Beauty and the Bounty Hunter (23 page)

“I needed to escape from my
otets
. My father. He was…”

Brutal,
Alexi thought.

“Difficult,” he said.

Cat’s suspicious glance made him wonder, not for the first time, if she could read his mind. But when she spoke, she gave no indication she’d heard anything in his voice but the truth. “Where were you born?”

“In the streets of a place once called Queen of the Golden Horde.”

“You’re making that up.”

“No.” His lips curved. “Although it hasn’t been
called that for centuries, I still prefer the lyrical name to the new one: Tsaritsyn. The town is located at the mouth of the Volga River.”

“That explains the Russian, but what about all the other languages?”

“I’ll get to those.” Alexi took a breath, let it out, and took another. He was being evasive, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d never wanted to speak of his past again. However, when he’d decided to take her to Ethan, he should have known a return to the nightmare was inevitable.

“You said your father was difficult.” She cast him a glance, which he ignored. He wasn’t going to elaborate. “Your mother?”

“Dead.”

He would not elaborate on that either. Not because it was painful but because he did not know any more than that. He remembered a few endearments, but he could not be sure he had learned them from her. Though he certainly hadn’t learned them from his father.

“Do you know how the draft worked?” he asked.

“Not yours.” She shrugged. “Not ours either, apparently.”

Alexi didn’t care for those words. Yours. Ours. Us. Them. In his mind, his heart, he and Cat were on the same side. But back then they would have been enemies.

“In the North,” he said, “there was a lottery. Male citizens between the ages of twenty and forty-five were enrolled. If your name was drawn, you could buy your way out by paying a substitute three hundred dollars to march off in your place.”

“You sold yourself,” she murmured.

“It was all I had left.”

The silence that followed his words loomed loud on a prairie where the only sounds were the muted thud of
their horses’ hooves and the harsh rasp of his own breath.

“Alexi—” she began, but he plunged on.

“I had to get out. He would have—” He swallowed the bile that threatened to rise. “He would have killed me. I thought it was a bargain.” He laughed. “A steal. All that money to do what I’d been trained to do anyway.”

“Trained?”

“My father was a soldier. A very good one. The Russians were often fighting the Persians, the Ottomans, as well as the occasional uprisings at home. The country is very large. There is always someone unsatisfied. When he was wounded and could no longer hold a weapon steady, we came to America.”

A man who could no longer fulfill his purpose found Russia an unforgiving land.

“He fashioned me in his image,” Alexi continued. “From the moment I could hold a rifle, I learned to use it. I had the eye of an eagle, he said.”

When he wasn’t shouting that I was a useless dog.

“He taught me well.”

Two punches in the gut for a miss. A light tap on the back of the head—a caress in comparison—if Fedya did as he was told.

“We made our living in a traveling show. Fedya, the amazing sharpshooting boy. We went everywhere—New York, Kentucky, Colorado; once I even saw California. I would perform, and my father would make bets with the locals.”

If he won, I ate. If he lost, I bled.

“One day we came to a town just after they’d chosen the men who would form a regiment and be sent off to war. We did our show. I was amazing.”

“Someone saw you and thought ‘He’d be better than me with a gun.’”

“
Oui,
” Alexi murmured. And, oh, how he was.

“Your father didn’t come after you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“What happened?”

“My new comrades in arms defended me.” It was the first time anyone ever had.

“Mmm,” Cat said.

“What does that mean?”

“They’d seen what you could do. They wanted you with them.”

“Most likely,” he agreed. But it had been wonderful.

His father barreling in, shouting, huge fists swinging at Alexi’s face. He’d cowered; how could he not? He knew what harm those fists could do.

But no blows had fallen. Alexi had lifted his head and seen that his comrades were holding his father back. The lieutenant had said, “He’s mine now, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

They’d tied his father up and left him behind. Fedya never saw the man again.

“I became a sharpshooter,” Alexi said. “A sniper.”

Cat frowned at his guns. Pistols, not a rifle, but he was as good with one as the other. When they were loaded.

“I shot people,” he continued when she said nothing more.

“You and the rest of the Union Army.”

“I did things a little differently.”

Her gaze lifted. “Why?”

“At the beginning of the war, an entire regiment of snipers was recruited by Hiram Berdan, who was said to be the best rifle marksman in the nation.” Alexi shrugged. “No one knew about me yet.”

“Don’t be so modest.”

“Truth is truth, and I was amazing.”

He’d had to be if he wanted to live—both before the war and during it.

“Berdan’s Sharpshooters saw action for most of the conflict. They were excellent, but they were a large group and unwieldy. They got noticed.”

“You did not.”

Ah, she knew him well.

“Secretary of War Stanton decided that snipers, other than Berdan’s, should be organized into smaller units and attached to a regiment for special deployment.”

“What kind of special deployment?”

“During a battle, if an officer was being foolish”—and many of them were—“shouting orders, riding a horse, standing up as if he were invincible…I shot him.” She flinched. “The loss of a leader often threw the troops into chaos. They’d retreat.” Or outright desert. “And the battle was over.”

“I find it hard to believe that soldiers would run because their leader went down.”

“The majority of men in both armies weren’t trained as soldiers. They were handed rifles that were heavy, ammunition just the same. They weren’t even told that they had to aim high to hit low. Of course, with the number of men on a field, they could aim at this man”—Alexi pointed—“and hit that one.” He moved his hand lower. “Dead was dead; it didn’t matter if you were aiming at him. Still, the amount of lead and powder wasted on shots that went into the trees or the sky was embarrassing.”

“Then there was you,” she murmured.

“I rarely missed. Which was how I graduated from shooting officers to more difficult missions.”

“More dangerous, you mean?”

“The missions weren’t that dangerous. I was positioned over eight hundred yards from my target.”

“Impossible.”

“You’ve heard of Major General John Sedgwick?” When she shook her head, he continued. “Killed at Spotsylvania Court House by a Confederate sniper. Sedgwick taunted the sharpshooters. Told his men to quit ducking, that ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant at that distance.’”

“Uh-oh,” Cat murmured.

“Exactly. A bullet struck him in the face a few seconds later. They say the Rebs were eight hundred yards away. I was better than all of them. And once it became known how very good I was, I was the one they called when the target absolutely had to be eliminated immediately.”

With the least possible knowledge of it.

“I began the war with my father’s musket. It was heavy and not as accurate as the Whitworth I took off a Confederate sniper.”

From her expression, she understood that the only way he could have taken such a prize from another soldier was if he’d killed the man and confiscated it.

“The Confederates bought a handful of Whitworths from the British. Only the best of the best received them. They were accurate to fifteen hundred yards. It was a Whitworth that killed General Sedgwick. Once I had one, I became even more deadly.”

“Which led to your dangerous missions?”

Alexi nodded. “We had a man who had infiltrated the Confederacy.”

“Ethan Walsh,” Cat murmured. “How did he do it?”

“He was a doctor.”

“He spied on the sick and the dying?”

“He
helped
the sick and the dying. Considering the conditions in the rebel camps, they were lucky to have him.”

“Lucky to have their delirious ramblings reported to the enemy?” she asked. “You have an odd definition of luck.”

True, but that was beside the point.

“Ethan did what he thought was best to end the war more quickly.”

“What did you do?”

“I was sent after Jefferson Davis.”

“The president?” Her voice carried over the silent prairie like a gunshot.

Alexi flinched. “Not mine.”

“Still. That’s…that’s…”

“War,” he stated. “No need to be so horrified. I didn’t do it.”

Although he would have.

“You were caught?”

“Surprising, I know. But I wasn’t as good at disappearing then as I am now.”

Because
of then, he had become what he was now.

“How did it happen?”

“A scout exchanged information between Ethan and myself. Ethan had heard that Davis was going to meet with Lee.”

“
Robert E.
Lee?” Cat didn’t wait for his response. Who else could it have been? “Were you supposed to kill him too?”

Alexi didn’t answer such a foolish, foolish question. Without Lee on the side of the Confederacy, the war wouldn’t have lasted half as long as it had.

“The scout led me to where the meeting was supposed to take place.”

“He led you into a trap?”

Alexi laughed. “No.”

“You’re positive?”

“Mikhail was the scout. He would never have betrayed us.”

“Mikhail,” she repeated. Considering Mikhail’s skills, which she was very familiar with, his being a scout made complete sense.

“We were all captured.”

Hooves pounding in the dead of night. The shouts. The curses. The blows.

“It
was
a trap,” he said. “Lee and Davis were never supposed to be there at all.”

“Who betrayed you?”

“Never found out.” Though he
had
tried.

“Why didn’t they execute you?”

“I don’t know.” It was common practice to shoot snipers immediately upon their capture. Many of the men who’d been there that night had wanted to.

Instead they’d uttered two words that had caused Alexi’s hands to tremble. He couldn’t remember, but he thought he might have begged them to kill him rather than take him to—

“Castle Thunder.”

“Hell,” Cat muttered.

“Yes,” Alexi agreed.

R
ichmond’s Castle Thunder was one of the most notorious prisons of the Confederacy. The majority of the captives were spies, political prisoners, and those accused of treason. As most of those crimes carried the death sentence, the level of brutality at Castle Thunder was high. What difference did it make if you killed someone who was already condemned to die?

Not much, if the survival rates at Castle Thunder were any indication.

The prison was composed of three buildings that had once been tobacco factories and a warehouse. Prisoners were separated between them based on their sex, race, military affiliation, and crime. Castle Thunder held the dubious distinction of housing nearly one hundred female inmates over the course of the war, along with Negroes and deserters from both sides. At one point, over three thousand men and women were crowded into what had once been known as Gleanor’s Tobacco Factory, Palmer’s Factory, and Whitlock’s Warehouse.

“If we didn’t die for the amusement of the guards,” Alexi murmured, “we died from dysentery or starvation. Which they also found quite amusing.”

“Amusing?” Cat repeated.

“Very.” He could still hear the laughter. Most often in his dreams. Right before he began to scream.

He had not done so lately. Probably because he had erased the past by re-creating himself as a man without one. He was no longer Fedya but Alexi. Alexi had never been in prison. He had never been in the war. He had never held a loaded gun. Which made it damn hard to shoot someone he cared about in the head.

However, seeing Ethan, who still thought of him as Fedya—why wouldn’t he?—had brought everything back. Alexi was surprised he hadn’t awoken screaming each night while in Freedom. Probably because he hadn’t managed much sleep. Which might be why he was having a hard time distinguishing now from then, then from now—

“How did you survive?” she asked.

Alexi flinched at the report of a gunshot before he realized the sound had only been in his head.

Again.

“What’s wrong?” Cat looked around. “Did you hear something?”

He often heard things. The true question was: Were they real or imagined?

“Are you going to tell me?”

He’d planned to. But suddenly…he couldn’t.

“Are you going to tell me?” he countered.

“I don’t know your story, Alexi. How can I tell it?”

“I wasn’t talking about my story.” He turned his head so he could see her when he murmured, “Cathleen.”

She flinched as badly as he had at the nonexistent gunshot. Then, as he’d known she would, she kicked her horse into a gallop and left him behind.

Before she even reached Mikhail’s side, Cat understood what Alexi had done. He didn’t want to tell her any more, so he’d brought up her past, her secrets, her pain, ensuring she would panic; she would run. Concerned
with herself, she would forget his past, his secrets, his pain.

And for a while, she did. As they rode west day after day, they spoke only of necessary things.

“I’ll pitch the tent.”

“I’ll make the food.”

“I’ll water them horses.”

She considered asking Mikhail what had happened, but he obviously didn’t remember, and she couldn’t upset him needlessly. Though she did find herself staring at the scar mostly hidden by his hair, wondering when and where he had gotten it and if it had anything to do with his memories, or lack of them.

Cat would have preferred they skirt Jepsum, continuing on to Denver City immediately, but they were out of supplies, and Denver City wasn’t close enough to reach before they needed them. They paused around dusk, far enough from civilization not to be seen, and pawed through their costumes.