She sat down at the table, her back to the wall. She faced the kitchen door. He followed, holding matching silverware, his plate, and a glass of water. He sat across from her.
She cut up the sandwich. “So ask,” she said.
He set his silverware down. He hadn’t even started carving up the food. “Do you really not remember what happened that night?”
She stiffened. She didn’t want to talk about that night. But she wasn’t sure how she could avoid it.
“I remember it,” she said.
“How much of it?” he asked.
Finally, the right question. She stabbed a bit of sandwich with her fork and ate. It was good: spicy, garlicky, with a strong after-bite. Better than she remembered.
“I remember that night,” she said.
He tilted his head and took a bite of his own sandwich. “Then you remember me.”
She was starting to shake again. She didn’t remember him. She knew he had to be there because at the time, his mother rarely worked alone. At least according to all the available information about the woman.
And really, there wasn’t a lot of available information. Halina Layla Orlinskaya had been an assassin, after all.
“Should I remember you?” Rikki asked.
“Yes,” Misha said firmly. “You should. I got you out of the burning house.”
Her cheeks grew warm. The fire— red and strong and hot, oh, so very hot and all the people silhouetted against it, that other little girl crying, the medical personnel— God. She didn’t remember how she got out of the house at all.
How did he know that?
“After you killed my father,” she said.
“I didn’t kill him,” Misha said. “My mother did.”
Rikki took another bite, but this time, she didn’t taste it.
“But let’s focus for a second on what happened between us,” Misha said.
She had trouble swallowing. “Nothing happened between us.” Another lie. Everything was happening between them.
“That night,” he said. “Let’s focus on what happened that night.”
She waited. She felt like she was made of glass and she could shatter at any moment. She
hated
that feeling. She had started this work, this profession, so she could learn how to take care of herself, how to prevent nights like that, to make sure if someone died, that someone was the right person, not a single father doing his best.
“I got you out of the house,” Misha said.
So
you
say
. She bit back the words. She didn’t dare say them. She didn’t want him to know how little she remembered.
“And then I waited with you until the authorities arrived. My mother dealt with law enforcement.”
“They didn’t even arrest her for the arson,” Rikki said bitterly.
He didn’t break eye contact, but something changed in his expression. Something slight. Something she couldn’t read.
God, she didn’t trust him, and yet part of her really wanted to trust him. Thought she could trust him.
Hoped
she could trust him.
“Again,” he said in that patient tone, “we’re just going to focus on you and me for the moment. We’ll get to the other details in a minute.”
“That fire’s not a detail,” Rikki snapped.
“And neither is your father’s death.” Misha sounded cautious. His hands were folded in front of his plate. “Just let me continue.”
She waited.
“After I got you out of the burning house,” he said, “I waited with you for the authorities. Do you remember that?”
She remembered standing outside. She remembered everyone leaving the buildings. She remembered how the front of her—the part of her facing the fire—was very hot, almost too hot, and how the back of her was freezing cold.
She shrugged. That was the only answer she was going to give him.
“First, the police arrived,” he said when it became clear she wasn’t going to say anything else. “My mother went to talk with them. Then the fire brigade showed up. The fire had spread awfully fast, but everyone got out.”
“Everyone except my father,” she said and heard the bitterness in her own voice, a bitterness that sounded almost alien to her.
He turned his head slightly, almost as if he didn’t believe what he was hearing. But he kept that eye contact.
“Your father was already dead,” he said softly.
“So you say,” she said.
He picked up his fork and knife, and cut into his sandwich. He took a bite.
That made her remember hers. She ate faster than she usually did, but it gave her something to do.
He took a drink of water. Then he said, “After the fire brigade showed up, the medical team showed up. I took you to them. Do you remember that?”
“Stop asking me what I remember,” she snapped, and immediately wished she hadn’t. That was an admission she didn’t remember.
He nodded, just once, as if agreeing to her terms. “When we reached the medical team, I asked them to take care of you. They took you in. You were horribly bruised, and you had some broken bones—”
“What did you do to me?”
He bit his lower lip. “I took you to them. And after I got you into their transport, I told them to make sure you got psychological treatment as well.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because of the trauma,” he said. “I went through a similar trauma. It’s better to have the counseling. But I guess they didn’t give it to you. Did they?”
The nurse wouldn’t talk to her. Rikki was in that hospital bed, under wraps of all kinds, and no one talked.
“I was burned,” she said. “You didn’t mention the burns.”
“Only your right hand,” he said. “You tried to open the door.”
She made herself finish the sandwich. The only burn scar she had that she had trouble getting rid of was on her right hand. It took several treatments before the skin came back.
Her right hand.
But she thought she had been burned other places. Even though the doctors kept her sedated while they worked.
Bruised, he said. Broken bones, he said. The very thought of that made her head hurt.
“Did they treat you for post-traumatic stress?” His voice was very soft.
He was trying. Or so it seemed. He was trying to talk to her.
What would it hurt to tell him that she didn’t remember? Except that he could exploit her hole-filled memory. But he was doing that already.
“They tried,” she said. “They tried all kinds of treatment.”
“And the post-traumatic stress remained?” he said.
She shook her head. “I thought I was fine. I didn’t seem to have it.”
Until
I
met
you
, she thought.
Until
I
thought
you
were
back, to kill me, and then so much of that night returned—not in memory, but in emotion
.
“Then what were they working on?” His voice was so gentle.
He
seemed gentle.
But he killed people for a living.
Just like she did.
Just like his mother had.
“Apparently there are gaps,” she said. Her cheeks were warm. She hadn’t talked like this with anyone except Jack.
Jack, who would say she was being stupid to trust this man. Jack, who was investigating him even now, while she sat across the table from him, finishing a sandwich.
“Gaps in your memory?” Misha asked.
She nodded and her eyes flooded. She looked away from him and blinked hard. This man brought out all the wrong emotions in her.
He had finished his sandwich. She hadn’t seen him finish. She was so self-involved that she had missed details she would normally keep track of.
“I didn’t know,” he started, then shook his head. “I thought there were methods now to bridge those gaps.”
“The wonders of science,” she said wryly.
“Yes,” he said.
She shrugged. “Apparently, if you have a strong enough mind, you can overcome those things.”
At least, that was what the doctors told her. Which meant they didn’t know why she couldn’t remember. Maybe they thought she was lying, protecting someone, needing the attention,
something
. Jack believed she didn’t want to remember and maybe there was truth to that too, given how she felt right now.
Misha made a soft sound.
She frowned at him.
He gave her a half smile. “I’m sorry. I almost asked you what you were blocking. But if you can’t remember, then you don’t know.”
She stood and picked up her plate. There was still a bit of sandwich on it, but she was no longer hungry.
“Apparently, I blocked you,” she said and went into the kitchen.
She set the plate down in the sink and spread her hands over it, trying to regain control. She was making rookie mistakes over and over again, mostly because of something that had happened eighteen years ago.
What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she take control of the memory, of herself, of this situation?
She should order him to leave.
She should force him to leave.
She should talk to him and find out what happened.
She should get away.
She should just plain give up and crawl under the bed with the dust bunnies.
She wished Jack was here. Jack would know what to do. But her heart-brother couldn’t save her anymore.
She was going to have to save herself.
Apparently, I blocked you.
Misha sat at Rikki’s dining room table, the empty plate before him, the fork still in his left hand, those words rolling around in his mind.
Apparently, I blocked you.
That sentence had hurt. He wasn’t quite sure why it had hurt, but it felt like she had taken her fork and stabbed him in the heart with it.
He swallowed, tasting the garlic. He reached in his pocket and got a mouth-cleaning strip, just so that he would have something to do.
Apparently, I blocked you.
Maybe that bothered him because he hadn’t blocked her. There wasn’t a day in his life when he hadn’t thought about that night—not because he was obsessed with a little girl, but because he thought of that night as a turning point for him, just the way his father’s murder had been a turning point.
His mother had told him to get the kid out of the house. And he had done things like that countless times before. But this time, he had grabbed the little girl, felt her tremble against him, and he had protected her. He had felt compassion for her, and some fear, and he wanted her to be all right.
He had felt so badly for her, even before he met her, as he watched her father brutalize her. Misha had known what was coming—the assassination, the changed circumstance—but he had wondered how it would feel to lose a horrible parent, the oppressor, the person who had ruined your life instead of saved it.
He would have thought she would be grateful. Maybe that was too strong a word. He would have thought she would be relieved to be free of her father.
And Misha had checked on her after it was all over. She was hospitalized—her wounds too bad to let her out immediately—and he made sure that she got into a high-ranked government program, one that provided excellent health care and education, one whose graduates (survivors?) went on to healthy, productive lives.
Someone could argue that her life was productive now. She had an approved job. She was good at it—or she seemed to be.
But she had gaps in her memory. Gaps that, it seemed, included him.
He sighed and stood. Then he grabbed his own plate and went into the kitchen.
She had been bending over the sink. For a moment, he wondered if she had been sick, but the air smelled of the sandwich, not of vomit. She stood when she heard him and turned so that her back wasn’t to him any longer.
Her eyes didn’t meet his as she took his plate and set it beside hers in the cleaner.
“I’m going to tell you exactly what happened,” he said. “I don’t know if this is prescribed or not, if it will help you or not. But you should know.”
She remained in front of that sink, slightly hunched, as if her body could protect her from his words.
“My mother took contracts, like you do,” Misha said. “She worked alone more or less, but a lot of governments hired her. She used to be a spy for the Kazan System until they gave her a job she couldn’t do.”
“I know,” Rikki said softly.
He nodded, acknowledging her, but not letting her throw him off his rhythm. “The Eyad government hired my mother to assassinate your father. The Eyad government had caught him selling secrets.”