MadetoBeBroken by Lyra Byrnes Page A

take much
for him to overpower her and make use of the arsenal in the armoire himself.
Hell, he even had her gun. She had only the hope that she had gained his trust
and the sex would be enough to keep him from reaching for it.
    “I said before you ask wrong question,” he announced,
putting plates on the table. “This one is a little bit right.”
    “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”
    “You are mocking me because I do not understand American
joke. Know this—I am a difficult man to kill.”
    “Not if I had aimed at your head.” She crunched into a slice
of toast.
    “But you did not, because I am more valuable alive, no? Was
same for the Russians. What you call me—strongman? Is quite true. In my village
and many more in the coldest, most unforgiving lands in Chechnya, I was
strongest man. My men called me General. We controlled supply lines to other
freedom factions, planted hard vegetables and also fougasse —what is the
word in English? Explosive in the ground.”
    “Land mines.”
    His smile brightened. “Yes! Land mines chipped into the
frozen ground. We lost men to them, but only the stupid ones. The Russians lost
many more.
    “To run a city that is also an army, you need very little.
One engineer, one nurse or medical student, one chemist, one farmer, one fixer,
one strongman. We had all this and were very lucky. You do not know, little
bird, that drive to make your civilization again and again from ashes and
shrapnel. Remember you said America was on top from the beginning and you fight
to keep her on top? I fight to rebuild my nation after it is crushed. This we
have been doing for hundreds of years.”
    His face was calm and unlined as he spoke, his eyes turned
inward. In their depths, Coco could see the urge to grow from spoiled seedlings
even a rickety, barely functioning semblance of what had come before. Perhaps
it was something like this—a warm cabin, fresh eggs in the cooler, a rugged but
beautiful landscape just outside the window. She could see what it took out of
him, to go from that to cooking rats on stolen jeep hoods and turning young
boys into murder machines.
    “To kill me would give the Russians great publicity, but
would bring the wrath of all Chechen region on their heads, which would be bad
publicity. But there were other ways to reach me.” He poured some more tea into
her cup. “Kill the body, you see, and the head will die.”
    “They wiped out your army?”
    “Oh no. Impossible. They wiped out my family.”
    Coco stilled, frozen with shock.
    “At night I slept in caves in the mountains, wherever we
moved our headquarters, to keep them safe. But not this night. It was my little
girl’s birthday, the younger.”
    “Alexi ¼ ” she
breathed.
    “You asked and you will hear it,” he said harshly. “They
knocked on the door, if you can believe, as if they were men and not filthy
beasts, and then kicked it in. A jar from my wife’s mother fell from the
mantelpiece and smashed. It sounds silly, I know. She rose without thinking,
and they cut her throat in front of my eyes. Avala loved that jar.
    “I flew to protect my girls, but it was too late. They threw
a grenade under the table where my daughters were hiding. I lost everything
that night—my wife, my little girls, my house and this little bit of my face. A
cruel God spared me. He built me again, from ashes and shrapnel, in his own
image.”
    Grease congealed on Coco’s tongue. She wanted to retch, or
cry, rip off the faces of men who would do such a thing, but she just sat
there, tasting the cold fat lining the inside of her cheeks.
    “You clean. I’m going out.”
    * * * * *
    The sound of the waterfall faded as Alexi made his way
across the valley. He did not want to be reminded of his ruined house, his dead
family, even of bliss with the beautiful red bird. Bliss was a sort of weakness
too. He rounded the lake and struck off toward a crag whose face was in shadow
from the bright sun directly overhead.
    That would