34. Ronan
RONAN
I begin the day I might die by making pancakes.
It's the last thing I expected to be doing on the morning that might be my last, but here I am, at Cali's stove, flipping batter one-handed while the coffee machine hisses behind me.
I slept maybe two hours. She slept even less.
But the kids don't know any of that, and I intend to keep it that way for as long as I can.
Isabella is at the table with Doctor Fuzz's shoebox.
The chrysalis inside hasn't moved in days and she's starting to worry, no matter how many times I reassure her.
Hayden is drawing something with far too many teeth.
If I squint and ignore everything outside of these walls, I could almost pretend it's a normal morning, a normal man making breakfast for his normal family.
I don't let myself go that far. But I peek at that possibility for just a moment before I tuck it away.
"Minnie ears," Isabella reminds me, in case I've forgotten in the night.
"You wound me with your doubt," I tell her. Then I pour two small circles on top of the big one with a flourish, which makes her giggle, even though I'm pretty sure she has no idea what I meant.
I set it in front of her. She inspects it with the utmost seriousness. Then she nods, satisfied, and picks up her fork.
Hayden gets his three small ones. Cali gets hers, buttered, with syrup on the side because she'll say she doesn't want it and then steal from Isabella's plate.
Cali comes down in her bathrobe, her hair still wet. She looks at me over the kids' heads with an expression I've never had a word for, so I don't try. I hand her the coffee I've had waiting for her.
"Thank you," she says quietly.
"You never have to thank me for that."
Isabella swallows a mouthful of pancake and looks up at me. Batter on her chin. Fork in her fist.
"See you tonight?" she asks.
Cali and I both freeze. The kids don't know there's a room across the water with my life stacked on a table in it. They only know I'm here now.
I could say yes to her. It would be the easy thing. It would let her go to school with a light heart, and that's worth everything.
But I don't lie to children. I learned that from a woman who never lied to hers, who told her daughter it wasn't a dream, Mr. Ronan was here, you're safe, instead of wrapping the truth up in a comforting story.
I watched her do it and I understood, in that moment, exactly what kind of mother she was, and exactly what kind of man I wanted to be near her.
So I crouch down beside Isabella's chair and look her in the eye. "That's the plan, brave girl," I say.
She studies me. She's got her mother's eyes, the ones that can tell when a grown-up is fibbing. But the plan is a true thing. It is the plan. I'm not promising the outcome. I'm promising the intent.
"Okay," she says happily. "Say bye to Doctor Fuzz before you go."
I do. I tell a chrysalis in a shoebox to have a good day, and I mean it. Then I take my coffee and go get ready to make my rounds across the city.
Navi is propped up when I get to him, which is worse than if he were flat, because propped up means he thinks he can get out of the bed. Sure enough…
"Take me with you," he says, before I've even sat down.
"Not a fucking chance."
"Ro." He tries to push himself higher and goes gray and stops. "You're walking into a skhodka with a woman and a laptop. You need somebody in that room who can shoot."
"I'll have Grigor."
"I'm not sure if you noticed this, but Grigor's sixty. And half-blind."
"He's the best I've got, and you took two bullets four days ago. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but you're hooked up to a fucking fax machine so your heart doesn't quit on you." I sit in the visitor's chair. "You're not coming. That's final."
He glares at me. The morphine's got him a little slow, but the fury is pure Navi, undiluted.
"You know what happens if it goes bad," he says. "You know what Lev does with a crown."
"I know."
"And you're bringing her into that world?"
"She's bringing herself. I stopped being able to keep that woman out of anything a long time ago." I lean forward, elbows on my knees. "She found the crack in the frame, Navi. She's the only person alive who can stand in that room and make them see it."
Navi squints at me, waiting to see if I'm messing with him.
But in the end, he knows my serious face when he sees it.
"Goddammit. Fine. Then take her," he says.
"But listen to me." He grips my forearm with the hand that isn't stabbed full of tubes and needles.
His grip is weak but undeniable. "You better come back.
Both of you. Because if you don't—if you let that old man put you in the marshes—I will drag myself out of this bed, I will hunt down whatever's left of you, and I will kill you again myself. Understood?"
"Copy that, cousin."
"That's my blessing," he says. "And that's my threat. They match. Now, go, before I start crying and pull a stitch."
I stand. At the door, I stop. "You're a good man, Navi Akov."
He rolls his eyes. "Jesus Christ. You're softer than baby shit these days."
Chuckling, I slip out.
But I could swear I hear him mutter under his breath as I go…
"You're a good man, too, Ronan. Remember to duck when the bullets start flying. I won't be around to save you this time."
Technically speaking, I don't have to go to Anna House. There's no pressing business for me there today. But I go anyway. It just feels right.
Louisa meets me at the door, surprised. "Mr. Akov! We didn't expect you. Is everything alright?"
"Everything's fine. I was in the neighborhood. I wanted to see the place."
She takes me around, though I've seen it a hundred times.
The central air. The laundry room with its six machines humming for forty children.
The reading nook, where a boy I don't recognize is folded into a beanbag with a book about sharks.
I think of Hayden, and my throat closes up so tight that I have to look away.
I end up at the window over the courtyard. The one that used to be a cracked parking lot before I turned dirty money into a place for children to run.
That same girl from my visit with Cali is back on the swing.
Dark braids. Small hands wrapped around the chains.
She's pumping her legs, throwing herself back and forth, going higher and higher, and there's nobody standing over her telling her to slow down or sit still or take up less room.
She just goes as high as she can, simply because she can.
I built this place so no child would ever see what I saw. I built it in my mother's name, to spite my father and everything Igor was. Anna, who got smaller and smaller, year on year, until there was almost nothing left of her to see.
And tonight, I have to go stand in a room and answer for being Igor's son. For a crown I inherited from a man I spent my whole life trying not to become.
There's a symmetry to it I don't much care for.
"You know," Louisa says, coming up beside me, "you've got a real somber air about you today. You look like a man saying goodbye."
I don't turn from the window. "I wouldn't dream of it," I lie.
"Hm." She watches the girl swing. "You'd tell me if something was wrong? If the money was—"
"The money's fine. There'll always be enough for this place. I've made sure of it."
But I say it too firmly. Her mouth tightens.
"Don't you know we need you?" she says. "This place.
Those children. You act like you're just the man who signs the checks, but you've been more than that from the start, whether or not you like it.
" She puts a hand on my arm, this small woman who thinks I'm a generous lawyer, who has no idea the money that keeps her orphanage running comes off the top of everything I've done wrong.
"Whatever it is you're carrying today, you ought to set it down long enough to remember that. We need you around."
The girl on the swing reaches the top of her arc and hangs there, weightless, for one bright second.
"I'll remember," I tell her.
Then I go, because if I stay any longer, I'll do something I can't take back, and there's still a war to prepare for.
I set the terms through Grigor. That's how it's done—the pakhan doesn't haggle directly with the man trying to snatch his crown. Two old-country men speak through an intermediary in the old-country tongue, working out where and how a life gets weighed.
Neutral ground. That's the first thing. No home turf for either side, nowhere that gives Lev the room's loyalty or gives it to me.
There's only one place I want it, though I don't tell Grigor why.
Warehouse three off the BQE.
It's the place I sat down at Pyotr's level in an ordinary office chair and gave a frightened old man his life instead of condemning him to a shallow grave.
The place I chose, once, not to be my father.
If I'm going to stand trial for being Igor's son, I'll do it standing in the one room where I proved I wasn't.
"Captains as jury," Grigor relays back to me, in the car. "Under the old law. Both sides present what they have. He agrees to all of it."
"And my wife?"
Grigor hesitates. "That was the sticking point. He didn't want her in the room."
"And?"
"I told him what you told me to say: that she's coming, or there's no sit-down.
" Grigor's mouth twitches. "He thought about it for a long time.
Then he laughed and said, let her come and bring her little computer.
He also said…" Grigor glances at me. "… that whatever's on her fancy spreadsheet, he's got something that outweighs it.
'It won't matter what she shows them, once I show them what I've got,' he said. "
Of course he did.
Lev consented because he is certain. He's got his bomb—the story that Pyotr gave up under pressure—and he's weighed it against a woman with a laptop and decided the woman doesn't count.
He looked at Calista Meadows and saw a tool, a lever, an operator to be acquired, the same as I once did.
The same as Todd did. The same as every man in this whole story has done—right up until the moment she took them apart.
He's making the mistake one last time. The biggest one. And he's doing it because he cannot imagine that the most dangerous thing in that warehouse tonight will be the woman he agreed to let in as an afterthought.
His fucking mistake.
His last one, too.
"So be it," I tell Grigor. "Tonight, we'll see who's right."
I knot my tie in front of the mirror.
It's her mirror, technically. One of the ones I took out of this house in the dark and then had put back, because she should get to choose what she has and how she sees herself.
It's in her bathroom, hung level, right where it came from.
And I'm standing in front of it in a black suit, working the silk through my fingers.
I confiscated all her glass because I couldn't stand to watch her take inventory of herself and declare herself unworthy. So I removed the equipment and left her no way to shrink.
But in all these weeks, I never once stood in front of one of these and did the same thing to myself, taken my own stock.
So I do it now.
The man in the mirror has his father's shoulders.
His father's height, his father's hands.
There are scars under this shirt that I called occupational hazards of Brooklyn real estate. Some of them are, and some of them aren't.
But there's the rest of it, too, if I look long enough.
There's a man who kneels down to a child's level instead of towering.
Who asks permission at every step. Who took the mirrors and then gave them back.
Who built a place with a swing in it so children who deserved happiness could be free.
Who wrote a letter so a woman wouldn't be gutted in a room full of strangers, and then let her push it back across the counter, because she'd rather hear the worst thing from my mouth than read it off a page.
I don't know which man wins tonight. Both of them are in here, standing in the same body. One of them has to walk into that warehouse and answer for the other.
I finish the knot. I smooth it down.
Behind me, in the glass, the door opens.
Cali stands in the doorway in the green dress. The one from the first date. It fits her perfectly, every gorgeous curve that made me salivate from the moment I first laid eyes on her. On her wrist, I spy a flash of gold: the little octopus charm.
She looks beautiful. She always does, and I've told her every day since I stole her glass. I'll go on telling her whether she believes me or not, both because it's in the terms and because it's true.
Our eyes meet in the mirror.
I turn around, so I'm looking at the real thing instead of the reflection.
"You're the most beautiful thing I have ever been in a room with," I tell her.
She smiles, and it doesn't quite diminish the fear behind her eyes, but it's a real smile all the same. She crosses the bathroom to me. She reaches up and straightens the tie I already straightened, because her hands need something to do.
"The kids are with my mom," she says. "She didn't ask questions. She just took them and told me to be careful, and then she told me—" Her voice catches. "She told me to bring you home."
"Formidable woman."
"She likes you. God knows why."
"She has excellent taste. It runs in the family."
That gets a laugh out of her. She presses her forehead to my chest for a second, and I put my hand on the back of her head and hold her there.
Her whole world is at her mother's tonight, but she doesn't have to worry—they'll be safe.
I would burn every warehouse in Brooklyn to the ground before I let anything happen to any piece of it.
"You have your machine?" I ask.
"Downstairs. Charged. Backed up in three places." She pulls back and wipes under her eyes. "I'm the operator, remember? I don't do things halfway."
"No," I say. "You never have."
I take her hand. Her fingers are cold as they close around mine. I feel the whole terrible weight of what we're walking into and the whole impossible weight of what I'd lose settle over me at the same time.
She looks up at me. "Ready?" she asks.
"No," I tell her honestly. "But it's the only way."
"Now, you're getting the hang of it."
I bring her hand up and press my mouth to her knuckles, over the thin gold ring I gave her. And then we go—down the stairs, through the kitchen, past the vault-heavy door I had installed to keep the world out.
I open it. The night's out there, and the water, and the warehouse across it where my life will hang in the balance.
I hold the door for her. She steps through, chin up, the most dangerous thing in any room she'll ever walk into.
Then I follow her out, and I don't look back at the house.
Everything that matters is in front of me.