Page 6 of Pageant

“It was just terrible, the way your husband was killed,” Mrs. Lugovskaya says. She trails off and glances at me expectantly. She wants the inside story about Ivan. I barely knew him, and he never felt like my husband. We were only married for eight months and then he was gone. There were two men I lost that day, and the one who causes me the most pain to remember isn’t my husband.

“How is Yelena?” I ask. I seem to remember that they have a daughter called Yelena.

“Da. How is Yelena?” a rumbling, richly accented voice speaks behind me.

I whirl around. Out of the shadows steps a tall figure, dressed in black. Leather jacket. Black hoodie up over his head. I recognize him with a thump of fear as the man watching me in the street.

Slowly, he reaches up and draws back his hood. There are tattoos on his wrists and fingers, and for a moment I think it’s—

Then he reveals his face. The man’s eyes are dark and thickly outlined with lashes, in stark contrast to his pale skin and rosy lips. His jaw is smooth, and he has brown, almost black, curls falling over his forehead, the sides tightly shaved. He’s young, just a few years older than me, but there’s so much darkness in his eyes, as if he’s lived through a hundred hellish lifetimes.

Mrs. Lugovskaya gasps and grabs her husband’s arm. “Call the police.”

Mr. Lugovskaya takes out his phone, but the stranger draws a gun from his pocket and fires. There’s a mutedphht, and the phone flies out of Mr. Lugovskaya’s hand.

The man points the gun at him. Then at Mrs. Lugovskaya. Then at me. He’s going to shoot us all. He’s just trying to decide the order.

But then the man lowers the gun and squeezes the magazine release button, and the bullets tumble to the floor. He tosses the gun to the other side of the room and it goes skittering across the parquet floor. An assassin, and he’s disarming himself.

Then he does something even more bizarre. He starts to undress.

He shrugs out of his jacket and tosses it over the sofa. Then he reaches behind his head and pulls off his T-shirt in one smooth motion, revealing a muscular torso covered in tattoos. Each one is inked in black and given space to breathe, and no two tattoos are touching one another.

A coiled snake.

The Virgin Mary cradling empty air.

A double-headed eagle with its wings spread.

A leaping tiger.

A skull with roses.

Barbed wire.

I suck in a shaky breath. I’ve seen tattoos just like them on the body of another Russian man. I’ve touched them, traced them in secret moments as if they were the keys to freedom. Keys to his heart.

Prison tattoos. Inked in despair. Inked in defiance. Inked with pride. He’s showing them to the Lugovskayas because they mean something to them. The three of them know each other.

Even before I see the knife in his hand, I know we’re all dead. He wasn’t following me, after all. He was following the Lugovskayas, and I’m collateral damage.

He flashes a smile at me, a smile so cold that it turns the blood in my veins to ice. A smile that says he should be sorry that I’ve been caught up in this, but he’s not. Then he turns away and advances on the Lugovskayas.

Mrs. Lugovskaya screams at the top of her lungs, a blood-curdling sound that shatters the night. The two of them are backing away, their mouths stretched wide in horror. The man follows them, taking slow, inexorable steps, the knife brandished in his fist. Inked across his muscular back, a Russian palace floats in the clouds, each tower topped with a decorative cupola.

Run. While he’s not looking.

But the Lugovskayas. They don’t deserve to die like this.

Panicking, I look around for a weapon. The magazine of bullets is lying on the floor. I edge closer to it around the sofa as quietly as I can, reaching down and snatching it up. They don’t do me a lot of good. The gun is on the far side of the room behind the Lugovskayas, where I can’t reach it.

Mr. Lugovskaya has his arms spread wide, protecting his wife. He glances over his shoulder toward the door into the master bedroom, and in that moment the assassin strikes. A vicious, downward stab that punches through flesh and bone. The man gasps in shock.

He’s stabbed Mr. Lugovskaya six times before he’s even fallen to the ground. He goes on stabbing him in the chest, throat, and face. Frenzied stabbing, full of hate. Blood gouts all over the place. I stand with my mouth open, sick, crunching noises filling my ears.

Mrs. Lugovskaya screams again and runs for the bedroom. The man gets up and goes after her, and I see the gun. I run over and snatch it up. It’s a Makarov semi-automatic with a suppressor fixed to the barrel. A Russian handgun.

I’ve used this kind before.

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