36. Ronan
RONAN
Even after I issue the order, I don't move for a long time.
The towel is still around my waist. The steam behind me has thinned out to nothing. The window is black and full of my own reflection, and below it, the park is a hole in the middle of all the lights.
The phone is still in my hand. Navi hung up a while ago, or I hung up on him. I don't remember which. I set it down on the dresser and I pick up the napkin instead.
I turn it over in my fingers. The corners are soft. She handled it a lot. I can tell. She carried it in her bag and took it out and put it back and took it out again, and each time she did that, she was deciding whether to keep me.
That's what it was for. That's what I built it for. A little test she'd run.
Well, joke's on me, because she ran it. She got her answer.
I made sure of it.
The door buzzes. Then it opens, because Navi has a key. He comes down the hall slow. When he gets to the bedroom doorway, he stops there. He looks at me standing at the window in a towel, and he looks at the napkin in my hand, and his face falls as he sighs sadly.
He doesn't gloat. I'd have taken it on the chin if he did. Fuck knows I've earned it. But he just stands there with his hands in his pockets, and after a while, he says, "From where she's standing, there's no difference between you and Todd. Do you remember when I told you that?"
I nod, not trusting myself to speak.
"It was in your office. Six weeks ago." He isn't cruel about it, even though I wish he would be. If he were cruel, I could get angry, and dealing with anger is easier than dealing with whatever the fuck I'm feeling right now.
"I remember."
"I know you do."
He comes into the room. He sits down on the edge of the bed, careful not to touch the napkin, like it's crime scene evidence. He looks tired. His tie is loose. He came straight from somewhere, or he's been sitting in his car in the garage downstairs for an hour working up the nerve to come up.
"You want a drink?" he says.
"No."
"Well, I do."
He doesn't get up to get one, though. He just sits there.
"I did what you told me," he says after a while. "The lockout. It's done."
I just nod again. I'm glad that's over with. Might as well rip everything away at once. No point in prolonging the agony.
"You want to tell me why you had me pull the trigger tonight?
Now? Two hours after she found out?" He rubs a hand down his face.
"Because when you called and told me to lock her out of everything, I figured you'd want the opposite.
I figured you'd want to look like the good guy.
Give it back. Grand gesture. That's your thing lately. "
"It's not a gesture."
"So what is it?"
I set the napkin down on the dresser. I can't hold it anymore. My hands won't stop shaking around it and I don't want Navi to see.
"The party that pulled the second filing on the shell," I say. "Have we figured out who?"
"Not yet. Working on it."
"But it's someone. It's a real set of eyes, not a bot."
Navi nods slow. "Yeah, real eyes. Somebody who knows what they're looking at."
"That's why." I turn from the window to face him. "Whoever that is, they're inside the system now. And Cali's company was about to get pulled all the way into the middle of it. If those enemy eyes trace the wrong thread, they land on her."
Navi is quiet.
"So we locked her out," I say, "to get her out of the blast radius. A woman who has no access to those accounts is a woman who can't be tied to them. If it all comes apart—and it might—she'll be safe."
"That's not how she's going to read it."
For the third time, I can only nod.
"This doesn't make you seem like a good guy, Ro," warns Navi. Again, it's not unkind. Merely matter-of-fact. "Especially not to her. To her, you're still a lying asshole and a thief."
"I know."
"Then why do it?"
"Because I'd rather she hate me and be safe than trust me and go to prison.
" I swallow and crush the napkin in my fist. "I know I'm not a good man.
I'm my father's son after all. But if I let her stay wired into that system to spare my own feelings, and it drags her down when our enemies close in, then I'm Todd.
No—I'm worse than Todd. Todd just wanted to take her house.
I'd be the one to put her in a jail cell. "
Navi doesn't answer that. He just looks at me for a long moment, probably wondering what the hell has happened to the Ronan he thought he knew.
"Then there's the second thing," I say.
His eyebrows wrinkle. "What second thing?"
"I'm pausing the gunrunning. All of it. Effective tonight."
He sits up straighter. "Ro. Are you fucking kidding me?"
"No. I'm not."
"You can't just— Jesus Christ, do you understand what that costs?
! Not just the money, but the relationships!
There are people expecting product who don't take kindly to being told to wait.
You became richer than God with this stuff, and you've spent the last year bending over backwards to find ways to rinse the cash clean.
And now, you want to turn the tap off entirely? "
"Yes."
"For fuck's sake, why?!" He lurches to his feet, fists clenched in sheer surprise. "Give me a real reason."
"Because as long as I'm printing dirty money faster than we can wash it, I'm a target. That means anyone standing near me is a target, too. I can choose to take that risk. But I won't let her make the same choice."
"So this is about her."
"It always has been, cousin. From the start."
Navi laughs in bitter disgust. He drags a hand back through his hair.
"You're shutting down the thing that funds our entire Bratva.
This shit keeps the firm lit and the lights on and every man on the payroll fed.
And you're pulling the plug to protect a civilian woman—who, by the way, just ran out the door and is probably never going to speak to you again? "
"That's correct."
"You know how that sounds?"
I shake my head. "I know exactly how it sounds."
He drops back down, shaking his head. He looks at me like he's never quite seen me before.
Maybe he hasn't. I'm not sure I've ever seen myself do this, either.
My whole life has been about the thing I inherited, the monstrous Bratva my father built, the money and the fear and the moving of it all through the dark.
I told myself the guns were ambition.
I told myself the shells and the fronts were wisdom.
I told myself a lot of things.
But right now, standing at a black window forty stories up with a two-cent napkin in my fist, I don't care about any of it. The money doesn't matter. The Bratva doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is a brownstone on the Upper West Side with two pairs of rainboots by the door.
And I've already lost my place in it.
"There's one more thing," I say. "You're going to think I've lost my mind."
Navi barks out another vicious laugh. "I already think that."
"I want you to return the mirrors."
He blinks in confusion. "What mirrors?"
"Her mirrors. The ones I took. They're crated in the storage unit in Red Hook. I want them back at her house. Tomorrow morning. Early, before she takes the kids anywhere. All of them, exactly where they came from, hung back on the walls."
He gawks at me. "You want to break into her house again? Now? After tonight? Ro, that's insane. That's the last thing on Earth you should—"
"I'm not breaking in. Stage a phone call to draw her out, or send them in with fake maintenance men, or—I don't fucking care how. They just need to go back."
"Why?"
"Because I took them and I had no right.
I've been telling myself for weeks it was a favor, but it wasn't. It was me deciding what she got to have and how she got to see herself.
" I set the napkin down. I never want to touch it again, if I can help it.
"She should be able to choose those things herself. "
Navi stands up. He comes across the room and, for the first time all night, he puts a hand on my shoulder. He's not one to do much of that. Neither of us are. So it sits there, heavy and strange.
"Okay," he says. "I'll get it done." He squeezes once. "For what it's worth, cousin… your old man never would've done any of this. Igor would've stolen it all and let her drown and never lost a night's sleep."
Another creeping chill steals through me. "That's not a comfort."
"It's not supposed to be. Just stating facts." He picks his jacket up off the chair. "You did the right thing tonight. It's a shame that she's just never going to know that. And you're never going to get to tell her." He heads for the hall. "Get some sleep, Ro."
I won't. He knows that as well as I do.
He lets himself out, and the apartment goes back to being the enormous, empty box it was before she walked into it. I stand at the window until the black over the park turns gray, and then a thin, sick blue, and then, finally, the color of an ordinary morning.
Out there, the mirrors will soon be on the move. I close my eyes and picture her house, her bedroom. I imagine the first glance she takes into that mirror when it's hung up again. What will she see? What will she think? Who will be left to tell her she's beautiful?
I do endless, meandering loops around the apartment for hours, looking out of this window and that one, thinking thoughts that have no beginning and no end, no purpose and no meaning.
At midnight, I grab my phone.
This won't do anything anymore, but I made a promise, and I intend to keep it. Every day, until you believe me.
And I'm not the kind of man who breaks that particular promise. It might be the only true thing I ever gave her.
You're beautiful, Calista Meadows.
The read receipt appears underneath almost at once.
Read 12:01 A.M.
But even though I sit and stare at the screen for hours, the three dots don't come. Just a single receipt, as thorough and damning as if she'd spit in my face and left me only a single napkin to clean it with.
I set the phone facedown on the counter.
Then I slump back in my armchair and wait for tomorrow, so I can tell her again.