With this new threat issued, the agent and Soviet lackeys left the cell. Anton felt like he’d been kicked in the face yet again.
He was still alive. He and Tate.
And within a few hours, the Soviets would know he’d sold them a sack of bullshit.
Limp on the floor, he realized just how badly things had gone. Tate lay beside him, panting for breath from his last round with the bucket.
No words passed between them. As Anton met his friend’s gaze, he saw his own dread reflected back at him.
All their ruse had bought them was a few hours of fitful sleep on the stinky floor of their dungeon. Anton was cold, hungry, thirsty, and aching in places on his body he’d never known existed.
But worse than all that was the knowledge of how badly he’d miscalculated the KGB agent. He thought he and Tate had been driving the bus. They’d been idiots.
Anton would never give up his family. He was destined to die slowly and painfully. He’d tried to circumvent his fate, but it was coming back to get him.
He made a silent promise: he would endure. The Soviets would not break him.
I’ll surprise them, Mom. I won’t give them a fucking thing. He would die, but his family would live.
It would have to be enough.
10
Family
Someone shoved a bowl of water and several slices of bread through a slot in the bottom of the door.
He and Tate had been left untied after their countless near-drownings. They crawled across the floor to reach it. They inhaled the dry slices of bread and sucked from the water bowl like dogs. The Soviets had well and truly reduced them to animals.
After that, there was nothing to do but wait for the other shoe to drop. He and Tate were too weak to speak, but Anton didn’t miss the way the other boy looked at the bloody carving on his chest. It made Anton sick. He turned his back on Tate and curled up on his side.
Anton drifted in and out of sleep. In a half-lucid state, childhood memories surfaced in rapid succession. He clung to them, holding those stupidly blissful moments the way an archeologist might hold a jewel box recovered at a dig site.
There had been all the times he, Leo, and Dal had spent on their dirt bikes, riding around the cabin until they were delirious with hunger. Nonna and their mother always had hot meals waiting for them when—sweaty and filthy—they returned home.
“No gorillas at the Cecchino table,” Nonna liked to say. She practically made them strip on the porch before permitting them to trek through the house.
Once the boys washed up, she always fed them like they might starve to death. Meat balls. Spaghetti pomodoro. Gnocci with cream sauce. Minestrone soup.
God, what he wouldn’t give for a bowl of her food right now. He was so goddamn hungry.
His mind flashed back to the age of seven when he caught chicken pox. His mother had quarantined him in the room he shared with Leo, forbidding everyone except herself from going inside. Lena had disobeyed their mother and snuck in with a bowl of Campbell’s chicken soup. She’d been desperate to check on Anton and ended up getting chicken pox along with him.
Being quarantined in a room with his twin sister hadn’t been so bad. They’d played I Spy and Uno and thrown spitballs at each other for days. It had been a good way to pass the time.
Thinking of Lena took him back to a time when the whole family had been out in the apple orchard. He couldn’t even remember how old they were. One of Nonna’s grumpy old billy goats had rammed Lena in the butt and knocked her over. Only Anton and Dal had been around.
Dal had walloped that poor goat with righteous vengeance. Anton secretly felt sorry for the goat; sure, the animal had been obnoxious, but he hadn’t deserved the full force of Dal’s rage.
Anton hadn’t been brave enough to defend the goat. Instead, he’d fetched the hose from behind the barn. When Lena had her back turned, Anton unleashed a stream of cold water on her.
Anton hadn’t thought about that in years. It occurred to him that Dal may have been in love with his sister since they were kids. No wonder they’d ended up together.
Anton never told anyone why he’d sprayed Lena; in the water fight that ensued, no one had thought to ask. Even Nonna had partaken in the fun, grabbing a hose from around the back of the house to spray Anton and his siblings.
He still remembered the way the water had smelled on the dry soil of the orchard. He remembered what it felt like when he stepped on a rotting apple and it squished between his toes. He remembered the sound of his mother’s laughter when their father dumped a bucket of water over her head.
As he surfaced in and out of pain-hazed sleep, Anton replayed this memory over, and over, and over. He thought it might be the singular best day in his entire life.
And he hadn’t even known it until now.
The KGB agent returned several hours later. One look at his thunderous expression said it all.
Anton and Tate were well and truly fucked. Everything they had endured up until this point had been kitten’s play.
He couldn’t stop the shudder that ran through his body. He’d never been so fucking scared in his entire life.
Then again, he’d never been this resolved, either. He was determined to hold. He’d be a fucking fortress. No matter what they threw at him, his walls would hold.
“Sniper scum,” the KGB agent snarled. He kicked Anton in the ribs. “I suspected the
