From a scrape on her hand, blood drips.

She crouches on the wood and picks up For Whom the Bell Tolls and catches sight of her wrist. How quickly the small ink heart pulses, just above the vein.

The book trembles in her hand. She grips the pages inside and rips them from the spine. Next she fastens her hands around The Prince, splitting the binding apart and flinging the book’s sections onto the bed. Not silent now. She can hear her fractured breath, the hurt sounds latching in her throat.

She stoops and seizes the books, gathers them in her arms, and piles them in the center of the white sheets. From the bedside table she grabs the decanter and pulls off the stopper and douses the books in whiskey, wetting Nietzsche and Sun Tzu. She flicks the lighter. Holds out the flame. Opens her hand.

Fire splashes across the bed.

She turns. With the heat on her back, she walks over and picks up the satchel. When he sees the smoke, he’ll return. In the kitchen she washes her hands. Gently. Just once. She dries them on a towel. She walks through the stone foyer and out the front door, into the falling snow. The scent of scorched paper wisping behind her. Ashes curling in the cold air. When she gets to the car, she puts the satchel beside her, in the passenger seat.

Midway down the drive, she stops and looks in the rearview mirror. This stillness of blood in her veins. Except for a frail orange light in the windows of the house, the fire is unnoticeable. She sits and watches the house burn.

She continues down the drive, into the thick of the trees and onto the road.

Some eight hundred yards from the house, the firelight blinked across the binocular glass. Bardem turned the focusing wheel to sharpen the house. He adjusted the diopter rings. As he did so, the fire glimmered. He sat with the pistol in his lap. The shotgun and the rifle lay in the zippered bag beside him. He watched the house, forming conclusions. That she chose what she chose while knowing the consequence. The action and reaction that led to this desperate ground. He studied the car, which headed away from the house to vanish among the white trees.

He lowered the binoculars and sat there in the cold and the quiet with the engine idling. The gray sky hanging low on the horizon before him. Puffs of snow floating down.

Ahead of him in the distance, Ava turned onto the road.

He pulled from the shoulder and followed.

XXXI