41
ALASKA
It’s the first time Vega sets foot in this temple, and the dork climbs the steps like she’s eighty, letting out a groan on every one. And damn, it smells like the woods, like clean, and like Nat—a smell I’ll never forget.
We step inside and the door makes the kind of sound that’s a straight-up miracle I needed. Vega, of course, launches into a running commentary like we didn’t just come out of a situation that left our hearts redlining. She starts pointing at lamps, at that big window, those beams, the plants.
“I feel like I’m at Hogwarts and we haven’t even made it to the table yet,” she says, bold as hell.
A weird laugh bubbles up in me, the kind where you can’t tell if it’s nerves or life being a bad joke. If I could, I swear I’d tell this whole story in alphabetical order, just to throw off my future therapist so she won’t catch a thing.
Nat, the bitch, looks like she’s got subatomic particles in her feet; she’s zipping all over the house.
She opens cabinets, slams drawers, pulls out plates, all at light speed.
Vega and I just watch. Somebody please sit her down and tell her we are not about to explode, to breathe a little, that this much energy is not necessary.
Anyway, we take turns showering; I’m last. When I come out, the coffee table in the living room is already set.
Bread, cheese, Mediterranean olives, nuts, chocolate.
And for us, vodka. Vodka, to Nat, is a religion—no debate.
For Vega, orange juice; she’s got a baby on board now and somebody told her vitamin C is everything.
My sister looks at my glass with mournful eyes.
If she weren’t pregnant, vodka would already be coursing through her veins, but, well, that’s responsibility for you.
Nat—very much family—promises to save a bottle for when the baby comes out and she can act like a functional human with the right to party and do whatever the hell she wants.
Dawn breaks and we eat, which is the most surreal part. And even though it seems impossible, the vodka even sends a pretty jolt down my throat. Each of us in her own movie, you know? Vega breaks bread, not a single mention of what we just lived through.
The house turns warm with the light coming in; the blanket folded on the couch, the books stacked haphazardly calm me, and the sky outside brings signs that we aren’t dead yet.
I check my hands, looking for traces of what happened, and the drama turns into an anecdote, blood exists only as a memory; now I’m someone else, I swear to myself.
And I promise to write a letter to Agatha Christie to tell her how easy it is to become the clue in a case already closed.
When Nat insists we need to sleep a little, neither Vega nor I so much as blink; we’re wired to life and death at the same time, our brains doing a crazy dance.
Nat insists we take her bed; she’ll stay on the couch, like a heroine sleeping with one eye open, watching the world.
I tell her to come to bed, we’ll make room, let’s do a three-way spoon, because the least we can do, right?
And she plants that kiss on my temple that’s half cuddly and half “don’t you dare contradict me,” and I get it, of course—tonight she needs to keep watch, stand guard, be the background extra while the leads—meaning us—sleep, or try to.
I leave the door ajar, neither fully open nor fully closed.
Vega and I lie down, each blasting off to her side as if we’d never shared a real, capital-F fear.
We look like two little girls in busted adult bodies, the kind who’ve seen it all and couldn’t care less.
She lets out a sigh from deep in her soul; I roll over.
I find her knuckles, a thing we’ve done since we were tiny, playing at guessing which bone stuck out the most to calm ourselves.
A sliver of light slips shyly through the window. Out there, the wind and rain do the soundtrack, the kind of noise that soothes your soul. There’s a serious silence, yeah, but not the awkward kind—the kind that lets you breathe. Now we can talk.
“Lasky…” Vega whispers, tucked against me, with that voice you get when you’re afraid someone will read your thoughts but you’re dying to have them confirmed.
“What.” I play it coy, because a girl has her pride and her method for rationing out the drama, and I’m not going to spoon-feed her.
“You did it.”
"I swore," I whisper with a back-alley mob vibe that comes naturally because, I mean, if I’m going to be the hitwoman, I might as well do it with class, right? "I had it in my planner, between the dentist appointment and picking up a good avocado."
"Be serious, I don’t want jokes." She goes very serious and snaps at me, exhausted from rolling her whole life and, on top of that, mine. "That was a figure of speech, Lasky, don’t fuck with me—a kiddie fantasy, a vent, a ‘wish they’d drop dead’ said out loud, like when you say you’re joining a gym in January. "
"Okay." I brush the hair stuck to her forehead and act like I’m calm, even though my pulse is spiking and my head is full of warning lights. "In the end you rushed everything. You’re so impatient, Vega. No shade, but I’m saying it."
"I seized the moment, okay? We’d talked about it, and the burgers, the tension, the drama—it all lined up. It was the script."
"Rashel was there and Nat was there. The script said we had to talk to Irina alone—no audience, without Nat having to swallow the mess. It pisses me off a little that you didn’t stick to the plan, with its steps, its commas, and its ‘if this happens, we do that.’ It wasn’t a whim."
"Irina didn’t care they were there, Alaska. Eight hours in and she served them up on a silver platter, no doubts, crystal clear."
"Yeah, faster than I expected. Even so, we almost blew it, girl. Irina wasn’t going to kill them."
"I’m not so sure. Did you see her face? She was furious. She didn’t care what Rashel said, she didn’t care about the code, she didn’t care about the protocol. I saw her mind made up."
"That’s you talking. We don’t know what she was going to do. Business Irina is one person, vigilante Irina is another, and family Irina is a different one. Maybe she was thinking about beating the crap out of them, threatening them, doing it her way, getting them thrown in prison."
"She killed Mauro without blinking, Lasky. Because he wouldn’t shut up when she was talking to you. He was getting on her nerves and she shot him without even looking at him."
"That wasn’t why, Vega. And you know it."
"She was going to kill them anyway. We’ve been chumps for months. Soraya’s dead because we waited, because we hesitated, because we didn’t make the move. Fuck."
"We waited because we weren’t sure. It’s one thing to fantasize and another to do this. If you go in, you make it airtight. And why did you grab her gun first? Because you weren’t that sure Irina was going to do it either."
"Fine. I wasn’t a hundred percent. And I wasn’t a hundred percent with you, either. I saw you with the gun and it freaked me out."
"Well, now you see I was."
Vega keeps staring at the ceiling. I think that if this were a livestream, chat would be begging for context with nasty emojis. There’s context.
All this started almost as soon as we got here, when we saw power everywhere, money flowing, private security, guns, muscle, hierarchies, secrets—everything thrown up shamelessly, and on top of it all, with a Russian accent.
We joked about it, said it out loud to see if it sounded like a plan or a joke, and every day it sounded less like a joke.
We fantasized about telling Irina, her stopping them, the joke being over. It got out of hand, Marvel-trailer level, especially after the night of my birthday.
Cut to flashback. Packed bar, crappy music, me with a crooked plastic crown. Patri latched onto me, the queen of spilling tea, with that face like she was about to drop a bomb. And Nat across from us, watching.
Inside, I was fuming on two fronts: at whatever Patri was about to drop and at Nat shutting me down at the mall, which still had my bile rising.
So I did what I do when I want to be left alone: I flirt. Hand on her arm, dumb little laugh, badly acted intense stare.
"Babe, you look gorgeous today. Those lashes," I blurted, and brushed a strand of hair from her face.
Nat looked. Patri took the bait and didn’t—she knows me.
"Don’t change the subject, Alaska. I’ve got something big," she said, staring me down.
I fantasized about killing the music, climbing onto the table, and giving a season-finale speech, but I kept my mouth shut.
"Go on, spill it," I said, clinking my glass against hers for no reason.
"Soraya got knocked up."
My hands went cold. Soraya, fourteen. She was eleven when we left.
She arrived at six with a Dora backpack and a crappy note.
We took care of her a thousand times. We gave her the last piece of candy.
We tucked her in at night. She was ours in everything but paperwork.
We left, and we left her there, easy to use. And they did.
"And the father?" I asked, my voice shaking.
"She said it was Mauro. And she didn’t want to get an abortion."
My stomach flipped. I pictured storming the home with Irina and half the Russian mob, submachine guns, freeze-frame, "case closed" popping up onscreen.
"What happened? You said she was—did she end up having an abortion?" I said, and kept up the flirting; I touched her waist, winked, cheap theater, and Nat was over by the wall stewing in her bad mood, and I was stewing in mine, itching to tell her to fuck off over the mall thing.
"A substitute teacher at her high school. One of those intense women who never shut up. She reported it. There was a whole thing. The cops came in. Questions, poker faces, you know."
I nodded. I knocked back my drink. Poured another. I wanted to stop the birthday, ask Alexa to hit mute, and pull out a whiteboard to start sketching a new plan.
"And the girl?" I asked.