The requisitioned Polish manor house felt like a tomb waiting for its occupants. Outside, a cold spring rain whispered against the blackout-paned windows, a sound almost lost beneath the constant, distant indigestion of the front lines—a sporadic, heavy rumbling that vibrated through the floorboards and into the bones.
Inside, in the grand study stripped of its finery, Koba stood before a map. It was a god's-eye view of the Gorlice sector, a place that, to the world, was just another quiet stretch of the line. To him, it was a detailed blueprint of an apocalypse he had designed. His mind, the alien consciousness of Jake Vance, was no longer a strategic asset. It was a torture chamber. Over the crisp topographical lines and the neat blue rectangles of the Russian Third Army, he saw ghosts.
He saw the numbers, glowing like phosphorus in his memory. 400,000 Russian casualties. 90,000 German and Austro-Hungarian. Half a million men. A city of the dead, wounded, and captured, and he had just handed the architect the final plans. Every name he had given Nicolai, every logistical weakness he had identified, was a death warrant signed in the blood of men he had never met. Tomorrow, he and his own small band of followers would walk into the inferno he had engineered. He felt less like a prophet and more like a man who had meticulously planned his own crucifixion, along with that of a hundred thousand others.
A soft click of the door brought him back. Kato entered, carrying a small tray with a pot of coffee and a single cup. She moved with a quiet, spectral grace, her face pale in the single cone of light thrown by the desk lamp. She placed the tray on the edge of the desk, the porcelain making a soft clinking sound that was impossibly loud in the tense silence.
She turned to leave. The sight of her back, straight and rigid, was a physical blow. She was the reason. The justification for every compromise, every betrayal, every soul-crushing decision. She was the one real thing he had saved from the grinding gears of the machine, and now she was just a ghost haunting his gilded cage. The terror of the coming dawn, of the statistics on the map becoming shrieking, dying men, coalesced into a single, desperate, primal need. He could not face that dawn alone.
"Stay," he said.
His voice was rough, a command scraped raw by exhaustion and fear. It was not a request.
She froze, her hand on the doorknob. She did not turn. He could feel her silent, cold defiance radiating across the room. He came around the desk, his boots heavy on the old wood. He didn't reach for her hand or touch her face. His own hands felt alien, clumsy things, fit only for holding a pistol or signing an order. He placed his palm on the small of her back, over the rough wool of her dress. He felt the rigid column of her spine, the way every muscle was coiled tight, a living statue of refusal.
He leaned in, his lips close to her ear, his breath warm against her skin. "I need you to," he whispered, the words an admission of a weakness he could show no one else.
He felt a tremor go through her, the slightest shudder of capitulation, or perhaps just resignation. Without a word, he guided her from the study into the adjoining bedroom. It was a cold, impersonal space, smelling of dust and damp, containing only a heavy bed and a wardrobe. The rain against the window was louder here.
He let go of her and turned her to face him. In the gloom, her eyes were dark pools, reflecting nothing. He reached for the top button of her dress. His fingers, usually so steady, fumbled with the small, frustrating piece of mother-of-pearl. She did not help him. She simply stood there, her hands at her sides, a silent observer of his clumsy urgency.
He unfastened the buttons one by one, pushing the rough fabric of her dress off her shoulders. It fell to the floor in a heap around her ankles. She stood before him in her plain cotton shift, a pale silhouette in the darkness. He reached out and pushed the thin straps of the shift down her arms. He wanted to see a flicker of something in her eyes—desire, fear, even anger. He saw nothing. It was like looking at a stranger.
He pushed her back towards the bed. She went without resistance, sitting on the edge of the mattress as he pulled off his own boots and uniform tunic. The air was cold on his skin. He stood before her for a moment, the man and the monster, stripped of his authority, left with only this raw, gnawing need. He pushed her down onto the rough wool blanket, her body a pale line in the darkness.
He came over her, his weight pressing her into the mattress. He kissed her. It was a rough, hungry kiss, born of desperation, not passion. Her lips were passive, pliant, yielding nothing. He moved his mouth to her neck, to the hollow of her throat, searching for a pulse, a reaction, a sign that the woman he remembered was still in there. Her skin was cool, unresponsive.
He pulled the shift up and over her head, tossing it aside. His hands moved over her body, mapping the familiar curves and lines of her hips, her waist, her breasts. It was the same body he had dreamed of in his prison cell, the same body he had sold the world to save. But it felt like a foreign country. His touch elicited no response, no softening, no answering fire. It was like stroking marble.
He entered her with a desperate, almost violent thrust, a silent roar of frustration against her terrifying calm. He moved inside her, his rhythm hard and fast, driven by a need to force a reaction, to shatter the ice wall she had built around herself. The only sounds in the room were his own ragged breaths, the creak of the old bedframe, and the relentless, whispering rain outside. He looked down at her face, a pale oval in the darkness, hoping to see her eyes closed in passion. They were open. Staring at the ceiling. Analytical. Absent.
He whispered her name, "Kato," a ragged plea. No response. He tried the old name, the one from the world before the mud and the blood. "Soso," he breathed against her ear, trying to invoke the ghost of the boy she had loved. Nothing. She blinked once, slowly, a movement of such profound indifference it was more cutting than any curse.
His desperation crested. He was not making love to her; he was attacking her silence, trying to batter his way back into her heart. His release came not as a wave of relief but as a shuddering, violent spasm of utter failure. It was a hollow echo in the vast, empty cathedral of his isolation.
He collapsed beside her, his body slick with sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs. He lay in the darkness, listening to the rain, the chasm between their bodies on the bed feeling a thousand miles wide. He had taken her body, and in doing so, had proven to himself that he had lost her completely.
After a long silence, she moved. The rustle of the blanket was the only sound. She sat up, her back a rigid wall of judgment. He watched her silhouette as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood. She found her shift in the dark and pulled it over her head, the simple act one of chilling finality. She picked up her dress and began to button it with brisk, efficient movements.
She was fully dressed before she spoke. Her voice, when it came, was not angry or hurt. It was quiet, sharp, and laden with a surgeon's dissecting contempt.
"Is that what you needed to be brave, Koba?"
The question was a stiletto blade, slid neatly between his ribs. It reframed his desperate act of connection as a pathetic display of fear. It denied him even the dignity of his own lust.
Without waiting for an answer, she turned and walked out of the room, closing the door softly behind her. The click of the latch was the sound of a tomb being sealed.
He was left alone in the cold, rumbling darkness, with the ghost of her words and the absolute certainty that he would be facing the dawn, and the hell that followed, utterly and completely alone. He got up, the chill of the room seeping into his skin, and began to dress, the monster putting his uniform back on.