Assassin's Heart

Chapter One
Lidiya

Moscow in the winter is bitterly cold. 

Not just cold in the sense that you need to bundle up, but to-your-bones, sink in deeply and stay there, in a way that only a hot bath and a fire and a steaming drink can fix, cold. It’s raining today too, which means that it’ll be even harder to shake the chill once I get home.

As if to add insult to injury, my radiator is broken. It’s been broken for most of the winter, but it didn’t matter, because I spent most of my nights at my boyfriend’s apartment in the better part of the city. 

Well, ex boyfriend, now. 

His heat never stops working, and the tub in his ensuite bathroom is big enough for two. I should know, we spent enough nights in it together. Bubbles, rose petals, champagne, the works. He was good at romance, until he wasn’t. Or rather, until I figured out that what I’d thought was romance was really just a way to keep me from picking up on the fact that he had a girl on the side.

Not a girl. A wife.

Kids.

It makes me sick. Really, seriously sick—I threw up in his meticulously twice-weekly cleaned foyer when I found out. On her shoes. 

Expensive shoes, as expensive as a month’s rent on my flat probably, which made me feel a little better. Good luck getting that out of leather.

She isn’t really who I should be mad at though—and I’m not. Not really. I’m furious with him for being a lying, cheating cad, and mad at myself for not seeing it. For letting myself be swept up in expensive dinners and nights in his giant bed and champagne bubble baths.

After all, who wines and dines a fucking grad student like that?

He’d said he wanted someone intelligent and charming, someone who could both look pretty on his arm and hold a conversation with his business associates. He’d taken me to a couple of those dinners and events, and of course I’d been able to hold a conversation—I’m in graduate school for fuck’s sake—but I don’t think I was charming. But then again, his wife didn’t look particularly charming either, even if she was quite pretty. She just looked—sad, and even though he’s the one who lied, I feel like that’s my fault. It shouldn’t be, but I can’t help feeling that way. I don’t understand what I have, exactly, that she didn’t, or why he would choose me to be the one to put in that position. We’d met at a party for my department, some research mixer where we were introduced to various donors, and he was one of them. I remember being surprised, because he seemed young to be a donor. As it turns out, we had a fifteen-year age gap, but that hadn’t mattered to me at the time. And unsurprisingly, it hadn’t mattered to him. 

I’ve been told I’m beautiful, but I don’t see it. Beautiful is the ballerinas that I pass on my way to class every day, catching glimpses of them through the arched windows in the stone building where the bulk of their classes are held. Beautiful is the voices of the opera singers I hear practicing when I head to the adjunct offices after class. Beautiful is the art I see on the walls of the department across from mine.

My blonde hair is frizzing from the humidity, my eyes are swollen from crying, and my cheeks are stained permanently red from the cold and wind, it seems like. I study archaeology, as much from a desire to spend months in a dry, hot desert as a real need for discovery. Especially this time of year, I’d give anything to be picking shards of pottery out of a dry riverbed with sweat rolling down my forehead. 

I have enough layers on to constitute an entire other person.

And I’m fucking running late.

I barely make it onto the train. I leap across the gap, pushing through the crowd of morning commuters and clinging to the overhead rail as the train jerks and moves forward, the crush of bodies feeling more suffocating than usual. I want to be home, curled up in my bed and alternating crying and seething over my ended relationship-that-was-never-really-a-relationship, but I also don’t, because there’s not enough blankets in the world to make my apartment habitable today.

Tonight is going to be even worse.

I force the thought out of my head, because there’s no point borrowing trouble, as my babushka used to say. It’ll be frigid tonight whether I think about it or not, so I might as well not bring myself down anymore than I already am.

She would have hated Grisha, my ex. She would have said there was something not quite right about him, and she would have been right, because there definitely wasn’t. I’d even sensed it at first, but I’d written it off as him being someone out of my league. Someone wealthy and cultured, while my idea of a nice meal prior to our first date was getting the ramen noodles with the little shrimp instead of chicken from the corner store. 

Being a grad student is hard. Being an orphaned grad student with a sick babushka back home is even worse. I know I should be with her—I want to be with her, but she’d beat me with her cane if I tried to drop out and go home to take care of her. My education is everything to her, and she’s immeasurably proud of me for getting this far, farther than anyone else in our family ever has. So I have to shove down the guilt and be satisfied with going home on weekends to see her, bringing her the money I have leftover from my stipend and the extra I make tutoring, and soaking up every bit of time I get. 

That, now that I think of it, should have been another clue as to what was really going on with Grisha. What kind of boyfriend never asks why his girlfriend is gone every weekend, or ever complains about it? It wasn’t like he knew about my babushka, I never said anything. I didn’t want him to think I was angling for him to help me financially, so I just kept it quiet. But he never once asked me to do anything on the weekends, or complained that I was never available, or wondered why I was gone.

Now I know why, of course—he was spending those weekends with his wife and children, wherever they live. Some upper-crust house outside of the city, probably. He never asked because he was probably just grateful to not have to fucking worry about it, probably a little bewildered that he never had to make excuses, but not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I’d been the perfect fucking side piece and I hadn’t even known it.

I even gave outstanding head, whenever he fucking asked.

He didn’t fucking deserve it.

Bitterness feels better than being sad, honestly. Anger is better than the yawning hole in my heart left by the fact that I really had been falling in love with him, that I’d believed him when he’d said he was falling in love with me. The part of me that had adored what we’d had together, before I knew it was all a lie.

The anger warms me up a little, at least.

The train jerks to a stop, and I surge forward with the crowd, stumbling over the gap onto the platform where the wind is whipping bitterly through the train stop. I pull my scarf up over my nose and mouth, and catch a glimpse of a man that I’d seen just as I’d gotten onto the train, a few seats down from where I’d been holding onto the railing. He’s wearing a black cap pulled low over his eyes and a black wool trench with a thick black woolen scarf wrapped around his neck, but even all of that hadn’t kept me from catching a glimpse of the piercing blue of his eyes, bluer than anything I’ve ever seen. Almost dangerous, in a way that made my heart race a little.

What are you thinking, Lidiya? As if you need to be noticing another man right now.

The small voice in my head always sounds like my babushka, chastising me. It’s a good thing, usually, although where was it when I was missing every red flag that Grisha ever waved? It’s not as if there weren’t plenty of them. I just hadn’t wanted to pay attention, because it had been so long since a handsome man had noticed me, and he did everything right. Too right. I’d wanted it to be real, so I’d ignored my intuition.

The same intuition that is pinging wildly right now, telling me that there’s something off about this man, too.

Or maybe I’m just being suspicious, because I’m pissed at men in general right now. 

The man is getting off of the train too, looking around, and for a moment I think he’s looking for me. That’s insane though—why would he be? I hardly know anyone in Moscow, other than my few friends from the department, and even then, we don’t get to spend nearly enough time together. 

I certainly don’t know any tall men with piercing blue eyes who wear all black.

I push forward in the crowd of commuters, later than ever now. I’ll never hear the end of it from my ancient history professor, who despises tardiness more than anything and yet has the gall to have one of the earliest classes of the day. But I can’t shake the feeling that there’s eyes boring into my back, and I resist the urge to look over my shoulder for several feet, until I can’t anymore.

When I finally do, my pulse leaps into my throat.

The man is several paces behind me, his head lowered, pushing through the crowd—towards me. Not towards me, I tell myself, just in the same direction. But then I turn the corner to take the stairs up to the street level instead of riding the escalator with everyone else, and when I glance over my shoulder again, he’s still there.

Closer now. 

Fuck. I pick up my pace, faster and then faster again, but he’s still there. I swerve to the right, my heart hammering, looking for another exit, a way out of here that might enable me to lose him, feeling crazier by the moment. There’s no reason for anyone to be following me. But he’s right there, closer now, and I’ve taken too many turns at this point away from the normal path out of the station for it to be a coincidence.

I grab the railing to head down a set of steps that heads down to the next level, entirely in the wrong direction, but I don’t care anymore. I’ll miss class if I have to. I never have, not all semester, not even when Grisha tried to get me to play hooky and stay in bed all day with him, warm and naked. But I just want this man away from me—in fact, if all men could stay away, that would be just fucking—

My foot slips on ice on the stairs, someone’s leftover wet footprints frozen over from last night, and I try to catch myself on the railing but my feet are already going out from under me. I hear myself let out a screech as I tumble down the stairs, ass over beanie. Luckily it’s only a half-flight, but the stairs are hard, cold metal in the frigid temperature, slick with ice from disuse, and I hit the landing hard, my head striking cement as I lie there groaning.

The world is swimming, and I have just a moment to look up and see the man coming down the stairs, his piercing blue eyes visible under the cap, and realize that unless I’m hallucinating, he’s fucking gorgeous. Strong jaw, long nose, stubbled cheeks and of course, those fucking eyes.

But then again, I could also have a concussion.

“Lidiya Petrovna?” His voice carries towards me, thick and heavily accented, and I peer at him from where I’m lying and trying to decide if I also have a cracked rib or three, as well as the aforementioned concussion.

“How do you—know my name?” I manage, through lips that feel thick and numb.

I don’t have a chance to hear his answer before I pass out cold.