EPILOGUE
LEO
I’ve made a few discoveries these last few months. Even after countless repaintings, cigarette stains are very persistent. They know I don't really want them gone.
Waking up and looking at the ceiling used to be just that: waking up and looking at the ceiling.
Now, it's waking up and looking at a discreet, stubborn nicotine and tar stain a few inches to the side of my vision, right where Dante usually sleeps.
And smokes. The smoke clings to the walls, the ceiling, the windows, and the upholstery. The whole room smells of tobacco.
Once, Dmitry set foot in here and grimaced. "Do you smoke?" he asked. Their intelligence report on my vices—and lack thereof—was a bit outdated, he thought. Maybe the stress of the job had gotten to me. Depressed people are twice as likely to smoke as chemically healthy people. True.
My neurotransmitters are still completely out of whack—this shit is chronic—but I said, "No.
" I was surprised he even noticed the smell because, in my head, all the Volkovs smell like cigarettes and have long lost the ability to perceive it.
My mistake. They smell like cigarettes because Dante smells like cigarettes, and the scent sticks to you, embraces you like a haunting.
Dmitry tilted his head at me, and I saw the exact moment he understood. His eyebrows shot up, he subtly tucked his chin, and he seemed a little desperate to change the subject. I almost called him over. Come and see, Dmitry, the smell is much stronger in my bed.
The yellowish-gray stain makes my mornings happy. Even when Dante gets up before me. I think, it's real . This god in human form is really spending all his nights in my bed. Most of the time, doing a little more than just sleeping next to me.
Sometimes, too, I don't need to look at the stain on the ceiling.
I feel him. Behind me, holding my waist; beneath me, his heartbeat in my ears; or just with his back against mine.
That last one is less frequent. Dante is a possessive guy.
He likes to make sure I won't move away from him without him noticing.
And that's another thing I discovered: if a feather falls to the floor, Dante will wake up instantly, pulling a pistol from under the mattress.
It's automatic, an irrational impulse. It doesn't matter what it is.
I didn't even know there was a gun under the mattress.
I asked him after the first time if there was any remote chance of that gun going off one night.
He looked at me like I was an animal. We have this wall between us—he knows everything about guns and ways to kill people and punching them.
I don't. He said, "The hammer isn’t cocked, you imbecile.
" I don't know what that means. But it's a testament of trust: knowing the gun is there, that he leaves it with me when he's gone, and that he trusts I won't use it against him. Or myself.
Overall, having Dante and this morbid smell of cigarettes helps me sleep.
It's never been easy for me to stay still for enough hours without my sleep being choppy, but it gets a little better with him.
At least, most of the time, he's the one who wakes me up—Dante's sleep quality is the worst imaginable, no matter how much he acts like mine is the problem.
I don't have anything that messes with my head enough to make me wake up drenched in sweat, breathless, with a racing heart and a surge of norepinephrine. He does.
It happens often. I don't get startled anymore.
He shoots up in bed, grabs the same hidden gray gun, and I wait for him to find himself again.
It doesn't take long. His eyes refocus within a few seconds, but the things that haunt his mind linger for much longer.
He usually gets up, takes a cigarette from the pack he's started leaving in my drawers, and goes to smoke on the balcony. They are ghosts I will never know.
I've joined him on the balcony a few times. Most of them, he says nothing. "Do you want to talk?" I asked him once, and he didn't look at me. All he said was, "No."
I never pushed. I learned that his silence after the nightmares is a wall you shouldn't try to climb.
Now, I just keep him company. When Dante wakes up like that, we just stay silent, and when we go back to bed, we're silent too.
It takes a while for him to relax. And when he does, it's the only time he seems truly vulnerable.
This morning, for some reason, I wake up before him.
He's holding me by the waist, and I noticed some time ago that the relationship between the perimeter of my waist and the width of his hand is offensive.
I measured it one night, out of morbid curiosity: his hand covers it almost entirely, from side to side.
I nestle closer to him. It's cold this morning, and Dante's body is always warmer than mine.
I still prefer him to those Hungarian goose-down comforters—as much as I insist I don't want them, all the Volkovs persistently try to drown me in overpriced luxury, even though I'd be satisfied even in a filthy basement if Dante were with me.
I prepare to go back to sleep. The room is brightening with the daylight outside. It must be early morning—just past dawn—or Dante wouldn't still be here.
That's when a vibration starts. Low, against the wood of the dresser opposite my side of the bed. His phone.
Dante grunts against my hair. He tightens his grip on me. I see the reflex—his hand flying under the mattress and stopping halfway as he realizes: it's just the phone.
The vibration continues. Insistent.
Svetlana, for sure. The only one with the nerve.
After a full minute of torture, with no one saying anything, the phone stops. Silence returns. I almost sigh in relief.
Then, from the nightstand beside me, my phone starts to ring.
It used to be on silent mode all the time, but with the Volkovs, I was forced to change that.
A missed call from Svetlana always meant a huge lecture.
Now I regret it. My ringtone is loud and shrill on purpose, the annoying kind.
It makes my head hurt. It's too early for this.
Dante curses without moving away from me. "What the fuck is that?"
I love how his voice sounds when he wakes up. Deeper, hoarse.
I try to remember. Today isn't a day off. So I reach for the phone purely out of obligation. With the Volkovs, schedules don't matter much either. I've been summoned at questionable hours more times than I can remember.
The name "Svetlana Volkov" glows on the screen.
"Yeah?" I answer. My voice is still a little thick with sleep.
" Leonel ," she says, with no ‘good morning’. " Put your boyfriend on. The idiot refuses to answer his own phone and we have a problem with customs in Rotterdam that needs his attention. "
Your boyfriend. She intones it like an offense.
Like Dmitry, she's also noticed. In fact, she noticed even before him and has protested at every possible opportunity.
At the beginning of the year, she said I was a statistical anomaly.
Asked if I was going to throw myself off a bridge when Dante got tired of me.
She also asked how Dante had never killed me, considering how often, and I quote, I am "inappropriately disrespectful".
According to Dante, the initial impression I gave her was that of a vulnerable and cordial boy, but that image crumbled with each new interaction.
Good. Since then, she's made her opinion my problem.
In March, she told me I was too young to understand that intensity burns out fast. As if the age difference between us was decades. It's seven years. She predicted that, in a month, Dante would be tired of his new toy.
In May, she was perplexed that whatever Dante and I had was still going on.
She told me I was proving myself to be a very valuable yet very unstable asset, and then I heard her yelling at Dante somewhere in the mansion about the black eye he'd given me the night before (which had also made me come, but she didn't find out about that part).
In June, she cornered me in a hallway after a meeting.
This was after I convinced Dante to use a rival as an infiltrator instead of killing him.
She said Dante listens to me, therefore I am a problem, because he could make a bad decision because of me and the mind control abilities she invented for me.
Last month, she gave up the fight. She had to notice at some point that the toy had moved into the dollhouse and redecorated the whole damn thing.
She decided to include me in her calculations and attempts to keep Dante on track—she talks to me when she thinks he's overdoing something and making the wrong decision.
Which is a little funny because, although Dante does listen to me, he's still Dante Volkov.
That means telling him what to do is completely out of the question.
The best I can wish for her is good luck with that.
Calling him my boyfriend is the most explicit acknowledgment she's ever given me. Even if it's laced with disgust. She knows that in the nights and early mornings, he's in my bed. The fastest way to him, now, is through me.
I lift my phone and tilt it back toward Dante. "It's for you. Your sister." I crane my neck to try to see him. "She said you're my boyfriend."
He grunts. But he doesn't protest. At some point, he started to accept it too.
He snatches the phone from my hand. "Why the fuck are you calling him?"
I nestle back into the pillows. Dante starts speaking Russian, which usually happens when they're talking among themselves or when they're fighting. Now, it's both.
I turn to face him, and he adjusts to hold me, without even paying attention. It's become so natural he doesn't have to.
I rest my head on his chest and trace one of his tattoos. I like listening to him speak Russian. I don't understand a word, but it's his voice. I could listen to it for hours.