27. Luna
LUNA
He knocks at nine-thirty, looking like shit. I know before I open the door that something happened, because Ivan does not knock at nine-thirty, so seeing him like this, throws me.
Normally, Ivan calls first or sends a text that says he’s coming over. The knock without preamble means something went sideways, and when I open the door and see his hands, I understand what.
I don’t say anything. I step back and let him in.
The knuckles on his right hand are split in two places, already darkening around the edges, the kind of damage that is not accidental.
I don’t know if that’s better or worse. “Kitchen.”
He follows me. I pull the first aid kit from under the bathroom sink and bring it to the table. He puts his hand on the table between us like he’s setting something down he’s been carrying too long. There’s a slight thud with the motion.
I sit across from him and open the kit and get to work.
He lets me. That’s the thing about Ivan that keeps surprising me—he lets me do things for him, this enormous man who has spent his entire adult life being the one who handles things. He sits there in my kitchen chair and lets me clean his hand like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
It took me a while to understand that this is not a small thing for him. Most of what he does, he does alone. I understand that now. I understand it well enough that it makes tonight harder, not easier.
The kitchen is quiet. Outside, someone is parallel parking badly and has been for three minutes. I clean the cuts with antiseptic, and he doesn’t flinch, even though I know it burns like hell. I fold a piece of gauze over the worst one, tape it down, and feel him watching me as I do it.
I sigh. “The vandalism was Hugo.”
“Yes. And it was business. Not personal.”
A beat. “Mostly?”
He doesn’t respond.
I smooth the tape down at the edges and check my work and decide it’ll do, and I don’t push on it.
Mostly because I already know the answer to that question and pushing on it isn’t going to change what happened to my window.
I’m still holding his hand. The gauze is clean, the tape is flat, and I have no medical reason to still be holding his hand.
I’m about to lean across the table—because he’s coiled up tight with bad energy and I know exactly one reliable method for unwinding it—when the knock comes.
Three quick raps. “That’s Mike.” I don’t want to let go of Ivan’s hand to answer the door, but I have to. His hand lingers in mine for a beat, like he doesn’t want me to let go.
I open the door. Mike is standing there with my spare shop keys and a six-pack of seltzer he was apparently planning to offer as payment for the key loan, and the expression of a man who has walked into a room and immediately understood that he has made a catastrophic miscalculation.
His eyes go to Ivan at my kitchen table. To the first aid kit. To Ivan’s taped hand. Back to me. The seltzer lowers about an inch.
Then he begins reversing. Slowly, carefully, maintaining eye contact the entire time, keys extended in one hand and the slowly lowering seltzer in the other, like a man backing away from something he has correctly identified as an apex predator. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. It’ll be fine,” I lie.
“Alright then. Good seeing you again, Ivan.”
A gruff “And you” comes from Ivan behind me.
I take the keys from his hand as Mike passes me. He nearly goes down the top step. He catches the railing, though, and he doesn’t stop moving.
I close the door.
Ivan says, from the kitchen, “He left the seltzer.”
“He’ll be back for it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s Mike.” I sit back down across from him.
My phone buzzes two minutes later with the reliability of a Swiss watch, because Cherry has a network and Mike is her primary source.
Mike says your boyfriend looks like a Bond villain.
Also he left his seltzer here. Is he coming back for it?
I show Ivan the first message without saying anything. He reads it. His mouth does the thing that is not quite a smile but is adjacent to it—the small compression at the corner that I have learned to read as the closest he gets to delight in mixed company. He looks up at me.
“Tell Mike I appreciate the endorsement.”
I send the message, and Cherry responds with a string of emojis I choose not to analyze. I put my phone face-down on the table.
Ivan’s hand is still on the table between us, the taped knuckles up, and I look at it while the warmth of the last two minutes starts to settle into something else underneath. Something that has been sitting in my chest since he walked in, and I saw his hand and understood what it meant.
I have been keeping it at arm’s length while I dealt with the antiseptic, the gauze, Mike, and Cherry. The words… I can’t stop them from coming out. “You went to see Hugo.”
“Yes.”
“After I asked you not to retaliate.”
He doesn’t look away. “It wasn’t retaliation.”
“Ivan.”
“What he did required a response. That is different from retaliation.”
“That’s a distinction you made up.”
“It’s a distinction that exists.”
“In your head.”
“In every organization like mine. There’s a difference between revenge and consequence. You don’t want revenge. What happened to Hugo was a consequence.”
I look at him. He looks back at me with those dark eyes that are entirely sincere, and that’s the thing that makes this hard—he’s not manipulating me. Not entirely. It would be easier if he was just manipulating me.
But he genuinely believes what he’s saying. He has built a whole internal logic around it that is coherent inside his world and makes no sense inside mine, and he is sitting in my kitchen applying that logic to my life, and he did it without asking.
He gently says, “You are too soft for what my life requires.” His voice is even when he says it, which means he believes it and is not trying to wound me. That almost makes it worse. “I didn’t tell you the truth about what I was going to do because I didn’t want you to have to carry it.”
I sit with that for a moment. “I know you believe that. I know you think you were protecting me.”
“I was.”
“You lied to me.”
“Yes.”
The word lands in the kitchen, and neither of us moves. Nothing moves, except the ratty bitch in my chest.
“I’m too soft for your world. You’re not wrong about that. I know what I am. I built a shop that sells candles because I wanted to put light in the world, and that’s not an accident, that’s a value, and it doesn’t fit with—” I stop. I press my hand flat on the table.
Breathe.
“I’m going to have a baby. I can’t be someone who looks the other way when the person I love lies to me about violence done on my behalf, and I can’t raise a kid in the middle of that, and I can’t—” My voice does something I don’t want it to do, and I stop talking for a second and wait for it to stop.
Ivan’s very still.
“I don’t want to do this. I want you to know that. I’m not doing this because I want to.”
“Luna—”
“I need you to go.”
He looks at me for a long time. I look back at him, and I will the tears to go away. His taped hand is still on the table, and I want very badly to take it, but I don’t, because if I do, I won’t go through with this.
I have a baby on the way and a shop and a life that I built to mean something. I cannot risk that. I cannot have that taken from me, just because of who I love.
Even if he is everything to me.
He looks at me for a long moment after I say it. His jaw sets, and I think he might say something, but he doesn’t.
He just picks up his jacket from the back of the chair and puts it on slowly, the way he does everything, like he has all the time in the world and the time is not currently breaking my heart.
He crosses to the door, and I follow him, which I don’t have to do but can’t seem to stop myself from doing.
He opens it and stops in the doorway with his back to me for a moment, one hand on the frame.
Then he goes.
Some adolescent part of my heart wants him to stop. To turn around, tell me he will give up being a Bratva boss, that he loves me enough to stop being a violent criminal.
But he doesn’t.
I close the door. I stand with my hand on it for a moment, listening to his footsteps on the stairs, counting them down to the landing and then to the street door. Then I go back to the kitchen and sit in the chair he was sitting in.
It’s still warm. Or maybe that’s the fiery pit of hell I’m in. Could go either way.
I look at the first aid kit open on the table, and the small piece of gauze wrapper on the floor that I didn’t get around to throwing away.
I knew, when I said it, that I might regret it.
I knew it the way you know you’re making a decision you can’t unmake, that cold clarity that arrives too late to be useful and just early enough to make it hurt. I said it anyway.
Regret claws at my chest.
I’m not sure yet if that makes me brave or just frightened. Tonight it feels like both at once, which is the worst version, the one nobody warns you about. The one where you do the right thing, and it feels exactly like the wrong one.
My phone buzzes. Cherry.
How’d it go? Did Mike ruin the vibe?
I look at the message for a long time. The kitchen light is on, and the rest of the apartment is dark. I’m sitting in a chair that is no longer warm, in a kitchen that is entirely mine again, trying to figure out how to answer a question that would take an hour to answer honestly.
The vibe is pretty ruined.
I close the first aid kit, put it under the bathroom sink, and go to bed.