8. The Dinner
The Dinner
Monika
The dress is blue.
It's the only nice thing I own—the only thing I brought from the farm that isn't stained or torn or worn thin from years of wear.
My mother bought it for me two summers before she died, at a department store in the nearest town, the kind of place where the salesgirls wore name tags and the fitting rooms smelled like cigarette smoke.
She said it brought out my eyes. She said every girl needs one dress that makes her feel like someone else.
I haven't worn it since her funeral.
The fabric is crepe, cheap but soft, the color of the sky just before the sun goes all the way down.
It's too small now—I was fifteen when she bought it, still growing, still shaped like a girl instead of a woman.
The sleeves end at my elbows instead of my wrists.
The hem falls above my knees instead of below them.
The zipper pulls tight across my ribs, and when I breathe, I can feel the fabric strain.
I look at myself in the mirror. The reflection is wrong. The girl in the blue dress has dark circles under her eyes and a mouth that doesn't know how to smile anymore. She looks like someone who has seen things she shouldn't have seen. Someone who has made choices she can't take back.
But she's also the only version of me I have left. So I smooth my hair, pinch my cheeks to bring back some color, and walk out the door.
The car is waiting downstairs.
Black. Tinted windows. The kind of car that people don't notice because they're trying not to notice. The driver is Viktor—I recognize him from the warehouse, though we've never spoken. He's old, older than my father, with a face that looks like it's been carved from something harder than wood.
"Miss Monika," he says, opening the door for me.
"It's just Monika."
He doesn't respond. Just closes the door behind me and gets in the front seat, and we pull away from the curb without another word.
The city slides past the windows. I watch it the way I watch everything now—waiting for the thing that doesn't belong, the shadow in the corner, the man with the knife.
The warehouse changed something in me. Or maybe it just uncovered something that was already there.
A wariness. A knowledge. The understanding that the world is not divided into good and evil but into things that hurt and things that bleed.
I don't know which I am anymore.
The mansion is in the hills, north of the city, where the roads curve and the trees grow thick and the houses become compounds.
We drive through a gate—iron, ornate, the kind of gate that says keep out in a language more expensive than words—and up a long driveway lined with evergreens.
The headlights cut through the dark, illuminating trunks and branches and the occasional glimpse of something that might be a garden or might be a graveyard.
And then we stop, and I see it.
The mansion is obscene.
That's the only word for it. Obscene in the way that wealth is always obscene when you've grown up with nothing.
It's three stories, maybe four, made of stone that glows faintly in the moonlight.
There are turrets, balconies, windows that stretch from floor to ceiling like eyes watching the dark.
A fountain sits in the center of the circular drive—dry now, empty, its basin filled with dead leaves and the memory of water.
I step out of the car and feel the cold on my bare legs. The dress is too thin for November. The heels I borrowed from a coworker are too high. I am a farm girl playing dress-up, and everyone here will know it the moment they see me.
But I walk to the door anyway. Because I have nothing left to lose except my pride, and my pride is already in pieces somewhere between the warehouse and the diner and the night I pulled a bullet from a stranger's side.
The door opens before I knock.
A man in a suit—not Aleksander, someone younger, someone with the same flat eyes as the guards at the warehouse—nods at me and steps aside. I walk into a foyer that could fit my entire apartment inside it.
Marble floors. A chandelier that looks like it was stolen from a palace.
A staircase that curves up toward a ceiling painted with clouds and angels and something that might be a god watching from above.
The air smells like flowers—real flowers, not the kind from a grocery store—and money, and the particular stillness of a house that has no children in it.
I stand in the middle of the foyer and try to remember how to breathe.
"Monika."
His voice comes from the top of the stairs.
I look up, and there he is—Aleksander Mire, standing on the landing with one hand on the railing and the other in his pocket.
He's wearing a suit, of course. Dark charcoal.
A white shirt. No tie tonight, the top button undone, and I see a sliver of his chest, the curve of his collarbone, and I look away before I can look longer.
"You came," he says.
"You invited me."
"So I did." He descends the stairs slowly, taking his time, and I watch him the way I've learned to watch him—searching for the monster beneath the surface, the thing that ordered those cages, the man who built an empire on bones.
But all I see is him. Grey eyes. Silver at the temples.
A mouth that knows how to smile in a way that makes my chest ache.
He reaches the bottom of the stairs and stops a few feet away. His eyes travel over me—the blue dress, the borrowed heels, the hair I spent an hour trying to tame. He doesn't look at my chest. He looks at my face. My eyes. The dark circles I couldn't hide.
"You look beautiful," he says.
"I look like I haven't slept in a week."
"Beautiful and tired. They're not mutually exclusive."
He offers me his arm. I take it, because I don't know what else to do with my hands, and he leads me through the foyer and into a room that might be called a parlor or a sitting room or something else that rich people have names for.
There's a fire in the fireplace, crackling and warm, and there are paintings on the walls—real paintings, oils, the kind that cost more than my father's farm.
And there is Gabe.
He's standing by the fire, one hand on the mantel, the other holding a glass of something amber.
He's wearing a sweater—dark green, soft-looking, the kind of thing that probably cost more than my rent but looks like it was made for him.
His hair is messy, like he's been running his hands through it, and his eyes are fixed on me with an intensity that makes my stomach flip.
He's been coming to the diner for two weeks.
Every night. Sitting at the counter, drinking coffee, asking questions about veterinary school and the farm and the mother I lost. He told me his name was Gabe.
He told me he was a pre-med student, home for break, trying to figure out what kind of doctor he wanted to be.
He didn't tell me his last name.
He didn't tell me he was Aleksander's son.
"Monika," Gabriel says, and his voice is different here. Softer. More careful. Like he's afraid of breaking something. "I didn't know you were coming."
"I didn't know you lived here."
The silence stretches between us—thin, fragile, full of everything we didn't say to each other in the diner.
I feel Aleksander's hand on my arm, his fingers pressing gently, and I realize he's watching us.
Watching both of us. His expression is unreadable, but there's something in his eyes that looks like calculation. Like he's measuring something.
"Gabriel is my son," Aleksander says.
"I didn't know that."
"Now you do."
Gabriel sets down his glass. He walks toward me, slow and hesitant, and I see the nervousness in the way he holds himself—the slight slump of his shoulders, the way his hands curl and uncurl at his sides. He's not like his father. He doesn't know how to hide.
"I should have told you," he says. "At the diner. I should have told you who I was."
"You told me who you were. You told me you wanted to be a doctor. You told me you were trying to be something different." I hold his gaze. "That's more than your father has ever told me."
Gabriel's eyes flick to Aleksander—a quick, anxious glance—and then back to me. "My father is..."
"Dangerous," Aleksander finishes. "Complicated. Not someone you should trust." He says it without heat, without apology, like he's describing the weather. "Shall we eat? The food is getting cold."
Dinner is served in a room that might once have been a ballroom. The table is long—too long for three people—and we sit at one end, clustered together like survivors on a raft. Candles flicker between us, casting shadows that move across the walls like dancers.
The food is exquisite. Courses arrive and depart—soup, salad, something with lamb that melts on my tongue, something with chocolate that makes me close my eyes.
I don't know the names of any of it. I don't know which fork to use or which glass is for water and which is for wine.
I watch Gabriel and copy him, and he pretends not to notice.
Aleksander watches both of us.
He asks me about the diner. About Del, about the regulars. He asks me about the warehouse—not directly, but in the spaces between words, in the way his eyes linger on my hands when I reach for my wine.
I answer. I don't lie, but I don't tell the truth either. I tell him what he wants to hear, because I've learned that's what you do with men like him. You give them enough to keep them interested, and you keep the rest for yourself.
Gabriel is different.
He asks me about Mercy. About the calf I delivered when I was ten. About the way it felt to pull her into the world, to watch her stand on legs that were too long for her body, to name her something that meant something.
"I've never delivered anything," he says. "I've only cut things open. In anatomy lab. It's different when they're already dead."