Chapter 41 #2
“And Gabriel adjusted.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“He stopped caring how it started,” I say. “Once I was close enough to Maksim, that was all that mattered.”
Vaska nods once. “Why tell Maksim now?”
Because Gabriel already had the ledgers, sits right at the front of my mouth.
But it’s uglier than that. More tangled.
Because Santo saw me. Because the walls were closing in. Because I was dead either way. Because I couldn’t keep lying to him with his name etched in my skin.
“Gabriel got the ledgers,” I say.
Vaska doesn’t move. “From you.”
“Yes.”
“Why take them?”
This time I answer faster. “Because Santo saw me.”
That stills him in a different way. One not visible to anyone who doesn’t know how to look.
But I see it.
“At the Amato house,” I say. “He looked at me and I knew he remembered. He saw me at Gabriel’s house during a meeting. And I knew if he told Maksim—”
“You were dead anyway.”
“Yes.” The word comes out thin.
“So you ran.”
“I tried.”
His eyes narrow slightly.
“But you brought the ledgers here.”
I nod.
“Yes.”
“Why not straight to Gabriel?”
“Because I wasn’t trying to save Gabriel.” The words leave me before I can soften them. “I was trying to get out before everything collapsed.”
Vaska watches me for a long second before he continues. “But Gabriel was waiting.”
My throat tightens.
“Yes.”
The room goes quiet again except for the hum of the refrigerator and my own heartbeat scraping too loud in my ears.
Vaska reaches for fresh gauze.
“What changed?” he asks.
I frown.
His eyes flick up.
“You were sent to use me. You ended up in Maksim’s bed. Somewhere in the middle of that, the objective changed for you.” His voice stays level. “What changed?”
That question is worse than the others.
Because this is the one that has no answer I can survive saying out loud.
I look away. My fingers tighten against my thigh.
“I don’t know.”
It’s a lie. A weak one. Vaska knows it I can tell by the silence.
Then he says, calm as ever, “That’s not true.”
Something hot presses behind my eyes.
I hate that too. “I said I don’t know.”
“You know.” He folds the gauze once, precise. “You just don’t like the answer.”
My chest goes tight.
Because yes, the answer is humiliating.
The answer is that Maksim made me feel less alone in the broken parts of myself, and that’s the kind of weakness that gets women like me killed.
So I say nothing.
And Vaska, infuriatingly, lets the silence do the rest.
I sit on the couch with my face throbbing and my wrists burning and my mouth clamped shut around the one answer I can’t give him without feeling stripped open.
He finishes taping fresh gauze over the worst of the skin he cleaned on my wrist. His fingers are steady. Efficient. Like the pain is just another fact to work around.
Then he looks at me.
“If your goal was to destroy him,” he says, “why tell him the truth before someone else could?”
My throat tightens.
I stare at the coffee table. The grain of the wood blurs for half a second before I blink it back into place.
“It didn’t matter anymore.”
“Not what I asked.”
His voice doesn’t sharpen. That almost makes it worse.
I drag in a breath through my nose and regret it immediately when the bruise there pulses hot.
“Gabriel already had the ledgers,” I say. “Santo saw me. If Maksim heard it from anyone else, I’d be dead before I could explain.”
Vaska says nothing.
Just waits.
He’s forcing me to hear it. Forcing me to hear what I left out.
I look up at him finally and hate how still he is. How unreadable. How impossible it is to tell whether I’m helping myself or digging deeper.
“I didn’t want him to hear it from someone else,” I say.
There.
Small. Ugly. True.
Vaska’s expression doesn’t change.
“Why?”
One word.
That’s all it takes to make my chest go tight again.
Because I loved him.
Because I couldn’t stand the thought of his face going cold while somebody else told him I was a lie.
Because for one stupid, terrible second I wanted him to hear it from me and maybe still look at me like I was real.
But I can’t say any of that.
So I say the only part I can survive. “Because it was mine to tell.”
Vaska watches me for a long moment.
Then:
“You left the card.”
I blink.
“What?”
“The card he gave you.” His gaze doesn’t move from my face. “You left it.”
My fingers curl against my thigh. “Yes.”
“Why?”
I laugh once.
It sounds wrong in the room. Thin. Not funny.
“Because I wasn’t taking his money to run.”
The words come out harder than I mean them to. Like they’ve been waiting.
Vaska tilts his head slightly. “And the phone.”
I frown. “What about it?”
“You left that too.”
Oh.
I look away.
Because I hadn’t thought about that part. Not consciously. Not in words.
Because taking it felt too much like staying connected to him. Too much like hope. Too much like keeping a line open I had no right to keep.
I say nothing.
Vaska doesn’t let me hide in it.
“You had access to more than ledgers,” he says. “More than enough time. More than enough proximity.” His eyes flick once over my face, then settle again. “Why only those?”
I hate that question most of all because it has teeth. Because there is no tactical answer.
Only the truth.
And the truth is pathetic.
I swallow hard. “Because Gabriel asked for Smash and Sugar.”
“Eto ne otvet.”
“It is.” The words leave me before I can stop them.
I go still.
A sick drop opens in my stomach. I just gave myself away. Now he knows I understand some Russian.
Vaska doesn’t react. Not visibly. He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t smile. Doesn’t give me anything at all.
“No,” he says. “That’s what he asked for.”
My pulse starts climbing.
“An obedient asset gives what she can, not just what she’s asked for.” His gaze stays on my face. “If you were doing this clinically, Maksim would be bleeding from ten places instead of one.”
Heat crawls up the back of my neck.
Because he knows.
Not just about the ledgers.
About the meetings.
About every word I was never supposed to understand and did.
“You protected him where you could.”
I shake my head on instinct. “No.”
A lie.
Instant. Useless
Vaska doesn’t call it that. He just waits.
The room feels too hot. My skin feels too small. My face hurts and my wrists hurt and suddenly I am so, so tired of being looked at like someone can see straight through the walls I built around myself.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” I whisper.
That’s the closest I can get.
Vaska studies me for one long beat. Then he nods once, like that’s enough.
No absolution. No comfort. Just enough.
He closes the first aid kit. The snap of it makes me flinch. For a second neither of us move.
Then he stands.
My pulse jumps so hard it almost hurts.
That’s it, I think.
This is where he decides.
This is where the room I’m sitting in becomes the last one I ever see.
But Vaska only looks down at me and says, “Stay here.”
I stare up at him.
The words don’t feel like safety. They feel like being shelved until the final decision is made. He picks up the kit. Takes two steps before he stops.
Without turning around, he says, “For what it’s worth—”
My whole body goes tight.
He glances back over one shoulder. “You’re very bad at being what Kaya made you.”
Then he walks out.
The front door shuts behind him with a soft click.
And somehow that’s worse than if he’d threatened me.
Because now I’m left alone with the possibility that he knows exactly what I am.
And exactly what I’m not.