MadetoBeBroken by Lyra Byrnes

showed him the pants and T-shirt she had hidden between the mattresses, but
she couldn’t have him running around naked. He lit their cigarettes.
    “Your turn,” she said coldly.
    “All my life, I saw only two options—succumb to Federalist
oppression or fight. But after my family was destroyed, I found a third way—my
way. Let the Feds capture their big deer with the condition I work for the
resolution of violence and the restoration of our homeland. They thought if I
become a diplomat on the Russian side, they, there is a word—take my sharp teeth
out.”
    “Defang.” The smoke tasted horrible, but she fought down a
cough. “No wonder you bought a fancy suit.”
    “Was not so fancy,” he glowered. “I’m a simple man.”
    “The point is, you were the diplomat Kaminsky was on his way
to meet?”
    “Yes. Shadow diplomacy—my position is not official. We were
close to a resolution.”
    “Meaning you didn’t kill him. So why did you leave me that
newspaper article?”
    “Because then you would know how dangerous a world you
entered. Did you think our ugly friend left forever? Maybe, but he will send
spies to this place to find me. The Feds want me to finish my work before the
situation explodes back home.”
    “And what do you want?”
    He shook his head. “I’m not a stripling anymore. Even the
hope I had is dead. What I want ¼ I fear
will it never happen.”
    “I thought you felt no fear.”
    “For myself, no. I am ready to die. But every one of my
countrymen feels the same for our future—the thing you said, shaking in boots.”
He ground out the cigarette. “I am like the boy in the tales, raised among
wolves. I can live like a beast, hunt and forage, scratch out a fire from
nothing, hide in caves or under leaves. Maybe to you sounds primitive, but
these talents grew and grew more sophisticated when I chose to defend my
homeland. You have your satellites and maps and closed-circuit communication,
field rations, smart new weapons. Easy to run a battle that way, easy to take
over the world. I built my army from scraps you Americans would not melt down
for bullets. The people, too, were less than scraps to you.”
    “Alexi, that’s not fair,” she said hotly. “Whenever there is
injustice in the world—”
    “Spare me, Superman,” he sneered. “And be careful not to lie
to me. We watched it happen in Serbia, and we thought it would never happen to
us, that the world would let us hack ourselves to death, piece by piece. But
you did, so I became a wolf-man, General Wolf, and I hacked back.”
    His glittering eyes had turned cold. Coco felt the ground
shift under her feet—the rules of the game had changed and for the first time
in her life, she had no idea where her place was on the field.
    “They took away my fangs. Telling lies, talking sweet to
fools, wearing suits, compromise ,” the last word clattered out with a
sound like an animal spitting out bones, “these are the tools they gave me.”
    “And how far did your wolf skin get you?”
    “Into the sheep’s fold,” he answered. “That is good enough
for a hungry animal.”
    * * * * *
    Like the night before, Alexi made a bed on the sitting-room
couch, keeping the door open to the bedroom. But long after his breathing
became deep and even, Coco stared at the cottage’s ceiling beams, willing the
last embers of the firelight to extinguish themselves and cast her into blessed
sleep.
    When at last it blinked out, Coco remained still and tense,
her eyes not moving. The events of the past few days whirled in her head, a
messy tornado that resolved itself into one pattern, no matter how many times
she scattered the pieces.
    Alexi had been working with the Russians in order to broker
a peace treaty, but someone had pinned a murder on him and his embassy bosses
would not be happy. He wasn’t sticking around the cabin to lie in the grass and
fuck her. He was lying low, waiting it out, thinking every minute of what he
would do next and how