15. Mat
MAT
My office has felt like a tomb since the day I first stepped through the doors of Snyder & Oglethorpe.
Today, it feels more like that than ever.
The cleaners have come and gone, so I’m all alone. The lights on the floor are still set to the motion sensors. Every time I shift in my chair, the overheads click on and blind me. Every time I sit still long enough to think, they wink off again, and I’m plunged into darkness.
I’ve been here since five. I couldn’t sleep. I drove home from the Mandarin around two, walked into my apartment, took off my jacket, hung it up, then put it right back on and walked out again. There was no point pretending I was going to close my eyes.
So now, I’m at my desk with a folder open in front of me, the same folder Afon dropped in my lap three weeks ago.
I’m supposed to be planning. The devil’s in the details, they say, and that’s where I belong: planning, scheming, plotting, preparing.
I’m supposed to be deciding which night, which window, which gun. I’m supposed to be thinking about the little plastic bag of residue that goes on Cass’s fingers and the way I’ll arrange her hand on the grip so the ballistics make sense.
Instead, I keep thinking about her tiny, scared, defiant voice ringing out in the darkness.
Let’s go kill my husband.
For as long as those syllables echoed in that cramped closet and her hand stayed in mine, I believed that there might actually be a way for both of us to get out of this shit alive and intact.
Then came the flinch.
A telltale fucking flinch.
She’s hiding something.
There’s a piece of this she didn’t put on the table. Whatever it is, it’s precious enough that she looked at me, in the dark, and decided I couldn’t have it.
So I’m left to sit here and brood on what she might’ve been preparing to say.
Sighing, I turn my attention back to the folder.
The plan, the way Afon laid it out, is clean. Open and shut. I sneak in after they’re asleep and put a hole in Raymond’s head while he snores. Then I put the gun in her hand and sneak right back out. The cops will do the rest.
The wife is not a person. Not for this. For this, she is a door we walk through.
Fuck! Out of nowhere, my rib pangs like I’m being stabbed all over again. I press my hand flat to it until the wave of agony passes, though it leaves a dull, sticky, sour taste in my mouth for a while after.
My eyes drift to my phone. I could call Afon, but what would I even say? Uncle, this isn’t the route we want to take. There’s another opening somewhere. There has to be.
But what would be the point of that? He’d laugh at me.
Then he’d stop laughing, and ask very quietly if I was compromised.
I’d lie, then he’d know I was lying, and then I’d be the one with the residue on my fingers.
Family or not, there’s a certain way things are done in the Bratva, and we both know it.
Or worse, he’d hear me out. He’d let me say my piece. He’d nod in that slow way of his. And then he’d remind me, very gently, of the debt.
Fifteen years, plemyannik. You owe me fifteen years of my life back. Are you really going to abandon me now, for the sake of a woman you’ve known for a few measly weeks?
I put the phone down without dialing.
Soon, the lights click off. I let the room get dark around me. Then I stand up, grab my coat, and leave.
These days, Kir lives in a brownstone in the West Village. It has a black door and a brass knocker shaped like a lion, which Jillian picked out, because Kir’s taste is so minimalistic that it might as well not exist.
I knock at a quarter to eight on New Year’s morning. My timing is a bit rude, but I’m past caring.
There’s a long pause. Then footsteps on hardwood. Then the door cracks open.
But it isn’t Kir.
It’s his fiancée, Jillian.
She’s in a robe, her red hair piled in a knot on top of her head, her freckles standing out bright. There’s a mug of something warm in her hand. Her free hand is resting, very lightly, on the small swell of her stomach.
She’s three months along, give or take. They’re both glowing with joy these days.
“Mat!” she says, happy but perplexed. “What a happy surprise.”
“In the neighborhood,” I say. “Thought I’d swing by.”
“Ah.” She smiles. “Kir’s at the office.” She tilts her head. “He didn’t tell you?”
“I might’ve forgotten to ask.”
“Hm.” She studies my face for a beat. Whatever she sees there makes her step back from the door and open it wider. “Well, get in here. You look like hell.”
She leaves me no room to demur. I sigh and follow reluctantly, then she closes the door behind me and pads down the hall in bare feet. I follow her into the kitchen, which smells like cinnamon. There’s a half-eaten banana on the counter and a copy of the Times folded open to the crossword.
She points at a stool. “Sit.”
My best friend’s wife is getting bossy as hell these days. But I sit anyway.
She refills her mug from a kettle on the stove, then pulls down another, fills it, and slides it across to me without asking what I want. It’s tea. Some herbal thing. I don’t drink tea, but I hold it for the warmth.
Jillian leans against the counter across from me. She sips her tea and watches me over the rim of her mug, her green eyes steady, and waits for me to spill my guts.
This is an old reporter trick of hers. I’ve watched her do it to sources. She did it to me the first time Kir brought me to dinner, and I sat there and told her, unprompted, about a case I shouldn’t have been talking about, because the silence got long enough that I filled it.
I’m not going to do it this time.
“So are you gonna talk,” she asks at last, “or are you gonna make me put my reporter hat on and start asking prying questions?”
I shrug. “What’s there to talk about?”
She rolls her eyes. “The hard way it is, then. Alright. Why are you here?”
“I wanted to see Kir.”
Her gaze narrows. But then she exhales and the hardness goes out of her face. “Whatever it is, you can say it out loud in this kitchen. It won’t leave.”
I set the mug down and run a hand over my jaw. I haven’t shaved, so the stubble is past the point of being attractive and into caveman territory.
“There’s a… job,” I say carefully. “The kind that comes with collateral.”
Her hand moves, very slightly, to her stomach again. I don’t think she knows she does that. It’s been happening a lot in the last few weeks, every time something’s heavy in the room.
“Hm.” She picks up her mug again. “And you came to Kir, on New Year’s morning, to ask him to talk you into it? Or out of it?”
“Something along those lines.”
She nods. “You’re stuck with me instead, though.”
“Lucky me.”
She pulls out the stool across from me and sits on it. “Okay. I’m not going to ask who the collateral is, or what the job is. I don’t want to know. But I’m going to ask you something else.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why did you say yes?”
“To the job?”
She nods.
I look at the mug in my hands. I haven’t thought about my dad in a long time.
The last time I saw him, Afon was showing me how to rinse the blood off my hands in a puddle before we left him behind for good.
That was also the moment that Afon and I intertwined our fates.
I owed my uncle every breath I would ever take from then on.
I tried to fight that link. I convinced myself that walking away from the Bratva at fifteen would be enough to sever the tie. Law school, the firm, the clean suits and clean record. For a little while there, I was so sure I’d done it. Achieved escape velocity. Broken free.
Turns out, the tie has always been loose around my neck.
Just waiting to tighten.
“Because I owe somebody,” I answer at last. “And this is the bill.”
Jillian nods. She expected something along those lines, I’m sure, so she’s not surprised in the least.
“Mat,” she says eventually, “can I tell you something?” She turns her mug in her hands.
“I’m a late addition to this family. You know that.
I came to it as a reporter, originally, asking questions I shouldn’t have been asking.
And then I stayed. I’ve learned a lot of things, and I made my peace with a lot more.
So when I tell you this, I’m not telling you from the cheap seats.
Okay? I’m telling you from in here . With you. ”
“Okay.”
She looks at me with concern in her eyes. “There are some lies that can hurt worse than murder.”
I open my mouth, but she holds up a hand. “Let me finish,” she insists. “Guys like you and Kir think the worst thing you can do to a person is the obvious thing. The big, loud, irreversible thing. Right? Pain. Torture. Death.”
“… Something like that.”
“Yeah. I know. I’ve watched men in this family tell that little self-delusion for a long time now.
” She shakes her head. “It’s wrong, though.
Because the things you can do to a body are over fast. Lies, though…
Lies live forever. You can’t outrun them.
Whatever you’re doing, or planning, or saying to this…
this ‘ collateral’… It’ll haunt her forever.
She’ll wake up every morning for the rest of her days and try to figure out which things are true and which aren’t worth a damn.
And she won’t be able to tell one from the other.
That not-being-able-to is going to eat her alive. ”
“Jillian—”
“I’m still not done.” She clears her throat.
“I’m not telling you this to talk you out of it.
I’m not your priest and I don’t know your debt.
Kir owes Lukas things I’ll never understand, and I’m not in the business of telling men in this family they shouldn’t pay their debts.
That’d be hypocritical of me, and also exhausting, not to mention a waste of my time. ”
“Then what are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you not to lie to yourself about what you’re doing.
” She sets her mug down. “If you’re going to put this collateral in a cage and throw away the key, do it with your eyes open.
The lie is the thing you’ll have to carry.
Not just her, but you, too . Forever. So decide, sooner rather than later, whether you can carry it. And then go do the job, or don’t.”
She reaches across the counter and puts her hand over mine. It’s warm from the mug. Her engagement ring glitters in the kitchen light.
“For what it’s worth,” she adds, “I’m sorry. Whoever she is.”
She squeezes once, then lets go, and picks up her tea again like nothing happened.
I stand up. “Tell Kir I came by.”
I leave my mug on the counter, untouched. She walks me to the door. With every step we take, I feel more and more certain.
Collateral damage. That’s what Cass is. That’s what she has to be.
“Drive safe,” Jillian says. She closes the door.
I stand on the stoop for a second in the dull gray morning. The brass lion looks back at me, mute and snarling.
Then I go back to the office. At my desk, I open the folder again, and I start to plan.