6. Viktor
VIKTOR
I still taste her on my mouth when I wake up, which is an inconvenient thing to notice before I’ve even had coffee.
I push it aside and get to the club early, before the doors open, because Dimitri texted me at seven asking for twenty minutes—and Dimitri doesn’t ask for twenty minutes unless something’s actually wrong.
He’s waiting in the office with two coffees and a face like he hasn’t slept much either, though for entirely different reasons than mine.
“Kazan’s shorting us again,” he says, no greeting, sliding a tablet across the desk. “Third delivery this month. Invoice says forty cases of the good vodka, we counted thirty-four.”
“Same six missing every time?”
“Give or take. And he raised the per-case price eight percent without telling anyone, buried it in the paperwork like we wouldn’t notice.”
I scroll through the numbers while I drink the coffee, and none of it surprises me, exactly. Kazan’s been our distributor for six years, reliable enough that I stopped watching him as closely as I should have somewhere around year three. That’s precisely the mistake that gets exploited eventually.
“He’s testing us,” I say. “Seeing how long it takes before someone notices.”
“Someone noticed. Took me two deliveries, which is embarrassing on our end too.”
I can’t disagree with that. “What do you want to do about it?”
“My instinct’s to replace him.” Dimitri leans back, arms crossed. “But switching suppliers this deep into a relationship draws attention we don’t need right now, with everything else going on.”
“So we don’t replace him. We remind him who he’s dealing with.” I set the tablet down. “Call him in ffor a meeting tomorrow. Bring the invoices. I’ll handle the conversation.”
“You want me there?”
“I want him uncomfortable, and you’re better at uncomfortable than I am.”
“He’s got a shipment coming through the port Friday too. Bigger than usual, more product moving through fewer hands than I’d like.” Dimitri scrolls to another screen. “If he’s cutting corners on vodka cases, I want eyes on that shipment specifically. Making sure nothing else gets creative.”
“Put Sergei on it. He’s good with the port crew, and Kazan doesn’t know his face yet.”
“Already planned on it.” Dimitri almost smiles at that, the first easy thing between us all morning, and for a second the office feels like it always does, business first, everything else waiting its turn.
“There’s something else,” I say, and his face shifts immediately, because he knows my voice well enough by now to hear the difference.
“The wedding.”
“The wedding.” I set my coffee down. “It’s happening Thursday morning. Courthouse downtown, ten o’clock. I need you there.”
“As what?”
“Witness.”
Dimitri’s quiet for a second, turning that over the way he turns over every piece of information I hand him, weighing it before he responds.
“You’re really doing this.”
“I already told you I was.”
“You told me you agreed to marry a stranger in a club. I assumed there’d be more time before it turned into an actual date on an actual calendar.
” He sets his own coffee down too, like this conversation needs both hands free.
“Viktor, think about what you’re bringing into this.
A woman who has no idea who you actually are.
A six-year-old. People who already watch every move you make, waiting for exactly a window like this one. ”
“Nobody’s watching a courthouse wedding.”
“Somebody’s always watching. That’s the job.
” He doesn’t raise his voice, he never does, but there’s a weight in it that makes me actually listen instead of just waiting for him to finish.
“You marry her, she’s tied to you on paper forever, legally, publicly.
If anyone wants to come at you through the people closest to you, you just handed them a name and an address. ”
“I’ve thought about that.”
“Have you thought about the kid too? Because a child changes everything about how exposed you are, and I don’t think you’ve fully sat with that yet.”
He’s not wrong, and I don’t have a clean answer for him, so I don’t try to manufacture one.
“I’ll increase security around the house before they move in. Nobody gets near either of them.”
“That’s not the same as not putting them in danger to begin with.
” He studies me for a long moment, and I watch him actually consider walking away from this conversation entirely rather than saying whatever he’s about to say next.
“You know how this business works better than anyone. Enemies don’t come at the man directly if they can help it.
They come at what he can’t stand to lose.
Right now that’s nothing. The second you say vows in front of a judge, that changes permanently. ”
“I’m aware of how this business works, Dimitri. I’ve run it for fifteen years.”
“And I’ve been your brother a lot longer than that, which is the only reason I’m still standing here saying this instead of just letting you find out the hard way.
” He drags a hand down his face. “I’m not telling you not to do it.
I gave up trying to talk you out of things a long time ago.
I’m telling you to go in with your eyes open, because right now I don’t think you are. ”
“I’m going in with my eyes open.”
“Are you?” He leans forward. “Can I ask you something, and you actually answer honestly instead of giving me the version you’d give anyone else?”
“Go ahead.”
“Is this still just a favor to you? Because two days ago it was a contract with an end date, and now you’re telling me about dinners and picking her up at seven, and you’ve got a look on your face I haven’t seen on you in about a decade.”
I don’t answer right away, and that silence probably tells him more than anything I could actually say.
“It’s complicated.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not a yes either.”
“Viktor.” He says my name the way he says it maybe twice a year, when he’s done letting me get away with deflecting.
“I’ve watched you your whole life, longer than either of us has been in this business.
I have never once seen you agree to something this fast, this reckless, for a stranger, unless some part of you already wanted the reason to say yes. ”
I think about the porch light, her hands against my chest, the way she said my name right before she went inside like she needed the door between us before she could trust herself not to invite me in.
“Maybe,” I say, which is as close to the truth as I’m willing to get out loud right now.
Dimitri exhales, long and slow, and for a second I think he’s going to push harder. Instead, he just nods, like he’s filed the answer away somewhere he can pull it back out later.
“Fine. I’ll be there Thursday. I’ll stand next to you and sign whatever they put in front of me.
” He picks his coffee back up. “But I’m doubling security on the house regardless of what you decide to tell her about any of this.
And Viktor, if this goes sideways because you didn’t want to look too closely at your own reasons, I get to say I told you so. ”
“Understood.”
“Good.” He heads for the door, then stops with his hand on the frame, looking back at me with something that isn’t quite a smile. “For what it’s worth, I hope I’m wrong about the reckless part.”
“So do I.”
“And for what it’s worth on the other side,” he adds, “I haven’t seen you talk about anyone the way you talked about her just now. Not once, our whole lives. Whatever else this is, don’t waste it pretending it’s simpler than it is.”
He leaves before I can answer that, which is probably deliberate on his part, a habit of his when he wants the last word to actually land instead of getting argued back down.
After he’s gone, I sit there with a cooling coffee and a supplier meeting still ahead of me tomorrow, Kazan’s invoices still open on the tablet like they’re waiting for me to actually care about them again.
I don’t, not for another minute. I think about Thursday instead, about a courthouse I’ve driven past a hundred times without ever once thinking I’d walk into it as anything other than a witness for someone else’s trouble.
I think about what Dimitri said, about the look on my face he hasn’t seen in a decade, and I don’t bother arguing with him in my head the way I would with anyone else.
He’s rarely wrong about me. It’s part of why I keep him close.
Eventually I pull the tablet back toward me and start drafting the message to Kazan, setting the meeting for tomorrow afternoon, keeping the wording flat and businesslike, giving him nothing to read into ahead of time.
It’s easier to focus on a man skimming cases of vodka than on the fact that somewhere underneath all of it, quieter than I’d like to admit, I’m looking forward to Thursday more than any part of me expected to.
And because of that, I don’t sit with the silence he leaves behind. I pull out my phone instead and call Harper before I can talk myself out of it.
She picks up on the second ring. “That’s fast. I thought you’d still be at the club.”
“I am. I wanted to ask you something before I lost my nerve.” I glance at the closed office door, half expecting Dimitri to walk back through it. “I’d like to meet Ginger. Properly, I mean, not just in passing before the wedding.”
“Oh.” A pause, and I can hear her recalibrating on the other end. “Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a good idea, actually. She’s been asking who you are.”
“Today, if you’re free. I don’t want to keep putting it off.”
“Today works. There’s a park near her school, the one with the good swings, she calls it. We could meet you there after I pick her up.”
“I’ll be there.”
We settle on a time, and I hang up before I can second-guess the impulse, the same impulse that’s been sitting in my chest since last night on her porch, her hands against my shirt, her voice telling me goodnight like she needed the door between us to actually mean it.
The park is smaller than I expect, a patch of green wedged between two residential streets, swing set and a slide faded from years of sun. Harper’s already there when I arrive, Ginger a few feet away, inspecting something in the grass with total concentration.
“Hey,” Harper says, her voice pitched deliberately even, the sound of a woman gauging how a six-year-old is about to react to a stranger. “Ginger, baby, come here a second. I want you to meet someone.”
Ginger looks up, assessing me with the same unflinching directness her mother has, and walks over without any visible nerves, which either means she’s braver than most kids her age or hasn’t yet learned there’s a reason to be cautious.
“This is Viktor,” Harper says. “You know, the man I told you I was going to marry.”
Ginger studies me a moment longer, head tilted, and whatever she’s looking for, she apparently finds it, because she shrugs and asks, “Do you push swings?”
“I’ve been told I’m reasonably good at it.”
“Okay.” That, apparently, settles the matter entirely, and she takes off toward the swing set at a full run, already shouting something about wanting the higher one.
“Give her five minutes and she’ll forget you’re basically a stranger,” Harper says, watching her go. “She warms up fast once she’s decided someone’s safe.”
“Good instincts, then.”
We sit on a bench close enough to watch Ginger climb onto a swing and immediately demand a push from the air itself, apparently, since nobody’s actually pushing her yet.
“I need to tell you something,” I say, before I can talk myself into waiting even one more day. “About the club.”
Harper goes slightly still beside me. “Okay.”
“I don’t dance there. I never have.” I keep my eyes on Ginger, giving Harper room to react without my full attention pinning her in place.
“I own the club, Harper. I have for years. The men on that stage work for me. I’m not sure why I let you believe otherwise that first night, except that you looked so certain, and I found I didn’t want to correct you yet. ”
She’s quiet long enough that I finally look over, bracing for something between fury and betrayal.
Instead, relief breaks across her face so plainly it’s almost funny.
“Oh, thank God.” She laughs, a little breathless. “I’ve spent weeks trying to figure out how to feel about being married to a stripper. I didn’t want to say anything because it felt rude, but Viktor, I was building an entire secret plan for how to explain that to Ginger’s teachers eventually.”
“That’s the reaction I was hoping for. Relief, not anger.”
“I’m still processing the anger part. Give it a minute.” But she’s still smiling, so I let myself believe her. “So if you’re not a dancer, what exactly are you? Because owning a club that pays that well for stage work isn’t exactly a small operation.”
“My family had money, going back a generation or two. I built the club myself, expanded from there into a few other business interests over the years.” I keep it vague, true in its outline without filling in the parts that would frighten her before she’s ready to hear them.
“It’s a longer conversation than a park bench really allows.
I promise you’ll get the fuller version eventually. ”
“That’s fair.” She studies me a moment, weighing the vagueness, and apparently decides to let it go for now. “Thank you for telling me the dancer part, at least. That one was genuinely stressing me out.”
“You could have just asked.”
“I didn’t want to seem rude about your job. I was raised better than that.”
I laugh, real and unguarded, and for a moment the entire weight of the morning, Kazan, Dimitri’s warnings, the wedding looming three days out, all of it goes quiet under the simple fact of sitting on a park bench with a woman who’s relieved to learn I’m not a stripper and Ginger shrieking with joy on a swing a few feet away.
“Higher!” Ginger yells, and I get up to push her, because apparently that’s the job now, and I find I don’t mind it at all.