18. Katerina
Within half an hour, every single member of the happy couples club is asleep. Two of them are snoring, and I can’t even tell which ones it is from the front seat.
“Everyone jumps on you a lot.” Gustav’s eyes are on the road, but his tone is light. Actually, it’s not just light. It’s something I haven’t felt in a while.
It’s kind.
“I deserve it.” I keep my eyes trained on the road ahead, too.
“I’m not sure that’s true,” he says. “I wasn’t lying about the white lights. I’ve seen a few people since that weird dark and light thing kicked in. Everyone has some darkness, but yours is very, very small.”
“I wish that was true, but I’ve made some really dumb mistakes. I don’t blame them for being a little leery of me.”
He’s quiet then, and I start counting the miles. He says nothing at all for thirty-one miles. That’s when I find myself asking him something. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” He turns to look at me. We’re finally out of the New York congestion, and we’re actually making decent time.
“You didn’t even know it was me,” I say. “You saw a horse, and six men were aiming guns at it, and you leapt right into the middle of it.”
“Ah.” He sighs, his hands shifting on the steering wheel and tightening a little. “The moronic move that has prompted the Russian maniac to visit the United States, presumably to kill me.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m really not.” He shakes his head slowly. “I hate horses. And all my life, I’ve witnessed the misery that follows any kind of gambling. I hate taking risks. I hedge all my bets in life, and I always take the safe path.”
“Except when someone wants to shoot a random horse on the streets of New York City.”
“I guess.” The corner of his mouth is turning up, though.
“If it’s any consolation,” I say, “every gamble I make always turns out badly for me.”
“When people say ‘if it’s any consolation,’ it never is.”
“I suppose not,” I say. “But at least you have a sister who loves you.”
“Do you mean the sister with the deviated septum?”
“Huh?”
He’s smiling. “It’s a common cause of snoring.”
I turn around and crane my neck, but with her head canted sideways on Aleksandr’s chest, their noses are inches apart, and I can’t tell which of them is making the wheezing-rattle that’s coming from the back seat.
“Seriously, though.” I lean the back of my head against the side window so I can kind of see Gustav’s profile while I pretend to look straight ahead. “My brother Boris would hand me over to Leonid on a silver platter if he thought it would win him points.”
“And yet, I haven’t been much better than Boris.” He frowns. “Kris has called me over and over, and every time, I’ve either ignored her call or told her I can’t help.”
“If you can’t help, then?—”
“I could’ve helped, though,” he says. “I had plenty of money. It was just that, with people who gamble like my dad, no amount is ever enough. I knew that if I helped her at all, she’d just keep coming back to me over and over.”
“But you said she did call over and over.”
His sideways grin is back. “Even sticking to my guns didn’t really work.”
“I’m surprised you could do it.” I sigh. “I think I’d have caved.”
His voice is small. Barely audible. “I would have too, but I was afraid my grandfather would find out I had helped, and trust me. If he knew I was funneling money back there, he’d have cut me off on the spot.”
“But your mother was his daughter.”
“And he gave and gave and gave to her—but it was never enough. It’s his keenest embarrassment,” he says. “It took me a long time to figure that out, but he felt like his generosity with her, his repeated gifts, made him a chump. Even thinking about it made him angry.”
“Is that why you hate horses?”
He doesn’t answer, but a muscle in his jaw pops.
“You founded a company that makes all its revenue from horse-racing. Your parents both loved horses, right?”
“Why do you say that?” He glances at me.
When our eyes meet, for some reason, it makes my heart race. “I mean, just from what I’ve heard about how Aleks and Kristiana met.”
He frowns. “How did they meet? She bought him thinking he was a horse, right?”
I fill him in on what I’ve worked out, which is basically just the broad strokes. She was gambling on her own horse winning—some horse named Five—and then he was going to lose. But then this big black stallion, who must have overheard how much she needed to win, lets her win. So when she sees him being abused, she spends the winnings buying him, instead of spending it to save the family farm.
Gustav shakes his head. “I swear, that’s how my family always is. They can have the money in their hand, but if there’s a horse thing calling them, they’re categorically unable to make the right decision.” He sighs. “And that’s why I hate horses. I actually loved horses, right up until I saw one kill my mother. Her love for racing, her love of horses, it destroyed her. It destroyed my dad. And it’ll destroy Kris, too, because she always puts them first.”
“I don’t blame you,” I say. “Leaving all that behind sounds like the smart move.”
“What?” His head snaps sideways.
“Horses are born looking for a way to injure themselves.” I shrug. “I do like them a lot, but it’s the simple truth.”
“I’m pretty sure my mother thought that was part of their charm.”
I can’t help adding, “In horses’ defense, humans kind of do the same thing.”
“They do,” Gustav agrees. “But at least we can articulate our reasons. For a horse, they’re often injured because they saw a plastic bag.”
“But not for horse-shifters,” I say. “When we take our horse forms, we aren’t stupid like they are. So you shouldn’t push that dislike onto us.” I’m not sure why I want him to like the idea of shifting into a horse. It doesn’t really affect me, except in the sense that Leonid’s coming, and he’ll probably kill us all unless Gustav figures out how to stop him.
As if we’re on the same wavelength, Gustav asks, “Do you really think he’s coming to America to kill me?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Every time I thought I understood Leonid, he surprised me.”
“He was your servant,” Gustav says. “People never pay attention to their servants.”
“He was also my friend,” I say. “Or at least, I thought he was for a while.”
“What changed?”
“Once I gave him my magic, he wanted more.” I fold my hands in my lap and look down at them. “He became obsessed with it, really.”
“He stopped caring about helping you win over Alexei, I take it?”
That was what made me the angriest. “Not only that, he told me I was an idiot for loving him.” He might have been right about that, in retrospect. “He told me no one ever starts loving someone who’s as pathetically desperate for that love.” It hurt when he said that.
“Sounds like he knew that from past experience,” Gustav says. “Did he love you?”
“Leonid has no idea what love is. His father was the only family he had, and he was totally crazy. It made him unstable.”
Gustav’s quiet for at least twenty more miles. We almost miss our turn.
Once we’re on the new road, one we’ll be sticking with for a while, I try for a safer question, one about his company. “Why’d you start Trifecta?”
“What?” He seems genuinely surprised by the question.
“You hate horses,” I remind him. “And Trifecta’s a combination totes company—which handles on-track betting—and online gambling, and you said it allows people to buy a share in various racehorses, too.”
“Right. It covers all the angles of betting, so as a businessman, it’s a marketshare-spread, so to speak.”
“But you hate gambling?—”
“Because the house always wins,” he says. “What better play than to be the house?”
“I guess.”
“What?” He’s scowling whenever he glances my way.
“I don’t know. I guess I still find it strange that you hate horses, but you make your living off them.”
“I make my living by taking money from people who contribute to the industry that took my mother away.”
“There it is.” I sigh. “Now it makes sense. It’s both revenge and a stable income plan.”
“Why do you care? Are you a therapist or something?”
“A what?”
“They’re people who analyze other people and try to break them down so they can help the people work through their issues.”
For a while now, I’ve felt lost. Alexei has been true north for me, my only goal, for a decade. Other people, like Gustav, have things they love, like his company. But all I’ve had was my obsession with Alexei. Now that I’ve let it go, I have nothing else to replace it with.
But in that moment, I know. If we can get the world under control, once the threat of Leonid’s gone, that’s what I want to do—I want to learn to be a therapist. “It’s really hard to see your own problems, but it’s easier to see other people’s stuff.”
“What?”
“Think about it. When someone’s riding,” I say, “they can’t see what they’re doing wrong on the horse. It’s the reason that even the best riders still need trainers. They need someone to see what they’re doing wrong and tell them how to fix it. People are like that, too. They cling to whatever dumb thing they think they need way longer than they should. That means these people—therapists—they’re basically like trainers for horseback riding, but they help fix the broken stuff in humans’ lives, right?”
“I guess so.”
Nothing in my life has felt this right in a long time. “And they have schools to teach you how to do that?”
Gustav nods. “Lots of them.”
“You’re so lucky to be alive now. When I was born, women like me didn’t have jobs. They didn’t look for meaning or purpose. Their purpose was to get married and have children, but now everyone gets to do what they want.”
“I’m not sure that’s really true,” Gustav says. “Plenty of people today still don’t do what they want.”
“Why not?”
“They don’t have the money to go to school, the time to pursue it, or the intellectual capacity to succeed even if they try. They may get stuck in a job because of other responsibilities, or they might be afraid to lose what they already have in the pursuit of what they really want.”
That only convinces me further. “It sounds like those people need a therapist to get them back on track.”
He’s smiling as he shakes his head, and I realize he’s probably mocking me. I don’t care. It doesn’t feel malicious. It feels. . .fond. Like he’s treating me as someone he thinks is amusing in an endearing way.
I find myself looking at his hands where they’re gripping the steering wheel—they’re large, but also refined. My eyes slide upward to his forearms, the muscles in them shifting infinitesimally as he adjusts the car to follow between the stripes on the road. I watch where his chest rises and falls with his breath, and his mouth, the curve of his lips, and then when I look upward again. . .
He’s staring right at me.
And I feel like a total idiot. This is exactly what I am not going to do. After we defeat Leonid, I’m going to figure out how to make the time and find the money to go to school, and I’m going to help people make better decisions in their lives.
While also making better decisions in mine.
Starting with not looking longingly at Gustav and his muscular forearms.
“Why were you looking at me?”
I can feel my face heat, but it’s dark enough, I doubt he can see it. “I wasn’t. I was just looking at the speedometer.”
“Can you even see it from where you’re sitting?”
“Not very well,” I say. “Which is why I had to stare.”
“If you want to be a therapist,” he says, “then finish analyzing me. Maybe I chose the company I chose because I wanted to stick it to people who gamble while staying safe. But why didn’t I just go to work for my grandfather? That would’ve been easier and safer.”
“You admire him,” I say, “but I think you didn’t really want to be around him very much. He probably makes you angry, even if you wish he didn’t. He’s upset that he enabled your mother, but your mom did what she did, at least in part, because he cut her off.”
Luckily the road is straight and flat, because he glares at me for way too long. “You might be right.” His head snaps back, and he says nothing else for quite some time.
I let him sit in his thoughts.
It’s what I’m doing—reminding myself of why I’m not supposed to be gawking at Gustav. I have a goal now. A goal that’s not just ‘get some guy to like me.’ I have a plan.
I mean, assuming we don’t all get killed.
But for some reason, I don’t think Leonid will kill me. He might kill Gustav, though, and that bothers me more than it should. I barely know the guy.
Whether I like it or not, though, I’m vested. I want him to at least survive, and more than that, I find that I want him to succeed. I want him to reach his goal—the one we basically just tried to derail entirely. “Will your grandfather really not choose you to be his successor if the IPO doesn’t go perfectly?”
“Aleksandr, Grigoriy, and Alexei really do appear to have the funds to buy most of the shares,” he says. “Grandfather won’t like it, though. Having private Russian citizens prop up my company?” He sighs. “I’m pretty sure that driving back here with all of you ruined my chances to be his successor, yes.” He looks. . .resigned.
Not depressed.
But not far from it.
“I’m really sorry,” I say.
“It’s not your fault.” He huffs. “It’s not really Kristiana’s fault either. I do know that, but I can’t help wishing things were different.”
“Why do you want to take over his company? Yours seems to be doing well, and you said you have plenty of money.”
“Part of it is that I hate losing, and my cousin’s a total jerk.” He’s frowning. “But part of it is that having that kind of control, owning that company, would be the kind of security that’s almost impossible to obtain.”
“Security?”
“No matter what happens with the economy, no matter what someone tries to do or take, I would be safe.”
“Would you though?”
He scowls.
“I’m not trying to be a jerk, but if you’ve learned anything in the past few days, isn’t it that there really is no way to be safe? I mean, life isn’t ever guaranteed.”
“So that’s it?” His hands are gripping the steering wheel so tightly, I worry he’ll pop it off. “We should just give up? There’s no way to be safe. We can all just float around life, letting what happens happen?”
I turn back and look over my shoulder. “Those six idiots are the safest people I know,” I say. “They have each other, and they trust each other. That’s rare.”
“Wonderful,” he says. “Well, they don’t trust me, and I don’t trust them, so I guess I’m still at square one.”
“I’m not sure.”
“What now?”
“You can look at people now and know what you’re looking at. Bad people. Good people. Complicated people, whatever the case may be, now you know it.”
“I guess.”
“You know people better than they know themselves. You said I’m not entirely black, but what do you see when you look at the six of them?”
“Why do you think I agreed to come?” He huffs. “They’re mostly sparkly and shiny and bright. Disgustingly so.”
“And other people? The guys at the rental car place, for instance? People on the streets?”
“Various levels of dark,” he says. “A few bright lights here and there, but most of the people I meet are pretty mixed.”
“That’s depressing.”
“It is.”
“But think,” I say. “Now you have that ability. You can sort people out and know whether to believe what they’re saying. That’ll keep you safe, to a certain extent, or safer than before.”
“It’s the lamest power ever,” he says. “I can’t even tell whether they’re telling the truth when they talk to me. I can just tell whether they’re light or dark people.”
“Leonid said almost the exact same thing to me when he found out.”
“I get why he was bummed.”
“He was so upset, so disappointed, that I didn’t try to stop him when he summoned Baba Yaga.”
The car swerves, and the people in the back wake up. We stop for gas. Everyone gets snacks. Grigoriy and Aleksandr both try to take over for Gustav.
Aleksandr’s the most adamant. “You should get some sleep.”
Gustav shakes his head. “I’m fine, I swear. I’ll take a break in a few more hours.”
It takes almost forty minutes for everyone to fall asleep again once we’re back on the road, but Gustav has not been distracted. “Tell me.”
“What?” I try to avoid the question.
“Tell me how you summoned her, and what happened when you did.”
“You didn’t ask when everyone was awake.”
“I think there’s a reason why you haven’t told everyone this story, and I want to hear it. I think I deserve to hear it.” He’s not angry, but he’s not going to let this go, either.
He’s probably right.