37. Cali
CALI
The days after the warehouse are so serene. I don't trust it for a second.
I keep waiting for the floor to drop out.
That's a habit I picked up somewhere along the way, bracing for the next bad thing.
But it doesn't come. Instead, one by one, all the loose ends start to tie themselves off.
I get to sit at my kitchen island and watch it happen with a cup of coffee that somebody else made just the way I like it.
Crosby Hess is the first thread to go.
He doesn't get dragged anywhere. He surrenders, is what Ronan tells me, though the word does a lot of heavy lifting.
His lawyer calls Mercer's office and sets it all up ahead of time.
A deal, worked out before the man ever set foot in a federal building.
He walks in through the front door with his counsel and hands the government everything.
"Everything?" I ask Ronan.
"Every last little bit," he confirms. "Sang like a canary. He handed over Lev's entire network, proof and details of the hit on Todd… Damn near wrote a book with his confession."
"And that clears you. Of Todd."
He nods.
I sink back in my chair and marvel. My engine put Ronan's likelihood of guilt at ninety-eight point one percent. I chose him anyway, against my own math, and it turns out the math was wrong and the man was right.
I don't know what to do with that yet.
Some days, I think it means I got lucky. Other days, I think it means I finally learned that spreadsheets and data and the machinery of your head can tell you a lot about a person—but only your heart can tell you the full story.
Mercer comes by on Thursday.
For the first time, I don't feel like I'm holding a lit stick of dynamite when I open the door and find her there.
I wouldn't go so far as to call her a friend—Navi, however, might think otherwise, because he has a funny habit of hanging around the FBI's field office in Brooklyn lately.
But she's a familiar presence, one I almost kind of like. I believe in her moral compass.
"Ms. Meadows," she says.
"Agent Mercer."
"You going to make me stand out here again?"
I think about all the times I did exactly that. "No," I say. "Come in. Coffee?"
"Alright." She blinks, just barely. "I take it black."
"I kinda figured."
She follows me to the island and sits down on a stool like it's the most natural thing in the world. I pour her coffee and join her.
"Crosby Hess is a hell of a cooperator," she says, finally.
"So I heard."
"He made my job easier. Well, in some ways. I should say that he made it simpler." She eyes me over the rim of her coffee. "Mostly because he has made it abundantly clear that Ronan had nothing to do with any of this."
I arch an amused brow. "Is that so? Well, if he said it, it must be true."
Mercer scowls, but I think she can't even pretend to hold onto her anger. I wouldn't call Ronan an "innocent man," but he's not guilty of the crimes she barged into our lives accusing him of. She recognizes that now.
"I dropped the firm subpoena," she adds.
"Oh?"
She shrugs. "It was going nowhere. Crosby's story was too clean, and the higher-ups were happy to accept it wholesale. So that's that then. Akov Firm is back in the good graces of the law."
"That must be a special kind of aggravating for you."
"You have no idea." But there's something in the corner of her mouth, just a shade shy of a smile. "For what it's worth, the thing you built saved your neck. And his. That doesn't happen often, in my experience. People with tools like that usually just get themselves in deeper."
"I'm particular about what I do with mine."
She looks at me for a long moment. "Yeah," she says. "I've noticed."
She finishes the coffee. Then she stands up, pushes the stool in, and says, "Take care of those kids, Ms. Meadows."
"That's exactly what I intend to do, Agent Mercer."
At the door, she pauses. "Your husband's cousin," she says. "Navi. He's recovering, I hear?"
I have to turn away to hide my grin. "He is. Back to rare form. I'll tell him you asked about him."
"Hm." And then she's gone, around the corner and into the world, no car, the way she always leaves.
Which brings me to Navi.
We've checked in on him quite a bit, but when I'm in the neighborhood one day for a work thing, I swing by his hospital room.
We talk business for a while, he complains about his doctors and an overly aggressive nurse who keeps threatening him with a catheter if he sasses her back.
It's good to see his spirits returning, little by little.
Somehow, the conversation turns to Ronan. Navi starts telling me stories, and I clear my afternoon just so I can sit and listen to him.
He tells me about Ronan at twenty, a young man full of sharp edges and rage, and how he used to start fights in bars just to have somewhere to blow off steam.
He tells me about the day Ronan first walked him through the plan for the Anna House, how he thought his cousin had gone soft in the head and then watched him build the whole thing anyway.
He tells me, propped up in a hospital bed with tubes still taped to his arm, about warning Ronan that I'd never be able to tell the difference between him and Todd.
"I was wrong," he says. "Which, frankly, pisses me off. I'm never wrong."
"You're only a little wrong," I allow. "You were right that he built a cage."
"But you didn't stay in it."
"Actually, I did," I say. "But I stayed on my own terms."
He grins at me, and I see, suddenly, why Ronan would take a bullet for this man, and why this man took two of them. "That's the only good way to do it, I think," he says. "You know what? You're all right, Calista Meadows. You have my stamp of approval."
I smile shyly as he pats me on the hand. It's a good thing to have a Navi in your life. A friend who sees you for what you are and loves you all the more for it. I lost the last one I had, and it turned out she'd been sleeping in my bed the whole time.
This one took two bullets for a person I love.
That's a different kind of data point.
Pyotr goes home.
I don't get the details, nor do I ask for them.
But Ronan tells me out of the blue one day that the old man is in Brighton Beach, with his daughter and his grandchildren, the second one born now, healthy.
There's Bratva protection on the whole family.
Lifelong, Ronan says. Nobody will touch them, ever, for the rest of their lives.
"Your father used to say there's no leaving the Bratva," I tell him. He'd told me that, one of the nights on the stoop.
"He did."
"So what's this?"
Ronan is quiet for a second. "This is different," he says.
"It's not leaving. He's not being cast out and buried in the marshes.
He came home." He looks at his coffee. "I couldn't fix what I did to him, taking his life apart to keep him under my thumb.
But I could make sure the ending was the one he wanted. "
There is no leaving, Igor said.
But there is coming home, his son decided instead.
I put my hand over Ronan's on the counter. He turns it over so our fingers lace, in the light, in the middle of the morning, where anybody could see.
The engine does one more job for the family.
"The guns are off," I say. "For good."
"That's it then," Ronan agrees.
"And," I add, "the firm has been dragged fully into the light. All the old money-washing mechanisms are disabled and dismantled, never to be used again."
"Keep going, Ms. Meadows," he says with a wicked smile. "This is the kind of talking dirty I could get used to."
I blush, but this is important, so I charge on. "Plus, the Anna House model is ready to be scaled and replicated. From now on, that's where the clean money goes." I peek up at him over the top of my computer screen. "That's the whole point, right? Making something clean out of something dirty?"
He smiles proudly. "Why else would we do it?"
Bending forward, he kisses me, our mouths sealing together right above the screen where my engine is humming along, turning sins into virtues, bad money into good, hopeless futures into bright ones. That's the best place for a kiss I could possibly think of.
Some other things settle, too. Small ones, but important ones nonetheless.
One of Ronan's lawyers who specializes in venture capital funding has gone through my company's cap table with a fine-toothed comb and ensured that it's all mine, down to every last bit and byte.
Todd, Emmett Glover, Ronan himself—all the men who once posed a threat to my right to my own work have been cleared away.
It's just mine again.
And there's Lev's hundred-dollar bill.
The one he pressed into my hand in the grocery store, for my avocados, like a grandfather. I've kept it in the junk drawer this whole time because I couldn't figure out what to do with a dead man's money.
I figure it out, eventually.
I take it to the Anna House. Louisa is there, and the little girl with the dark braids is once again on the swing in the courtyard, going as high as she can, simply because she can. There's a donation box by the front desk, a plain wooden contraption with a slot cut in the top.
I fold Lev's hundred in half and drop it in.
It's the only thing that man's money will ever do that's worth anything. It goes to the swing, and the reading nook, and the laundry machines, and the air conditioning. It gets turned into something good.
I stand there a second and watch the girl swing. Nobody tells her to make herself smaller.
Then I go home.
The house is quiet.
The kids are with my mother for the night, one last handoff before the world goes back to being ordinary.
She keeps making jokes about how much I owe her for this summer of unlimited babysitting, and she's very much right.
I'm sure I'll pay her back one way or another.
Maybe I'll set her up with Grigor. I could see them two hitting it off.
Ronan is on his way home from work. I'm waiting for him on the front steps.
Because it's time for an overdue conversation. After, he said, then I'll tell you everything.
Well. It's after.
And I want to hear it from his mouth. Like he promised me.
I've got the envelope in my hand and a bottle of wine.
Calista Meadows, it says on the front. It's still sealed.
If I wanted to, I could open it now and read it start to finish before he walks in the door.
Maybe, back in the old days, that's what I would have done.
But I was operating on a different mindset then.
Never trust.
Always verify.
Get the data first.
Never let yourself be surprised.
But I don't want it from the paper. I never did.
I want it from him. His face. His voice. My head is done deciding things about Ronan Akov. And my heart made up its mind a long time ago. So this? I wouldn't quite call it a "formality." But it's the last thing standing between us and the wide-open future.
I see his car pull up and park in the driveway. He climbs out, sees me waiting there, and frowns. "Cali? Everything okay?"
I set the envelope down at my side and pick up the bottle of wine I bought for exactly this, uncork it, and pour some out in the two glasses. "Come sit and drink with me," I call out to him.
It's time to hear the final data point.