Black Wolf

Contents
 
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Copyright
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Chapter 17
 Chapter 18
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 Chapter 23
 Chapter 24
 Chapter 25
 Chapter 26
 Chapter 27
 Chapter 28
 Chapter 29
 Chapter 30
 Chapter 31
 Chapter 32
 Chapter 33
 Chapter 34
 Chapter 35
 Chapter 36
 Chapter 37
 Chapter 38
 Chapter 39
 Chapter 40
 Acknowledgments
 Discover More
 About the Author
 Also by Kathleen Kent
 
 
 Navigation
 
 
 
 
 
 Table of Contents
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
 Copyright © 2023 by Kathleen Kent
 Cover design by Julianna Lee
 Cover photograph © Georgy Chernyadyev / Trevillion Images
 Cover © 2023 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
 Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
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 First ebook edition: February 2023
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 ISBN: 9780316280419
 LCCN: 2022909760
 E3-20221122-DA-NF-ORI
 
 
 
 
 
 
 For Lowell A. Mintz
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 Who can carry the incineration of a universe?
 —Ted Hughes
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Chapter 1
 31 Iyul’ 1990
 Tuesday, July 31, 1990
 Minsk Oblast, Byelorussia
 
 The man was so happy, he thought his heart would shatter.
 This surge of elation brought to mind the poem that every schoolchild grew up reciting:
 
 There, the birch in silence
 Slumbers all day long…
 
 But at night. At night, with the warm summer breezes, the birch groves came alive, their topmost branches whipping carelessly in all directions. As did the tall, slender pines that stretched on formidably, lining both sides of the road like restless armies facing each other before a battle. The luminous shale road cut through the forest in an unbroken line—a white scar gouged into the land, shining pale and lustrous beneath a three-quarter moon.
 The night air, as balmy, and as dense, as an evening spent on a Georgian holiday beach. The sky, for a few hours a shade blacker than black, punctured by a million pinpricks of light, bathed in the vaporous light of the Milky Way.
 The man had rolled down all the windows of his car to let in the breezes, but soon, overcome by his senses, he killed the engine and stepped out of the blue Lada. He stood in ecstasy, the poem inviting back so many memories of his childhood. The savory smell of shashlik roasting on an open fire, the clink of a metal spoon against glass as the small dollop of jam was stirred into his tea, the meaty slap of fish against the surface of the lake as they leapt to catch bottle flies. The lazy, hours-long hunt for mushrooms. Delighted, he shivered and hugged himself and laughed out loud.
 He had another ten kilometers to go before he could rest, and so he climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and continued on his northeast journey. As he drove, he listened for any noise from his passenger in the backseat. It had been quiet for the past twenty minutes, but he glanced in his rearview mirror all the same, checking for movement. There was none.
 He smiled and began to hum a song he’d heard on the radio. “You Will Come Back to Me” by the Russian star Tamara Miansarova. A bit saccharine, but far better than listening to the Red Army Choir butcher another Western rock melody. He sang along, loudly, extravagantly, appreciating his own warm baritone, which had charmed so many women. So many women…
 He was tempted to turn off his headlights and let the reflective glow from the road guide him. It would feel like flying. But it would not do to veer off, to get stuck in a boggy rut or, worse, hit a fox or wolf or the occasional elk that ventured out at night.
 Checking the backseat again, he once more admired the ingenuity of his handiwork. The simplicity, the subtlety, of his methods. He had been a student of Western history. In particular, American Colonial history, that all-too-familiar swamp of superstitious dread and cultlike devotion to the ruling magistrates. That culture of opportunistic accusations, as during the Salem witch trials, where the remnants of medieval British law held strong: guilty until proven innocent. But even with debtors’ prisons and oppressive religious rulings, outright torture had been outlawed. However, like good apparatchiks, the black-coated judges and their willing constables found a cunning way around