be stubborn this time. This time you have to be safe. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, knowing it’s bigger than me and my multitude of issues.
“From now on, we’re a team. Right?”
When the wind blows my hair across my face Alexei reaches up and tucks a piece behind my ear.
“Right.”
“Now, come on.” He scoots back the way we climbed up. “I guess I should walk you home.”
He doesn’t mention Jamie.
There is no lecture in his tone or his eyes. We’re almost to the embassy’s gates, and then he’s closer than he was. I feel the gate against my back. The gaslight goes dim, and there is nothing but the pounding of my heart in my chest. One more time I cannot breathe, thinking about how — right now — he doesn’t look like Alexei. He doesn’t feel like my brother’s best friend. He is old and familiar and he is new and alive. Both. I feel it now. I feel everything.