The adrenaline of escape burned out fast. What remained was ash. Kato was a fugitive. The word stopped being dramatic and became real.
The first day taught her misery. Cold seeped through her decent dress and settled into her bones as she hid in a derelict stable at the edge of town. Hunger gnawed without pause. Thirst cracked her lips until she risked the horse trough—metallic, icy water that made her stomach twist.
Worst of all was fear. It wrapped around her like a wet blanket. Every passerby felt like an Okhrana agent in disguise. A distant police whistle sent her deeper into shadow, heart slamming like a trapped bird. She saw the teahouse men in every face—a baker, a driver, even a child. The whole town felt like a prison yard, and she was the one inmate loose by mistake.
On the second morning, hunger made the choice for her. She watched a baker's tray of warm loaves. When his back turned, her body moved on its own. A grab, hot bread in hand, then a sprint down an alley. Shame burned her face as she devoured it beside a stack of refuse. The taste was food and guilt in equal parts. This wasn't living. It was a slow, degrading slide.
She crawled into a collapsed woodshed and admitted what she already knew. The Party was a dead end. Zaguri's terror had proved that. Official channels were compromised. She needed help from the cracks between systems, not the system itself.
She pushed her mind backward, away from hunger and fear, to Tbilisi and easier days. To talks with Soso, back when he was more poet than general. He had told stories about the rough side of the movement—the outlaws who sometimes worked with them, the Keto gangs. The underworld ran alongside the revolution's roads.
There had been a name. She dug for it. Found it. A man who could move anything across a border—person, package, weapon—for a price. Not an idealist. A fixer. A smuggler. Levan.
It was the thinnest thread, but it was a thread. He could be dead. Jailed. Or just a story. He was still the only chance she had.
She unclasped the silver chain at her throat. The small plain locket had been Soso's anniversary gift. The last solid piece of her old life. Selling it felt like betrayal—like cutting the final thread. But sentiment was for the safe, and she was not safe.
The pawnbroker barely looked at her as he counted out a few rubles. Her past for a handful of coins.
She didn't buy food or a room. She bought information.
That evening she walked into a tavern she would have avoided a week ago. The air was thick with cheap spirits, cabbage, and unwashed bodies. Dockworkers and teamsters filled the room, faces hard, eyes suspicious. A respectable woman alone meant trouble—or a sale.
She kept her expression tight and desperate and laid rubles on the bar.
"I'm looking for my brother," she said, voice trembling in the right places. "He mentioned a man who could help. A man named Levan."
The barman weighed the coins, then her face. He jerked his chin toward a smoke-dim corner. "Over there. But I'd let your brother solve his own problems."
Levan wasn't what she expected. Not a brute or a romantic rogue. A wiry, middle-aged survivor with a map of hard years etched into his face and sharp, cynical eyes. Several front teeth were missing, giving his smile a collapsed, knowing look.
He watched her approach, taking in the decent dress gone shabby, the fear beneath her poise, the iron under the fear.
"Levan?" she asked quietly.
"Depends who's asking."
"Ekaterina," she said, keeping back her surname. "I need to get out of Borjomi. I was told you arrange such things."
He gave a short, ugly laugh. "I do. For a price you can't pay." His gaze swept her, already dismissing her.
She played the only card she had—pure bluff, delivered like truth.
"I am the wife of Iosif Dzhugashvili," she said evenly.
His glass stopped halfway. Shock, then calculation.
"Koba's wife?" he whispered, the name a legend in the Georgian underworld. "I heard he was dead. Or rotting in St. Petersburg." He leaned back. Eyes narrowed. "Why should I help you? The Okhrana would pay dearly to have you. I'm a businessman, not a saint."
Kato didn't blink. Ideology and pity wouldn't move him. Only risk and reward.
"Iosif is not dead," she said, voice flat as steel. "And he remembers every debt. So does his closest friend. A man named Kamo."
At "Kamo," something changed in Levan's eyes. Cynicism flickered into caution. Everyone knew the stories—the master of expropriations, the butcher of Tiflis, the man who brought both riches and nightmares.
Kato pressed, soft and lethal. "Get me out. Get me to him. You'll be paid beyond your imagination. Iosif repays loyalty. But if you sell me to the police—Kamo will find you. It won't matter where you run or how long it takes."
It was a total bluff. She didn't know where Soso or Kamo were. They could both be dead. But she said it like a queen handing down a sentence, with the same cold certainty she had learned from her husband.
Levan studied her a long time, searching for the seam in the lie. He weighed fast money against a slow, ugly death.
A thin grin crept across his face, showing dark gaps.
"All right, little revolutionary queen," he rasped. "You've got nerve. I'll get you out of Borjomi."
He leaned in. Cheap wine on his breath. Voice low.
"But it won't be easy. Your husband made sure of that. The Okhrana has patrols on every road. Papers checked on every train. They're choking this town." He let it hang. "There's only one way now—the old way. The smugglers' route. Through Borjomi Gorge. Night. On foot. And the gendarmes watch it like hawks. They added checkpoints. More patrols. Ever since your husband made himself and his friends the richest men in the Caucasus."
He sat back, grin returning. "Funny, isn't it? The crime that made him a legend might put you in a shallow grave in that gorge. Poetic."