Cursing, Sergey smacked her hard, knocking her back against the seat. Blood welled from her split lip. “Sit there and don’t move or you’ll get much worse.” He pointed the gun at her leg. “The firing squad won’t care if you stand or not.”
Mama spit at him. Bloody spittle sprayed his white necktie.
Sergey flashed the gun to Svetlana’s knee. “Last warning.”
Grabbing her mother’s hand, Svetlana fought against the rising tide of panic. Calm resourcefulness was their best chance for survival. As they’d had when escaping the threat of Russia once before.
The carriage wheels clattered over cobblestones, jostling the occupants like marbles in a box until they rumbled to a stop. Train horns whistled in the distance.
The door jerked open and there stood the rat man, his nose and mouth jutted out to a near direct point. His round eyes settled over Svetlana and Ana, but he said nothing as he blocked their escape to the busy sidewalk.
“Do not think to try anything. You will immediately regret it.” Flashing his gun as a cautionary reminder, Sergey handed Ana out first to his accomplice, then Svetlana, keeping a tight hold on her arm. Blotting the blood from his face with a handkerchief, he placed a homburg hat atop his head. Made for a slightly larger crown, the hat slipped over his ears, shadowing the scratches on his cheeks. “Now, come along, ladies. We’ve a train to catch.”
Glasgow Central Train Station. With its skeletal ironworks arching over the platforms, dark wood information desks, flashing indicator boards, and large hanging clocks overseeing the bustling schedule, the station chugged a chaotically precise rhythm familiar to anyone whirling from one place to another. A mere two hours before Svetlana had stepped off platform six with nothing more than Mrs. Roscoe’s letter in her pocket and a winged prayer. By the end of the day she and Wynn should have started a new chapter in their life. A chapter full of promise that would begin with her confession of love.
With a cruel twist of fate, that chapter was ripped from her hands, its pages stained with the forthcoming blood spilled on Russian soil. Her blood.
She had to do something before that awful fate became her own.
People dressed in somber tones of black and gray that matched the outside dreariness bustled by with their eyes fixed on a destination far beyond the walls and steel tracks that had brought them here. Svetlana tried to catch the eye of more than one of the station’s uniformed workers in hopes they would recognize her, but none seemed to take much interest in a lady on the arm of a well-dressed gentleman. They might have cared more if they’d seen the gun hidden inside his coat.
“Don’t think of signaling to one of them,” Sergey whispered in her ear. The tip of his gun pressed into her side.
“Or you’ll shoot me? That would cause a scene I’m certain you’re wishing to avoid.”
They descended to a lower level where the crowds thinned and the air thickened with grease and coal smoke. Belching steel trains screeched along tracks and ground to a stop at the platforms where passengers crawled out like ants to scurry up the stairs or onto another platform. Shoulders and briefcases knocked against her, propelling her farther and farther into the belly of no escape. There, among the sea of unflinching black, a flash of red. Svetlana swallowed a cry of panic as she waited for the hands to grab her and yank her into the thrashing chaos of revolution. Mama cried behind her, Sergey’s hand tight on her arm as they raced for the last train.
The red floated by. A man’s scarf. Time snapped forward and out of the past.
“Brings back that last night in Petrograd.” Sergey remembered too.
“It was the last night I thought you had a heart.”
“Only to have wasted it on you, but unlike that night, I’ll be going with you this time. A touch of sentiment in that, I think.” He stopped to face her, and nothing existed in his expression to remind her of that awful night. Gone was the man who had kissed her cheek and thrown her onto the train to save her. In his place stood an unrecognizable man who chilled her to the core. “When I handed you onto that train in Petrograd, I knew it was the end of our beginning. A romance withered before it could bloom. This, however, truly will be the beginning of our end.”