The Russian words made her pause. But the tone was wrong. Too raspy from cigarettes, too deep, too smoothed around the edges by years of speaking French. Still, she put on a smile and turned her head to greet the man she remembered as a lanky teen who worked the farm next to her parents’. “Paul. It is good to see you.”

Half truth. Half lie. She’d never had any particular affection for him, and the decade since he’d last been in Russia didn’t look as though it had been especially kind to him. She knew he was only thirty, but he looked far older.

He was a familiar face, though. And more, the leader of the Bolsheviks in Paris. She intended to remain firmly on his good side, so she fastened on a smile and held out a hand.

He took it, but he didn’t shake as she’d intended. Just held it for a moment, his gaze steady on her face. She didn’t much like the way the glow at the end of the cigarette dangling from his lips mirrored the gleam in his eyes when he looked at her. But then, she’d long ago grown accustomed to such looks—and had learned how to dissuade them.

Stay on his good side, she reminded herself. And so she merely lifted her chin and reclaimed her hand rather than punching him in the nose with it. “Where is Evgeni? He hasn’t replied to any of my messages since I left Petrograd.”

The glow turned to a smolder. A temper-heated one. “The first time you see me in a decade, and you greet me with ‘Where’s Evgeni?’ You don’t ask after my parents? My life here?”

She lifted her brows. “I said it was good to see you, didn’t I? And I’ve seen your parents since you have. Not to mention that you greeted me with ‘It’s about time you showed up.’ My question is at least relevant.”

He grunted. And actually reached for her. No, for her bag.

Tired as she was from the travel, she wasn’t about to get off on such a foot. And she made a point of it by stepping back. “Don’t be a caveman, Paul. I am a soldier. A comrade in arms. I will carry my own bags.”

“Have it your—”

Something whistled overhead, drowning out the obvious ending to the phrase. She looked up, but by the time she did, there was nothing to see. A boom sounded from somewhere in the not-far-enough distance, and a plume of dust and smoke shot into the sky. “What is that?”

Paul took the cigarette from his lips, waved it in the air, and blew out a puff of smoke. “The Germans’ new siege gun. We will have time to get home without fear of another.”