The Curse Bearer series - To Clutch a Razor E-Book

Veronica Roth

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 267

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

#1 New York Times bestselling author pulls from Slavic folklore to explore family, duty, and what it means to be a monster in this sequel to the USA Today bestselling When Among Crows A funeral. A heist. A mission born of desperation. When someone in Dymitr's family dies, he's called back home for the Empty Night, a funeral rite intended to keep evil at bay. The secret Dymitr is keeping from them makes returning home downright dangerous, but if he wants to get his hands on a book of curses that might appease Baba Jaga's blood lust, he has no choice. And when that same funeral brings ferocious creature-of-legend Niko to town for his own bloody purposes, Dymitr's charade becomes impossible to maintain. Family gatherings can be brutal. Dymitr's might just be fatal.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

1A Prelude

2A Family Meal

3A New Hunt

4A Desperate Plea

5A Puzzle Solved

6A Full Bottle

7A Chance Encounter

8A Bargain Struck

9A Family Reunion

10A Feast for the Dead

11A Restless Spirit

12A Tale of Twins

13A Song for the Dead

14A Tense Conversation

15A Scream in the Night

16A Perfect Reflection

17A Feint

18A Razor’s Edge

19A Whiff of Perfume

20A Parting Shot

21A Meeting of Sisters

22An Airplane Movie

23A Bone Sword

24A Last Demand

25A Stone for Two Birds

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise for

WHEN AMONG CROWS

“Deliciously frightening folklore perfectly mixed with adventure, heart, and sinister surprise.”—Holly Black, New York Times bestselling author of Book of Night

“Rich with myth and tapped into the deepest kinds of magic … a deliciously strange, multi-layered mystery full of very human longing.”—Leigh Bardugo, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House

“A tantalizing blend of gritty Chicago noir and Eastern European folklore … a thrilling tale of magic and uneasy alliances, betrayal and redemption … I’m hungry for more!”—Cassandra Clare, New York Times bestselling author of Sword Catcher

“Lovely, lush, and full of otherworldly longing, this modern fairytale about righteousness and the weight we bear for love is Roth at her most imaginative and ethereal.”—Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six

“I give it all the stars … Roth accomplishes something magical in a very small number of pages and tells a heartbreaking and beautiful story.”—Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun

“It is fantastic in the old sense of the word, in that it feels like a curtain has been pulled away so that I step into a magical backstage … I loved it.”—Mary Robinette Kowal, Hugo Award-winning author of The Calculating Stars

“From word one, Roth captivates the reader and takes you into a folkloric Chicago full of dark magic and dark delight.”—Chuck Wendig, bestselling author of Black River Orchard and The Book of Accidents

“A magical, action-packed read with vivid scenes and characters.”—IGN

“Magic and wonder as only Roth can do it.” —C.J. Leede, author of Maeve Fly

Also by Veronica Rothand available from Titan Books

Arch-Conspirator

When Among Crows

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To Clutch a Razor

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781803363592

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803364254

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: September 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Veronica Roth 2025.

Veronica Roth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

EU RP (for authorities only)eucomply OÜ, Pärnu mnt. 139b-14, 11317 Tallinn, [email protected], [phone]

Tonący brzytwy się chwyta.*

—Polish saying

* A drowning man will clutch at a razor.

Go to note reference 1

A PRELUDE

BABA JAGA tugs the curtain back from the window with a gnarled hand. The reflection of the sun on the river is sharp as a knife. It cuts at her and she lets the curtain fall again.

Centuries of life have taught her there are certain patterns. Not just in other people’s behavior, but in her own. She falls into them without meaning to, and her body knows before she does, remembering its old shapes. When she turns back to the Knight, she’s young and sturdy, a warrior, with an as-yet-untested womb and a muscled arm.

If he’s startled by the change in her, from old woman to young, he doesn’t show it. But then, that’s what she expects from this particular Knight. And though she reacts to him as if he was truly a Knight—a zealot with a holy mission to execute so-called monsters, such as herself—she knows that pattern doesn’t actually apply to him. He chose a new path, one she’s never seen walked before.

He asked her for destruction, and then, when that didn’t suit . . . for transformation.

“And how are you settling into the new skin I gave you?” she says.

The last time she saw him, he had the look of someone who was creeping toward the edge of a cliff. Now he’s unchanged in all the ways that would matter to a mortal—still tall, still strong, still with that dusty brown hair and eyes to match it—but in the ways that matter to an immortal, he’s fundamentally altered. He looks shifty to her, like he might become something else entirely if she doesn’t keep an eye on him.

“Ala is teaching me,” he answers, and it’s that accent, too, that carries her back to another time. He’s fresh from the mother country, still on a guest visa, his consonants going still in his throat, his vowels too short.

“Ala,” Baba Jaga repeats.

The experience of time is relative to age, with the minutes stretching long and lazy for a child and imperceptible for an adult, and so it might as well have been a second ago that she turned this Knight into a fear-eating nightmare creature. She amplified the few drops of zmora’s blood that had crept into his veins until they drowned out the rest of him. That makes him a zmora, too, but perhaps . . . not all the way.

“Ah yes,” Baba Jaga says, because it was only a second ago, after all, that Aleksja Dryja knelt on the rug not two feet from where the Knight currently stands. “Aleksja Dryja. A capable illusionist, I hear. But unimportant.”

“Unimportant.” He looks offended.

“A young Dryja who, up until you brought me the fern flower to cure her, was a ticking clock.” Baba Jaga drums her fingers on her sternum, a habit she’s passed along to some of her wraiths. The sound it makes is louder and higher than it should be, like her chest is hollow.

“The other Dryjas will not be so welcoming,” she predicts.

“I don’t expect to be welcomed.”

“No, you don’t, do you?” Baba Jaga laughs a little. “You expected death, and pain, and a life of suffering. You came to me for those things, thinking they would be your penance.” She moves closer, her feet bare on the hardwood floor. As she walks toward him, the Knight’s head bows further. “But soon you will get used to this new life, and you’ll begin to want things you don’t deserve. Acceptance, and trust, and yes—welcome.”

She reaches out, and flicks beneath the Knight’s chin to get him to raise it, to look at her.

“Already you want something you don’t deserve: your sword. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To inquire about your sword?”

In truth, she’s the one who summoned him here. But not everyone comes when she calls—the wise know it’s better to flee. Only the desperate turn up at her door, and she knows the source of this Knight’s desperation.

It hums behind her, fixed to her wall. A longsword made of bone, bright white with a gilded hilt. It was made by magic, but not a magic Baba Jaga understands or respects—a magic that uses pain as currency, the magic of monster-hunting Knights of the Holy Order. She can feel the agony that brought it into being every time she walks past it, like a sour taste in her mouth, like an echo of a scream. It used to be buried in the Knight’s back, formed by splitting his soul in half. And now it’s hers—and by extension, he is hers, until he manages to earn it back.

He seems to know it, given how he stands before her like a soldier reporting to his commanding officer. Shoulders back, body still, eyes forward. She would enjoy it more if he didn’t seem so damn sad about it. She can’t tease someone who’s yielded so completely.

“Yes, I . . .” The Knight looks down again. “You said I could get it back, for the right price. So I am here to ask what that price is.”

“And what is the cost to you, exactly, if I keep it in my possession? Do you even know?”

He hesitates. She isn’t sure how a Knight reacts when parted from their soul sword. She knows they can feel where it is, and they can use that feeling to track it. She knows it’s not pleasant. But that’s the extent of her knowledge.

“So far, the cost is . . . pain,” he admits, after a moment.

“But you don’t really care about pain, do you?” She tilts her head. “You believe it’s no more than you deserve. Perhaps you even crave the punishment. So what do you care if the sword lives in my apartment?”

“I . . .” He frowns. Looks away. “It’s more than that. The Holy Order believes that if your sword can’t be integrated with your body after you die, you will . . . wander the earth forever, neither alive nor dead.”

“The Holy Order believes,” she repeats. “And what do you believe?”

The Knight hesitates again. “I don’t know.”

“You should maybe find someone who does,” Baba Jaga says. “It may give you some urgency that you currently lack.”

“Do you know what will happen to me if I don’t get it back?”

He should have asked from the start. Foolish boy.

“I have suspicions,” she replies. “But whatever the truth is, I know it’s not good to walk around with only half a soul.”

The Knight swallows hard. He nods.

“You’re in a terrible bargaining position,” she says. “You come here with nothing but that tragic face, appealing to my merciful nature—Oh, this Knight who would rather suffer and die than kill another monster, take pity on him, Babcia—well, let me see how deep my well of mercy is today, shall I?”

She closes her eyes, and she feels herself shifting, hunching beneath the weight of time, her hair shivering as it turns dry as a corn husk and her skin softening over her bones. She has seen so many things, and death is one of them. And where there has been death, there have also been Knights.

Knights, their palms stained red, their eyes glinting red, their swords dripping red blood onto the hard ground.

Knights, chasing her brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, into the ancient woods of her old home.

Knights carving wounds into their own flesh to curse her kind with bloodthirsty crows or flesh-hungry wolves.

Knights who take every powerful symbol they find to twist it and warp it into their own.

Knights who crave death, and seek it, and cling to it like an oath.

“You were named for the harvest,” she says to him, and she hears it, the way her voice deepens as she allows time to rush into her body again. It’s so heavy, time. Easier, really, to keep it at bay, like a dog she has to keep nudging away from the front door with her foot every time she opens it.

“You were named for the harvest, and harvest you will.” She looks at him. He doesn’t look well. The skin under his eyes is almost purple. “Thirty-three bones made the sword that you used to slay the innocent, and to earn them back, you will bring me thirty-three swords drawn from the spines of the dead.”

“You . . .” He almost whispers it. “You want me to kill thirty-three Knights?”

“Not just thirty-three Knights. You will begin with the one you call Babcia.”

He stares at her, his eyes wide.

“Whatever one sows, that he will also reap,” Baba Jaga says. “Your grandmother sowed you. And you, my Knight, have sowed nothing but death.”

She almost expects it, the way he goes to his knees. The posture of a supplicant comes to him too easily; he knows, too well, that he has nothing to offer but himself. A meager thing indeed.

He bows his head, and says, “Please.”

Baba Jaga’s bones ache. The light of the setting sun is orange, and acrid as the fruit that shares its color. She prefers night.

“I know . . .” His voice cracks. “I know they’re . . .”

“You know they’re what? Murderous? Violent?”

“Monsters,” he supplies. “I know they’re monsters. But a man can love a monster.”

Kościej, something inside her whispers.

She remembers. She has loved a great many monsters, and Kościej was the greatest of them. In some ways he reminds her of the man kneeling in front of her. His soul displaced. His nature still undecided. Crooked and shrouded in darkness. But unlike this creature who begs her for mercy, Kościej knelt for no one.

“A man can love a monster, yes,” she says. “And a man can also kill the things he loves.”

“It would destroy me, to do what you ask.”

“And you think I should care?” Something fierce rises up inside her, a memory self she hasn’t encountered in some time. She grits her teeth so hard her jaw aches, and says, “Destruction is what you came to me for, Knight!”

A strong wind blows through the herbs that hang in dried bundles from her ceiling, blows through the pages of the books she’s left open on tables and desks, here and there and everywhere, and it whips through the Knight’s hair and clothes like it’s fighting to tear him apart.

“Killing is all you’re good for!” she shouts over the tumult.

The wind blows the Knight back, so he’s cowering on the floor at her feet, an arm curled over his head. Bones sail through the air and tapestries flap against the walls and jars tumble from their shelves and crash, spilling eyeballs and dried tongues and rare powders across the hardwood.

“So kill the guilty instead of the innocent, for once,” she says. “Or suffer the consequences of missing half your soul, whatever they are. Those are your choices, and don’t you dare think them unfair.”

She nudges time back with the toe of her shoe. The weight disappears from her shoulders, from her bones. Her skin tightens over muscle. She’s young again, and a warrior again, and the air is calm.

The Knight is still cowering on the floor, windblown and terrified.

“Get out of my sight,” she says.

She turns away from him, and tugs the curtain back to look at the river. The sun is still too bright on the water, but she lets it burn dark spots into her vision for a few seconds.

When she turns again, the Knight is gone.

A FAMILY MEAL

WHEN DYMITR was a child, he often waited in the weapons room for his uncle to come back from a hunt.

Always his uncle, not his parents—because his mother, Marzena, liked to greet with admonishments, and his father, Łukasz, was unpredictable, at turns either kind or vicious. Uncle Filip, though, was ruddy-cheeked and sly; he took coins out of Elza’s ears and taught Dymitr how to whistle with a piece of grass between his thumbs, and when Dymitr’s older brother teased him for being too sensitive, too soft, Filip called him off.

So Dymitr would sit on the stone bench at the edge of the weapons room, his legs swinging, and wait for Filip to return. When he did, Filip’s hands were always bloody, and his face was always smeared with dirt. He would offer Dymitr things piece by piece to be returned to their places: spare knives that hadn’t been used in the hunt, and the armored vest, and his heavy boots, which always needed to be cleaned. He didn’t talk much, after, but Dymitr didn’t mind the quiet. And he didn’t mind scrubbing Filip’s boots, either.

Most of the time, the bone sword was sheathed by the time a Knight came home, so Dymitr’s first glimpse of one came when he was ten years old, and Filip turned away from him to change his shirt. Filip went out on missions often, which meant he drew his sword often, so it was close to the surface of his skin. So close that Dymitr could see every ridge of the golden hilt, and every centimeter of the bone blade, standing out from Filip’s back.

It was an honor to become a Knight. Not everyone in the family did. Not everyone had the constitution for it, as his grandmother liked to say. And the people of the village—the ones who were in the know—treated Knights like royalty. Knights always got to go to the front of the line at the butcher shop, always got extra cakes at the bakery. Even the unruly teenagers who played soccer in the field behind the old factory went silent and still at the sight of them. Knights were like old heroes of legend come to life.

So the sword, such an integral part of becoming a Knight, should have left Dymitr awestruck. Instead, he shuddered at the sight of it bulging from Filip’s shoulders like a tumor. He wanted to look away from it, but he couldn’t stop staring until Filip put a clean shirt on to cover it. Then Filip turned around and looked at Dymitr standing there with bloody boots in hand.

“You haven’t seen one before?” he asked.

Dymitr swallowed. He felt nauseated. “Not up close.”

Filip clicked his tongue, disapproving. “Your parents have been neglecting your education.” He sat on the stone bench next to the door. “Come. Ask your questions.”

Curiosity wasn’t always rewarded in Dymitr’s family, so the invitation to ask whatever questions he liked was a rare one. He stood in front of his uncle, his fingers twisted together in front of him.

“Does it hurt to draw it?”

“Yes,” Filip said steadily.

He had a thick beard, gray in places, and neatly trimmed. There was a scar through his left eyebrow—a big, crooked one that made his skin pucker and ripple.

“Does it hurt to sheathe it?”

“Yes.”

“Then why . . .” Dymitr furrowed his brow. “Why not just leave it here in the weapons room, then collect it next time you go out on a mission?”

“Well, for one thing, it tugs at you when you’re separated from it, so you can always find it. Annoying. And for another . . .” He shrugs. “It’s good to always have a weapon with you. Monsters don’t only attack when we hunt them. They can creep into our houses, slip into our bedrooms while we sleep. Infest our bodies and minds, feed on our blood. The sword is with me always, so I’m never defenseless against them.”

No one ever softened things for Dymitr, or any of the children in the family. Monsters were everywhere, pain was inevitable, and only the strong could survive both.

“The sword is a tool,” Filip said. “But it’s also a treasure—because it’s hard won, understand?”

Dymitr never had much. Not because his family couldn’t afford it, but because they didn’t believe in certain indulgences. Nothing without purpose: a child’s bow-and-arrow set, for learning archery; a chessboard, for learning strategy; a survival kit, for learning to be resourceful. He and his brother and Elza had a fort in the woods, built from fallen logs, where they went to start small fires and set traps and identify mushrooms. They had tournaments with the rest of the cousins that were half playful, half serious. They quizzed each other with questions that sounded like the first parts of jokes, but weren’t. What is most commonly misidentified as a strzyga? What do you call a banshee in Germany? In what country can you find an oni?

He was used to his most valuable possessions having purpose. And that purpose was always related to monsters.

“How . . .” Dymitr was almost afraid of the question, but he asked it anyway. “How are they made?”

“We do it in here,” Filip said, gesturing to the weapons room before them. “You’ll lie on a table, face down. There will be four Knights with you. One will be your mentor, when you get one. One will speak the words of the ritual. And the other two . . .” He looked at Dymitr, assessing. “The other two will hold you down.”

Dymitr’s mouth went dry.

“Your mentor will take their own blade and cut into your back. Right down the center.”

Dymitr imagined it like carving a chicken: his skin crispy beneath the blade, clear juices bubbling up from that first cut. He shuddered.

Filip continued, “Then they’ll cut into themselves, and let their blood spill into the wound. The words of the ritual are spoken, and then . . .” He swallowed hard. “It will hurt. It will feel like every bone in your body is breaking. It will feel like a thousand deaths. You’ll pass out. But then, when you wake . . . you’ll be twice as powerful as before.”

Filip reached out and put his hand on Dymitr’s head. He gave him a serious look.

“Don’t fear pain, Dymek,” he said. “Fear . . . losing your purpose, losing your family, losing yourself. Those things are worse than pain.”

*   *   *

Dymitr chose this coffee shop because it has two exits.

Well, and because the baristas are good at latte art. There’s one, Zuri, who always draws something special for him. Most of the time, she just makes beautiful patterns, but once it was a swan, once it was a seahorse, once a four-leaf clover. Her cheek dimples when she smiles. And she’s always stressed, which he’s now realizing is a source of appeal . . . given that he now eats fear.

He sits by the window, equidistant from each exit, and waits for John to arrive.

There are American families of Knights, of course. One for each region. Like the country itself, their traditions are cobbled together from other places, a patchwork-quilt version of Knighthood that Dymitr’s family always liked to sneer at . . . despite the fact that they themselves had pieced their practices together from Polish tradition and Kashubian and Jewish, from Orthodoxy and Catholicism and paganism. The hypocrisy stands out to Dymitr now, though it never did before.

John is slim and blond and walks with forearm crutches. His skin is a few shades darker than Dymitr’s, like he recently spent some time in the sun. When he spots Dymitr sitting by the window, he grins, and Dymitr has to wonder how John identified him so quickly. The coffee shop is crowded with stressed-out students hunched over their laptops, spandex-clad yoga students with mats tucked under their table, and two older men playing cards.

“Process of elimination,” John says, like he heard Dymitr’s thoughts. Once he’s seated, he leans the crutches up against the window. “You must be Dymitr.”

He makes the name sound clumsy. He offers Dymitr his hand, and Dymitr shakes it. He’s tense, even though John never became a Knight, so he can’t use magic to see what Dymitr really is. From what he’s heard, John makes up for his lack of magic in other ways. He’s adept at following digital footprints—increasingly important these days—and has a knack for spotting things others don’t.

“A pleasure to meet you,” Dymitr says.

“I’m glad our schedules overlapped. I’m only here for a couple days. Have you tried a hot dog yet? I’m told I need to surrender to the full cadre of toppings, but I’m suspicious of the neon-green relish.”

Dymitr was already aware that John talked a lot, but hearing it in person is another thing entirely.

“I haven’t, no,” Dymitr says.

“You Eastern Europeans always have this aura of profound gloom, you know that?” John waves at Dymitr’s face. “Or maybe Americans are just obnoxiously chipper. That world-famous optimism, right? Not so much to be optimistic about these days, of course—”

Though Dymitr didn’t ask, John launches into a summary of the situation across the Midwest. The region is spotted with so-called monstervilles—small towns full of creatures of all varieties who realized they could band together to keep themselves safe. And that’s not even accounting for the new influx of things from all around the world.

“Not just your old-world standards anymore,” John says, with an exaggerated wince.

“The world is the same age no matter where you go,” Dymitr replies. “Just because it’s new to you doesn’t mean it’s new.”

John blinks at him, like Dymitr was just spouting philosophy instead of a simple fact.

“Suppose you’re right about that,” he says with a shrug. “Now what was it you wanted to meet about? Something about . . . swords?”

“I heard you’re the Moore family historian,” Dymitr says. “I wondered if you’d ever come across information about what happens when a Knight is parted from their sword.”

Zuri, of course, chooses that moment to carry John’s latte over to their table. The face of an owl stares up at Dymitr from the mug, and he feels a bubble of hysterical laughter in his chest as he thinks of Niko, his strzygoń . . . not-quite-boyfriend, and the second form he can shrug on and off like a jacket.

Zuri winks at Dymitr, who manages a weak smile, and tells them to holler if they need anything else, one of those folksy phrases that sounds wrong if Dymitr tries to say it in his accent.

Once Zuri is gone, John leans over the table, conspiratorially.

“As a matter of fact, I have,” John says. “And a more recent account than you’d think. My great-grandfather’s death was a bit of a family mystery for most of my life, right? In our family records he was a beast of a man, big and strapping, killed a whole bunch of game”—game is what they call their work in public, in case anyone is listening to their conversation—“and then one day, poof. Gone. No account of what got him, if anything. Weird stuff. But my grandfather, he left behind a lot of old journals when he passed, and guess who has two thumbs and got tasked with reading through all of them?”

He gives Dymitr a double thumbs-up, and then points back at himself.

“This guy,” John says. “Anyway there was a record of him losing his sword in a fight against one of our fearsomest feathery friends—” Dymitr thinks that means strzygas. “But the owl flew the coop instead of sticking around to kill him, with his sword in hand. He tried like hell to find her, and so did a few of the others, by all accounts—but no dice. And then things took a turn.”

“A turn?”

“Well, for the first few weeks, he was in pain—body aches, and constant thirst and hunger that never seemed to be sated. No big deal for a man of his constitution, right?” John shakes his head. “Well, then he started seeing a different owl, one he’d brought down a few years before. The family thought, you know—a curse. A haunting. A hallucinogenic poison. Whatever. And then he saw other things. Old game. Crows—” Those were zmoras. “And wolves—” Werewolves. “All kinds of things. An entire menagerie. They didn’t replay old memories, or anything, they just talked to him nonstop. Taunted him, refused to leave him alone. Eventually there were so many of them he couldn’t hear anyone over the noise. He just stayed in his room with his fingers in his ears.”

“And he died from it?”

John shakes his head. “No, it didn’t kill him. Not directly, anyway. He did that himself. Couldn’t take it anymore, left a note and everything. That’s why there was no official record of it—a Knight’s not supposed to destroy himself, right? He’s supposed to take something else down with him.”

As a child, one of the first things Dymitr understood about Knights was that there were good ways for a Knight to die and bad ways. Dying because you were stupid or scared or didn’t prepare for the work at hand adequately or lost your nerve in the middle of a fight, those were shameful ways to die. But dying because you were saving someone else, or because you were fighting something especially fierce or deadly—those were good deaths.

No Knight hoped to live a long life; they hoped for a good death.

“I guess it makes sense, you know? You can’t just walk around without half your soul without suffering some consequences,” John says. “So why the sudden interest? Someone you know misplace theirs?”

“I know someone whose sword is in the wrong hands,” Dymitr says quietly. “Though he knows exactly where it is, it will be difficult to get back. He wanted to know how urgent it was that he do so.”

John’s smile fades.

“Tell your friend that it’s urgent. From beginning to end, it was only a few months for my great-grandfather. And it got bad much sooner than that.”

Dymitr looks out the window at the cars driving past. At the construction workers setting up orange traffic cones on Irving Park. At the woman walking her corgi past a hair salon and stopping by the door for the stylist to toss a treat.

“Thank you for your help,” he says to John distantly. “I have to go.”

John’s hand brushes his as he stands, an attempt at comfort that Dymitr doesn’t acknowledge.

*   *   *

Dymitr stops at the top of the stairs and leans against the wall. The scents of the stairwell are overwhelming. Rubber boots. Sweaty feet. Petrichor. Wet carpet. Soggy paper from the mail Ala must have brought in earlier—the mailbox has a leak in it. Whatever food the neighbors had delivered. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath through his nose. Basil and peanuts—Thai food from the place down the street, if he had to guess.

The smells distract him from the ache in his chest. He rubs his sternum absently, and unlocks the door with the spare key. He’s been staying at Ala’s place since his transformation. Justuntil I get my bearings, he promised her. She just rolled her eyes, like he was being ridiculous.

The apartment is too small for both of them. He sleeps on the couch, and his feet hang off the end of it. There’s no room in the refrigerator for both his milk—whole—and her milk—1 percent—so they compromise by buying 2 percent. Just this morning she made him get out of the shower early so she could use the toilet. They don’t know each other, not really, but the cramped space has forced an intimacy neither of them is quite comfortable with yet. He can tell it would be better if he was gone, and also that Ala is too stubborn to tell him so.

She’s in the kitchen when he arrives. She hasn’t gotten her hair cut in a while, so it’s starting to curl behind her ears. She’s wearing an old gray T-shirt with holes at the collar seams. When he tries to peek at what’s on the stove, she blocks it with her body and grins at him. “Tell me what it is.”

She seems to love this game.

“It’s ramen,” he says.

“Not specific enough.”

“It’s the Sapporo brand,” he says. “You put carrots and broccoli in it. And an egg.”