6. Cali
CALI
After dinner, I sit on the edge of my bed and try to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do now.
The kids are asleep. The pancake plates are washed. Ronan is prowling around somewhere downstairs, probably standing near a window, sweeping his eyes over the street like he did all night on my stoop.
I've got the two cards from Agent Mercer sitting on my bedside table.
Next to them sits a computer full of evidence that could put Ronan away for the rest of his life.
I've got Todd's warning ringing in my ears, and Ronan's warning ringing right next to it, and I still can't decide which of them I trust less.
The facts are thus:
There are people out there who want me. There are people out there who want my kids. Some of them have official badges, but some of them just have guns and a violent grudge against the man who's currently acting like a Rottweiler in my house.
Which leaves me with just a few choices. I don't particularly love any of them.
If I run to Mercer and sing like a canary, I throw myself on her mercy—no pun intended—and hope that she's as much of a straight shooter as I thought she appeared to be.
Except I don't know if Mercer is even real, not really. And even if she is, "protection" from the FBI means putting Hayden and Isabella's names inside a federal investigation into a criminal organization. Forever.
It also does nothing about Lev. I get the feeling he's not the kind of guy to get too hot and bothered about a fancy-looking badge brandished by a woman in a JC Penny pantsuit. Lev sent a man up my stairs with zip ties and a blanket.
So if the FBI can't be trusted, who's left? Can I even trust myself?
Maybe the right move is to run Ronan's mom's old playbook: Shrink down real small and hope that, if and when somebody throws something at me, I'm not a big enough target to hit.
But I can't even finish thinking that thought before I rule it out. I've done that shit before and I refuse to ever do it again. Plus, it provides no guarantee of safety for my babies.
Therefore, we are once again at rock bottom with only one name left for company.
I hate that so much. I express that hatred with several filthy turns of phrase, uttered out loud in my empty bedroom.
The safest place for my children right now is inside the reach of the one man I swore just yesterday I would never see again.
Think about it. He has the men. He has the reach. He put a body in a tarp and had it hauled out of my house to God knows where, and the worst result of all of it is that my daughter woke up worried that her pet caterpillar had a bad dream.
Whatever else Ronan Akov is—and he's a lot of terrible things, there's no denying that—he is the only force standing between my kids and whoever comes next.
In the end, that's the data point that settles it.
Ronan Akov is the least-bad option on a list of bad options. Nothing more.
"Nothing more," I repeat out loud, so I believe it.
Like I summoned Beetlejuice with that incantation, the doorway darkens.
Ronan is standing there, filling the frame, like he heard me thinking. I wouldn't be surprised if he did. The man hears everything.
"Shouldn't you be downstairs barking at squirrels that stray too close to the perimeter?" I snap testily.
His shadow remains stock still. "I heard you talking to yourself. Thought I'd see if you cared to expand the conversation."
"Nah, I'm good. I do that now. It's my one remaining hobby."
I lurch up off the bed. I want to be on my feet for this, and more importantly, I want to start this chat on my terms, not his.
"Okay," I declare. "Here's how it's going to go. You can stay. In the house. Because I have two kids and somebody sent a killer after them, and you're the only person I know who can make sure that doesn't happen again."
He nods, once. Nothing more. Nothing more.
"But—and let me be exceedingly clear about this—you are not forgiven.
This is not us getting back together. You don't sleep in my bed.
You sleep in the corner chair, or the guest room, and above all, you keep your hands to yourself.
Now, repeat that back so I can make sure you got it through your thick skull. "
He raises his hands as if to show me where they will remain at all times. "This is not forgiveness. I sleep far away. I don't touch you. Not even if you beg me to."
I roll my eyes. "Cut that shit out, too, while we're at it."
"If you insist, kotyonok."
I jab a finger in his direction. "And that shit! As far as I'm concerned, you're furniture. Like a lock on the door. Capisce?"
But Ronan shakes his head.
"Which part of that was debatable?" I cry out, irritated beyond belief.
Finally, he cracks a smile. "In the Bratva, we don't say, 'capisce.' You would say, Ponyal?"
The only reasonable response flies fast and obvious from my lips. "I hate you, you know."
"So you keep saying. I believe you about as much as the fed did."
I turn my back on him so he doesn't see me biting back a frustrated smile. "Whatever. Get out of my room, Ronan. I've had enough aggravation for one night. For a whole lifetime, really."
He chuckles as he slips away. "In my experience, life contains an endless supply of the stuff. Goodnight, Ms. Meadows. Sleep tight. I'll be watching."
He moves in the next morning with almost nothing.
I don't know what I expected. Trunks, maybe. A valet. A grand piano gilded to the brim.
But Ronan Akov arrives at my door with a single black duffel bag and his phones, and… that's it. He sets the bag down in the guest room, plugs the phones into the wall, and just like that, I have a new roommate.
What he doesn't travel light on is men.
There's always somebody outside now. A dark coat at the corner. A different dark coat across the street two hours later. A car that idles for exactly forty minutes before it glides away and a new car takes its spot.
My neighbors probably think I've become somebody very important or somebody very in trouble. I guess they'd be right on both counts.
On the second day, the door goes up. My old front door had been leaning against the railing for two nights, splintered where Ronan tore it off its hinges. Now, there's a new one, and it is not a normal door.
For one thing, it's a hell of a lot heavier. When it closes, it thumps shut with a sound like a bank vault and a pneumatic hiss follows. There's a new lock on it, too, some sleek matte-black thing that NASA surely had a hand in designing.
The intrusions don't stop there. Day three begins with a scream.
My scream, to be specific.
I walk into my master bathroom first thing in the morning, barely conscious, hair a disaster, to find Ronan standing in it.
I scream. It's a full, undignified, horror-movie scream, but completely involuntarily.
"What the hell are you doing—"
He's got my BioInfo scale in his hands. The little square of digitized plastic that started this entire catastrophe, that told me my life was a lie from three thousand miles away.
As I gawk, I watch him flip it over, dig his thumbnail under the battery cover, and rip the batteries out. Then he sets the thing over his knee and cracks it clean in half.
The plastic gives with a nasty snap. He drops both pieces in the trash can.
"There," he says with a happy sigh. "I think that's better, don't you?"
"You could have asked me first!" I say, out of breath, my heart still hammering from the scare. "Didn't I tell you that's what you were supposed to do before making decisions on my behalf?"
"You're right." He straightens up. His eyes are dark and fierce where they fix on me. "I'll pull it back out of the trash if you want it. You, after all, should get to decide."
I look at the two halves of the scale in the garbage can.
"... No," I admit. "Leave it."
"That's what I thought." Then his voice drops into something low, something that's got two things braided together in it—one part sweet enough to melt me, one part cold enough to raise every hair on my arms. "But I want to say this, and it's very important that you listen.
No number in a box is ever going to tell you what you're worth again.
Not that one. Not any of them. And if anyone ever tries to use one to frighten you in your own home again…
" His jaw sets. "… they'll answer to me.
Personally. That's not me deciding for you, kotyonok. That's just a fact about the world."
He steps past me out of the bathroom before I can decide whether to be furious or fall to my knees in weepy gratitude.
I'm left standing there stupidly, with a broken scale in my trash and my heart doing something it has no business doing.
The kids are, frankly, thrilled.
Isabella treats the whole thing like it's Christmas morning and Ronan is the present wrapped in a pretty red bow. She wakes up every day and races down the hall to check that he's still there. When she finds him—at the stove, at the window, wherever—she lights up like the sun came out just for her.
She makes him examine Doctor Fuzz twice a day with her plastic doctor kit. She saves the chair next to her for him at every meal and gets horrifically offended if anyone else tries to sit there.
Hayden is quieter about it, but it's worse, in a way, because it goes deeper. My nine-year-old spent months with a dad who left, who lied, who took school pickup so he could cheat and build a custody case.
And now, there's a man in the house who catches fish with him off a dock, who cares enough to learn what a hydrothermal vent is, who asks real follow-up questions and doesn't fake his interest.
A man Hayden looks at the way I used to hope he'd look at Todd. Like he's found somebody worth being like.
A role model.
A father figure.
I watch them from the kitchen doorway one evening, the two of them bent over a book, Ronan's finger tracing something on the page, Hayden explaining some new fascination to a grown man like it's the most important thing in the world, and the grown man listening like it is.
It splits me right down the middle.
Because I know what I'm doing. I'm letting my children attach themselves, heart and soul, to a man who lied to me. A man who might vanish at any moment. He might get taken, or killed, or hauled off by an FBI agent who may or may not be real. He's exactly the kind of man I built a machine to catch.
I'm setting my kids up for the heartbreak I know is coming.
The guilt of it is killing me like gut problems that no Pepto-Bismol or Tums could ever alleviate. I lie awake with it. I tell myself I'll pull back, I'll cool it down, I'll remind everyone that this is temporary and Mr. Ronan is not staying.
No sir. No way. No how.
Then I catch myself, watching the whole charade and wanting the exact same things they want. Wanting the fish and the pancakes and the caterpillar checkups. The vault-heavy door and the man behind it.
I want all of it so badly.
I am no better than my six-year-old, is the truth of it.
I just hide it slightly more competently.
For now.
It's a couple nights later, at dinner, when Isabella asks the question.
We're eating spaghetti. Ronan made it, of course, because apparently the man can cook anything, and Isabella has marinara sauce spread from ear to ear like clown makeup. Hayden is telling a long story that I've mostly stopped following. It's a good night.
Then Isabella puts down her fork, looks up at Ronan with her whole open face, and asks, "Are you gonna stay forever?"
The conversation dies at once.
I know how this goes. I've seen it. I was there at the lake, in the dark, with the window open and the cicadas going, when this man told my daughter he'd do his best to stay forever and looked like he meant every syllable of it.
I felt what it did to me then.
Now, he's going to do it again.
He's going to make her a promise he has no right to make, a promise neither of us has any way to keep, not with feds circling and Lev out there and my whole life balanced on a knife's edge.
He's going to say the beautiful thing, and it's going to undo me, and I'm going to be furious and moved and helpless all at once, the way I always am with him.
I brace for it. I grip the edge of the table.
Ronan sets down his fork.
He doesn't look at me first like I thought he might. Instead, he looks at Isabella. He gives her his whole attention.
And then he says:
"That's your mother's decision."
Isabella blinks. "But do you want to?"
"What I want doesn't come first here," he tells her, gentle.
"This is your mom's house. You're her kids.
Whether I stay isn't up to me, and it isn't up to you, either, brave girl.
It's up to her." He picks his fork back up.
"And whatever she decides is going to be the right thing. She's the smartest person I know."
Then he goes back to his spaghetti like he didn't just utterly ruin me for any other man forever.
Hayden and Isabella are satisfied. My son resumes his story and Isabella asks for more parmesan.
But I'm not moving.
Because he just handed me the pen to write my own ending.
You decide.
I'm not even sure how long passes before Isabella pokes me in the leg.
"Mommy?" Isabella says. "The parmesan?"
"Right," I manage. "Yeah, baby. Here you go."
I pass her the cheese. My hand isn't quite steady. Ronan sees it, but he doesn't say a word. Just smiles and twirls more noodles on his fork.
Bastard.
I think I might love him after all.