How well Evgeni knew that feeling, even without the added threat. When he blinked, darkness bombarded him. A darkness filled with all he should be doing, all he’d failed to do. The man cloaked in shadow in France. The train, twisted and prone. The hospital, where he’d realized he’d lost everything.

Everything.

Zivon. Gone. Where had he gone? Was he alive? He had to be. He’d had his passport in his pocket, as always, so if he’d been killed, the queries Evgeni had put out would have yielded an answer.

He winced at another dark image—the expression on the face of his host. Paul was a fellow Russian, but he’d made it clear from the start that he wasn’t helping Evgeni from any real feeling of camaraderie. He was helping solely because their mutual friends expected it.

Or mutual friend, anyway. He pressed a hand to his pocket, where the telegram rested. Nadya. Just thinking of her name called to mind the riot of gold curls, the deadly flash of her dark eyes. The way her arms wrapped around him when they kissed. He ought to be sorry she was coming—that she needed to. That he’d managed to fail so spectacularly. But he couldn’t ever be sorry to see her.

He’d only known her a year, but it was enough to admire every single thing about her. She was not one of those girls who thought her sole purpose in the world was to marry and have enough babies to guarantee a few would survive the harsh Russian life. Who waited at home in a village of dirt and snow while her man fought and died on the front.

No. Nadya had been on the front too, a rifle in her hand and a look on her face that had no doubt terrified any Central Power soldier who got in the way of the First Russian Women’s Battalion of Death. They’d served alongside each other during the Kerensky Offensive near Smorgon. He’d seen firsthand her ferocity. Her strength. And yes, the beauty that peeked out beneath the mud and gunpowder.

He could think of no one in the world he’d rather fight beside.

Matushka wouldn’t have liked her. His mother had been a staunch believer in tradition, in the old ways, in the certainty that faith and family were the only things worthwhile. Zivon had gotten that from her. But Evgeni was more like Batya. He’d seen enough to know that sometimes the old ways only led to death, starvation, and the obliteration of the very way of life they were supposed to be upholding. Sometimes the czar who was supposed to be leading them went into hiding instead of trying to help his people. Sometimes the war that was supposed to end an atrocity just made a dozen new ones.

Sometimes tradition led to death—and so tradition had to die.