The safe house in Königsberg was a world away from the frozen hell of the bridge. It was a comfortable, anonymous apartment in a respectable bourgeois building, a place of polished wood floors, heavy velvet curtains, and the quiet, civilized ticking of a mantelpiece clock. After the chaos and the cold, it should have felt like a sanctuary. To Kato, it felt like a tomb.
There was hot food, a rich, fragrant stew that she could not bring herself to eat. There was a soft bed with clean, crisp linens that felt alien and abrasive against her skin. There were clean clothes, a simple wool dress, laid out for her. It was a gilded cage, a place of warmth and comfort that only served to highlight the profound, freezing coldness that had settled deep inside her soul.
She was physically free. The threat of Stolypin's guards and the damp despair of the fortress cell were gone. But she had never felt more like a prisoner.
Koba was there, a restless, brooding presence in the warm, quiet rooms. A German military doctor, a man with efficient hands and cold eyes, had tended to his arm, setting the fractured bone and putting it in a proper, clean sling. Koba barely seemed to notice the pain. His focus was entirely on her, his eyes following her with a desperate, hungry intensity. He tried to talk to her, his voice low and rough, attempting to bridge the chasm that had opened between them. He spoke of the future, of a new life, of safety. His words were meant to be comforting, but they were just sounds, a meaningless language from a man she no longer knew.
She waited until the German doctor had left, until it was just the two of them, along with the silent, hulking presence of Pavel, who stood guard by the door like a mournful statue. The quiet of the apartment became heavy, thick with all the things that had been left unsaid.
Finally, she turned to face him. Her voice, when it came, was not loud or angry. It was quiet, brittle, and sharp as a shard of glass.
"Who were those men, Soso?" she began, deliberately using his old name, a name that now felt like an accusation. "The Germans. The ones who looked at you like you were a prize they had won. And that other man… on the bridge… the one you shot at. He called you 'Koba.' He shouted 'in the name of the Central Committee.' He was one of ours, wasn't he?"
Koba's face tightened. "It was complicated, Kato. A matter of Party discipline."
"Was it?" she pressed, taking a step closer, her eyes blazing with a cold fire that made him flinch. "Stolypin told me things. He told me you had acquired an asset he wanted back. A traitorous deputy. Malinovsky." She was piecing together the fragments, the things she had witnessed, the things Stolypin had told her, the things she had overheard in the chaos. The horrifying picture was becoming clear. "You didn't just rescue me. This was a trade. You made a deal with the Germans. To get me out, you sold one of our own leaders to the Kaiser's spies."
The accusation landed in the quiet room with the force of a physical blow. Pavel, by the door, shifted his weight, his expression a mask of misery.
Koba saw then that simple comforts and promises of a safe future were useless. The woman standing before him was not a damsel to be rescued. She was a revolutionary, a comrade, and she was demanding an accounting. He would have to justify himself, not to a committee, but to the one person whose judgment he still feared.
He took a deep breath, the mask of the cold strategist settling back over his features. He would have to give her the truth, his truth, the brutal philosophy that now governed his world.
"Yes," he said, the word a stark admission. "I sold him."
He began to speak, his voice low and steady, a chillingly calm recitation of his monstrous new worldview. It was the Gospel of the Wolf, but this time it was not a speech to conquer a subordinate's doubt. It was a confession, an explanation, a plea for understanding to the woman he had just damned himself for.
"The world you and I dreamed of in Tbilisi, Kato… it doesn't exist. It is a fairy tale we told ourselves in the dark. The real world is a machine. A cold, grinding machine of power, of empires, of money. It doesn't care about justice or loyalty or love. It only cares about leverage. About who has the power to break whom."
He gestured around the comfortable room. "To survive in that world, to achieve anything, you cannot be a poet. You must be a mechanic. You must be willing to get your hands dirty. You must be willing to strip the machine down to its ugliest parts, to break the ones that are working against you and replace them with ones that will serve your purpose."
"Malinovsky was a broken part," he continued, his voice utterly devoid of emotion. "He was already a traitor, serving one enemy. I simply changed his master to one who was, for a brief moment, more useful to me. Stern… he was an agent of a different broken part. A Party leadership that is blind, that would have let you rot in that cell for the sake of an abstract principle, for a piece of paper. And the Germans… they are just another machine, a bigger, more powerful one, that I could use as a tool to get what I wanted."
He took a step towards her, his eyes burning with a desperate intensity. "And what I wanted, Kato, was you. The cause is an idea. The Party is a committee. The Revolution is a dream of the future. You are real. Your life is real. I chose the real thing over the dream." He was not asking for forgiveness. He was demanding that she see the cold, brutal logic of his choice. He was demanding her understanding.
"I did what the world demanded of me to save you," he finished, his voice raw. "The man you remember from Tbilisi, the poet, the romantic… he could not have done this. That man would have written a pamphlet. He would have made a speech. And he would have let you die."
Kato listened, her expression shifting from angry confusion to a kind of profound, bone-deep horror. She was not listening to Soso, the passionate boy she had fallen in love with. She was not even listening to Koba, the hard revolutionary she had respected. She was listening to a stranger. A monster. A cold, dead-eyed philosopher of violence who spoke of treason and betrayal as if they were simple tools in a workshop, like a hammer or a wrench.
She looked at him, at this man who had torn the world apart for her, and she felt a wave of revulsion so powerful it made her feel faint. He hadn't rescued her. He had purchased her. The price had been his soul.
She realized the truth of her new reality. She was free from Stolypin's prison, but she was now the captive of this man and his terrifying new alliances. Her cage was no longer made of stone and iron. It was a gilded cage, built from his monstrous, possessive love and walled by his unforgivable sins. She was not his comrade. She was his prize. His justification. The living, breathing proof of his damnation.
She finally looked at him, at the desperate hope for understanding in his eyes, and she delivered her verdict.
"You didn't save me, Soso," she said, her voice a quiet, heartbreaking whisper of finality. "You just built me a bigger cage."
She saw the hope in his eyes die, replaced by a look of stark, utter desolation.
"The man I loved," she finished, turning away from him to face the window, her back a rigid wall of grief, "died in a forest in Vologda long before I was ever arrested."
She left him standing alone in the middle of the room, alone with his terrible victory, which now tasted entirely, and irrevocably, of ash.