12. Cass
CASS
The invitations were sent out on thick, cream-colored cardstock with gold foil trim, which is Raymond’s way of signaling to the universe that he is Very Important and also has Very Good Taste.
The Law Offices of Snyder & Oglethorpe
cordially invite you
to ring in the New Year…
As if Raymond has ever done anything “cordially” in his entire fucking life. The only thing “cordial” about him is the cord I’d like to wrap around his throat.
I stand in front of the bedroom mirror in a backless emerald gown that Raymond picked out without asking my opinion on the subject.
I keep running my palms down the front of it over and over, not because there are wrinkles, but because, if I don’t keep my hands busy, they’ll find their way to my belly.
And if they find their way to my belly, Raymond will notice.
“Cassandra.” His reflection appears behind mine, straightening his bowtie in the mirror. He smells like his cologne, which I’m pretty sure is Fire & Brimstone by Satan Himself . “Are you ready?”
“Almost.”
“Don’t make me wait.” He half-turns, then pauses before leaving to add, “And smile tonight, would you? You’ve been moping around this apartment like a kicked dog for a month. That won’t do in front of my colleagues.”
“Yes, Raymond.”
He pats my hip. I don’t flinch. I’ve gotten very, very good at not flinching. It’s a skill I’m going to put on my LinkedIn one day, right between Partially fluent in Spanish and Can stumble her way through Microsoft Excel.
Cassandra Snyder: Does Not Flinch Under Duress. Available for Hire.
… Soon.
The ballroom at the Mandarin Oriental has too much gold, too much champagne, and too many women in dresses with astronomical price tags. A string quartet saws away in the corner. Waiters float between clusters of partners and their wives with trays of flutes and canapés.
I suppose it’s all very pleasant and nice, if you’re in the right state of mind to notice those sorts of things. Since I’m not, Vivaldi sounds more like nails on a chalkboard.
Raymond’s hand comes to rest on the small of my back the second we cross the threshold, and it stays there as if he’s super-glued to me. He walks me through the room like a show pony, parading me past men I’ve met a hundred times whose names I still can’t be bothered to remember.
I do exactly as promised: I smile. Even when my cheeks start to hurt from the prolonged effort, I laugh at the right moments and say, Oh, isn’t that something! whenever someone pauses long enough to require a response.
I’ve been doing this for four years. I could do it in my sleep.
I could do it pregnant, too, apparently.
Add that to the LinkedIn.
My hand drifts up toward my womb, but I catch it before it lands and fold it into my other hand at my waist instead, like the good little wife I am.
“Raymond!”
A woman in head-to-toe Valentino descends on us, and Raymond’s attention pivots. I use the opportunity to ease half a step back away from him, take a long sip of the sparkling water I’ve been nursing since we walked in, and scan the room for a bathroom or a balcony or really any exit at all?—
And that’s when I see him.
Matvei.
He’s standing across the ballroom, one elbow on the bar, a whiskey in his hand. Black tux. Black bowtie. Black everything, except the pale skin of his throat and the piercing blue of his eyes, which are already fixed on me, because why wouldn’t they be?
What is he doing here?!
My first thought is that I’m being stalked.
My second thought is that I’m being watched over, which—given what I saw Matvei do to those men in the alley—is less reassuring than you might expect.
My third thought is that life can always, always get worse. I am the proof in the shit pudding.
My feet stop working. My lungs stop working. Every organ in my body files a joint complaint and storms off the job with no plans of coming back.
Matvei, on the other hand, seems unfazed. Without moving a muscle, he gazes calmly at me over the rim of his whiskey like he’s been standing there waiting for me to turn around all night. Or for my whole life, really.
Raymond’s hand tightens on my back. “Ah!” he says brightly. “There he is.”
“Who?” I manage to splutter, pretending I was not just zoning out badly.
“My protégé. Come. I want you to meet him.”
My protégé.
My protégé.
My motherfucking protégé.
… This can’t be happening.
I let Raymond steer me across the ballroom, past a dowager in pearls, a senator’s wife, and a man I’m fairly certain owns half of Queens. The closer we get to Matvei, the blanker his face becomes, and the more ice settles into mine, because one of us has to sell this, and I am not up to the task.
“Matvei!” Raymond booms, clapping him on the shoulder. “There you are. Hiding at the bar like an Irishman.”
“Thank God I’m not Irish, then,” replies Matvei coolly. “Russian through and through.”
“Ah, well, we can’t all be perfect, can we?” Raymond jokes. He immediately bursts out cackling at his own really-not-that-funny joke. “Glad you could make it.”
Matvei’s mouth does a strange twist that does not resemble any human smile I’ve ever seen before. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“I should hope not. Have you met my wife? Cassandra, this is Matvei Satyrin. My best associate. He’ll make partner before he’s thirty-five if I have anything to say about it.”
Matvei’s eyes pin me to the floor. “Mrs. Snyder.”
“Mr. Satyrin.” My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. “It’s a pleasure.”
“The pleasure is mine.”
He takes the hand I don’t remember offering. He holds it a beat too long. Raymond doesn’t notice, thank God. He’s turning away to flag down a waiter, already losing interest in this small, polite exchange between his wife and his favorite lawyer, because why would he care? Why would he ever care?
“I hear you’re his best associate,” I say, because I have to say something or I’ll scream.
“He’s a flatterer.” Matvei lets my hand go. “I hear you’re his best wife.”
“No, only his latest.”
And, if I have it my way…
… his last.
Raymond returns with two fresh glasses of champagne and presses one into my hand before I can protest. I hold it and don’t drink. Matvei’s eyes flicker like he’s doing math in his head, but he says nothing.
“Darling,” Raymond says, a word that grates on my nerves, “stay and chat. I need to go shake a few hands. Matvei, keep her entertained, will you? She gets bored at these things. Can’t have her wandering off, you know?
Pretty things like her have a tendency to fall into the wrong hands if a man’s not careful. ”
Matvei inclines his head in a graceful half-bow that looks almost royal when he does it. “Of course.”
And then Raymond is gone, cutting through the crowd toward a knot of men in the far corner. I’m left standing alone at the bar with the father of the baby in my uterus, who is coincidentally also the man I walked into a bar to hire to kill the man who just introduced us.
Matvei waits until Raymond is out of earshot. Then, very quietly, without looking at me: “Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere that isn’t here. Now.”
Matvei finds a corridor off the ballroom, past the coat check and down a narrow service hall, and opens a door onto what appears to be a storage room for extra banquet chairs.
He steps in and I follow. Then he shuts the door and leans his back against it.
He doesn’t seem interested in talking right away. I decide we’d better not ignore the elephant in the, er, closet. “You didn’t think to mention this key detail at any point during our previous conversations?”
“I didn’t know who he was to you,” he replies. “You wouldn’t give me a name, remember?”
In fact, I do remember. I also remember exactly why I wouldn’t give him a name.
And I remember, with sickening clarity, what Matvei promised he’d do if I did.
Once you tell me, I’m going to hurt them.
I’m going to hurt them very badly.
“Oh, God.” I sit down hard on one of the stacked banquet chairs. “Oh, Great God Almighty.”
“Breathe.” He crouches in front of me, but he keeps his hands to himself.
He knows better than to touch me right now, which is one of the thousand infuriating things about him: that he knows exactly when to and exactly when not to, with a precision that Raymond has never once come within a country fucking mile of in the four agonizing years of our marriage.
“Look at me.”
Reluctantly, I do.
“The job you tried to hire for at the bar on the night we met. Tell me now and tell me plainly. Who was it?”
I almost laugh. Because here we are. Here we finally are, months later, in a coat closet off a New Year’s gala, and the question I wouldn’t answer in an alley or a hospital bed is about to come out of my mouth anyway, whether I want it to or not.
“Raymond,” I whisper. “It was Raymond.”
He closes his eyes. Just for a second. “Yeah,” he says. “I figured.”
“You figured?”
“I put it together about ten seconds after my uncle put a folder on my desk last month.”
“After your who put a what ? —”
“Shh. Lower your voice.” He opens his eyes.
They are the color of a gas flame right before it turns white.
“The Bratva—my people—want him dead,” he explains quietly.
“My uncle dropped the assignment in my lap three weeks ago. Raymond runs an outfit that’s been muscling into our territory.
I’m supposed to be the one who puts him down. ”
I hear myself make a strange, strangled, highly concerning little squeak. “You’re kidding.”
“For many reasons, I wish I was. But I’m not.”
“You are telling me that you, the man I tried to hire to kill my husband, also work for my husband, and your Russian mob bosses have also decided to kill my husband, and you are the one they picked to do it. Am I summarizing the situation correctly?”
“Impressively concise.”
I put my face in my hands. “Jesus fucking Christ,” I mutter into my palms. “Is there a hidden camera? Is someone going to jump out with a microphone? Is this a bit?”
“Unfortunately not.”
I drag my hands down my face, careful not to smudge my mascara, and look up at him. “Okay,” I say. “Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Let me think.”
He nods.
So I think.
It doesn’t take long.
Because ultimately, it all comes down to one unchangeable fact: I swore over my sister’s closed coffin five years ago that I’d get revenge against the man who put her there. I only met Matvei in the first place because I didn’t think I had it in me to do what must be done.
I froze, and Raymond lived, and Giana stayed dead.
But now, the universe is once again handing me the exact man I went looking for. The exact. Same. Man.
Better yet, he is telling me that he wants Raymond dead, too. That he’s been tasked with it. He has people and plans and a will and a way. All the things I’m lacking.
Is that not a sign?
“Okay,” I decide at last. “Do it with me.”
He goes very still. “Say that again.”
“Do it with me,” I repeat. I lift my chin. “You and me together. We plan it. We execute it. Your uncle gets his body. I get?—”
For one wild second, I consider telling him everything.
He’d listen and he’d understand, I think.
I don’t know much about Matvei, so I could be wrong on that front, but I don’t think I am.
There’s just something in his eyes, a sadness and a loneliness and a fierceness, that says he’d understand me perfectly.
But I don’t. I have to remember that this is a transaction, at the end of the day. The less intimately involved we are with each other, the better.
I’m not gonna tell him about Giana, and I’m sure as fuck not gonna tell him about the baby. It’s better like this. It’s the only way.
I swallow. “Your uncle gets his body, and I get free.”
Matvei stands up out of his crouch and looms above me, as huge and beautiful as he is terrible. “You understand what you’re asking for.”
“I understand perfectly.”
“You understand that once we start, we don’t stop.”
“I understand.”
“You understand that my people are not your people. If this goes wrong, I can’t protect you from all of them at once.”
“I understand that, too.”
“You understand that you and I are going to have to lie to everyone we know for as long as it takes.”
“Matvei, I have been lying to everyone I know for the last five years. I’m basically a professional at this point.”
He hesitates, and for as long as that hesitation lasts, I think he’s going to decide that I’m an operational risk, not worth the trouble, and I’ll be right back where I started, only more alone than ever.
Then he sticks out his hand. “Partners,” he says. “Say it back to me.”
I grab his hand. His fingers enfold mine, swallowing me up. “Partners.”
“Good girl.”
I close my eyes. I let myself have it, just for a second. The warmth of his hand, yes, and the ease of being in his aura, but also the relief of not being alone in this anymore.
From out in the ballroom, distantly, I hear the string quartet strike up something festive and the first murmurs of a countdown starting.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
Matvei squeezes my hand. “Happy New Year, Mrs. Snyder.”
Three. Two. One.
“Happy New Year, Matvei.” I open my eyes. “Let’s go kill my husband.”