9. Luna
LUNA
“Your extremely weird situationship,” Cherry announces on Tuesday, apropos of the inventory we are allegedly counting, “has now lasted longer than two of my engagements. Combined. I’m just putting numbers on the board.”
I look up from the carton. “You’ve been married twice?”
“I’ve been married four times, baby, keep up. Two of them were short.” She ticks a box on the clipboard without looking at it, because her actual count is happening on my face.
“Husband two and husband three together lasted nineteen months, but we were engaged in the first few weeks,” she continues.
“Your gentleman caller is at four weeks and climbing, with car service. Do the math. All I’m saying is, a man sends a car, that’s not a situationship anymore. That’s a situation. The ship sailed.”
I open a carton of jar lids and do not dignify this, mostly because she’s right and we both know it, and being right makes Cherry insufferable in a way I deeply enjoy from a minimum distance of six feet.
She hums something victorious and moves down the shelf, four husbands deep in credentials, case closed without my testimony.
Mike surfaces from the back with a box cutter and impeccable timing, hair already escaping whatever it was doing this morning.
“Wait, are you seeing someone? Is it serious? Is he nice? Does he—oh my God, the new wax came.” And he’s gone, pulled into the orbit of forty pounds of soy blend the way the tide is pulled by the moon, conversation cheerfully abandoned mid-sentence, and that is the entire interrogation I’ll ever receive from Mike.
I love him for it.
Hairy gets the real briefing at lunch, per protocol.
He hangs at the front of his tank while I eat my Italian beef and lay out the situation, the gala, the restaurant, the blanket I woke up under, the door to his office standing open in a way that felt like it meant something.
Hairy works his little mouth through all of it, which I choose to read as thoughtful.
“I know,” I tell him. “I noticed that, too. The blanket was cashmere, Hairy. There was a blanket protocol in place, and nobody briefed me.”
He does a slow turn. We agree it warrants monitoring.
At four, my phone buzzes. Ivan, who texts the way other people send telegrams.
Dinner tonight. My place. Lev at six thirty, if you’re willing .
If you’re willing. He does that, leaves the door in the sentence, and the door is why I keep walking through it.
I text back a thumbs up and then, because the thumbs up felt insufficient for reasons I decline to investigate, a photo of Hairy, who photographs from his good side without being asked, like a professional.
Lev says nothing for the whole ride, which by now I’d miss if it changed. The city slides past in early dark, and I watch the lake appear between buildings in slices. Somewhere around the river, I notice I’m not nervous, which is its own data point.
The elevator opens on Ivan’s floor, and I’m two steps into the private vestibule when the penthouse door opens ahead of me, and a man comes out of it.
A stranger, fortyish, in a good gray suit with his tie loosened, and the first thing I notice is the color of him, which is wrong, paste-pale.
The second thing I notice is the walk. He’s limping, favoring his left foot so completely that the foot is barely participating, one hand trailing the wall for balance, and his left shoe is unlaced, loose.
He sees me. Whatever is left of his composure goes into not making eye contact, and he edges past me to the elevator with a wide, careful berth. The doors close on his pale, sweating face, and the vestibule is very quiet, and my heartbeat is loud in it.
Ivan stands in his doorway, jacket off, sleeves rolled, watch absent from his wrist. Calm in the way deep water is calm, which is to say, not actually calm, just deep.
“Luna,” he says, and steps back to let me in, and the door closes behind us with its soft, expensive click.
The penthouse smells of Darya’s cooking and underneath it, faintly, something coppery I might be inventing. I set my bag down on the counter slowly, organizing the last ninety seconds into a question. There are several available, and I pick the load-bearing pair.
“Who was that? What’s wrong with him?”
“An employee.” He pours two glasses of water, hands me one, level as ever. “He was skimming off the top. So, I skimmed him.”
The sentence sits there between us, neat as an invoice.
He doesn’t dress it up, and he doesn’t look away from me while it settles on the counter between us.
I understand, distantly, that the plain delivery is itself a decision.
He could have said a business matter. But he said what he said, to my face, on purpose.
But I don’t know the purpose. “What exactly does that mean?”
“Nothing to you.” He says it without heat. “His broken foot will heal. The matter is closed.”
His broken foot. I hold my water glass and process this with the part of my brain that processes, while the rest of me does a quick and honest inventory of my own pulse. Elevated. My feet, which are not moving toward the door, confuse me.
Hugo used to hint about his family in our third year, late at night, vague and self-important, dangerous people, you don’t want to know, and I’d thought Hugo was just making himself interesting. Apparently, not.
Apparently, the dangerous people have a kitchen that smells of roasted chicken.
Ivan watches me think. He doesn’t fill the silence, doesn’t manage me toward a softer version. He just stands there with his glass and lets me work. Somewhere in the quiet, his stillness changes in quality, and I understand that this giant, scarred man is braced.
The most dangerous man I’ve ever met stands in his kitchen, holding his breath about what a candle maker thinks of him. “You’re quiet,” he says, finally.
“I’m deciding if I should be scared of you.”
His volume sinks to a near whisper. “Have you decided?”
“Not yet. Give me a minute.” I take my glass to the big window and look at the lake while I finish deliberating, because this deserves the full minute.
The facts: a man left this apartment broken. The man who broke him is standing in his kitchen in rolled sleeves, worried about my judgment.
My body is standing in this apartment, loose shouldered and warm. Whatever alarm is supposed to be ringing, isn’t. Maybe my sense of self-preservation is broken.
I play with fire on a daily basis, which might have something to do with it. “So,” I say, turning around. “All that stuff Hugo used to say about his family. That’s true?”
“Depends on what he said. If it was, my stepbrother is the pakhan of the Fedorov empire, then yes.” A beat, dry as the lake in February. “If it was anything else, he was probably trying to get in your pants.”
A laugh gets out of me before the committee can vote. “Pakhan. That’s the boss, right?”
“That’s the boss,” he confirms, watching me hold the word.
“Of an empire.”
“Of an organization with good holdings,” he says, and gestures me toward the counter. We proceed to have the strangest conversation of my life over roasted chicken and good bread.
“What does the organization actually do?”
“Freight,” he says, “hotels, the casino, real things that make real money, and beneath them a second ledger, where disputes are settled.”
“Do people get hurt?”
“Sometimes, when they’ve earned it. Usually, punishments are financial—less potential for the law to be involved.”
“What constitutes deserving punishment?”
“Could be a personal offense. Could be harming someone under my protection or doing something stupid in public... The list of potential offenses is long.”
“Should I worry about being here?”
“No.” And then, before I can ask the follow-up, he says with all sincerity, “You are the safest person in this city. I’m not being romantic.
I’m describing the security architecture of this building and of my life.
If someone fucks with you, as my companion, they are fucking with me. I cannot let that stand.”
The answers don’t worry me the way they’re supposed to. I keep checking, holding each one up, waiting for the cold drop in my stomach, but it doesn’t come.
My whole life, the people everyone warned me about have always been the ones who showed up. Aunt Gerty, the former pornstar. Uncle Fred, the director of some of the most extreme horror films of their era. Cherry Darling, a trans woman with a scarily checkered past.
My sister, Star, hates them all because they’re the people she fears. People who fall outside the lines of society. The weirdos.
But life takes turns. You end up in places you never expected, doing things you never could’ve predicted, for better or worse. I’ve never once been qualified to judge anyone, and I’m not starting tonight with the man who’s been nothing but good to me.
Maybe that should scare me, how easily it all goes down. Maybe the wiser woman, the one with the egg-white routine and the four-year script, would already be in the elevator.
But the wiser woman also spent three years on Hugo because he looked safe on paper? Her judgment is hereby under review. I make a note to interrogate all of it later, with Hairy, in committee, where the real decisions get ratified.
“You’re doing that thing,” Ivan says, across the chicken. “The accounting face. Lower lip.”
“I’m finishing the deliberation.”
“And?”
“Verdict’s in,” I say. “I’m not scared of you. I reserve the right to reopen the case if you ever lie to me, that’s the one condition, lying reopens everything. But tonight, no. Not scared.”
His slight smile tells the story of his relief. “Good.”