18. Cass
CASS
In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have done it quite like this.
But the whole night has been a slow drip of poison, and somewhere between the fish course and Raymond’s fourth bourbon, I just… overflowed.
I sat there in this scratchy black silk, smiling at Bill’s wife while she yammered about her grandkids, and every time Raymond’s hand twitched toward me, I went a little colder inside.
Then he called me a “coat hanger.” What a charmer.
Matvei’s hand on his glass went so white at the knuckles I thought the crystal might shatter.
That’s when I started shaking.
With shame, anger, fear—you name it, I felt it. I couldn’t stop thinking, over and over again, that we were right at the finish line.
In fifteen minutes, my husband will be dead.
We’re so close, Gi.
I’m sorry it took this long, but we’re so close now.
By the time Raymond stood up to excuse himself to the restroom, the hope and the dread had braided together so tight in my chest I genuinely thought I might be sick on Bill Oglethorpe’s loafers.
What I’m struggling to make sense of is Matvei himself. He explained to me why he was doing this; he and/or his shadowy bosses have their own reasons for wanting Raymond six feet under. But that’s something else I can’t stop thinking: It feels like there’s more to it.
Why is he doing this for me ?
He doesn’t owe me a damn thing. We’ve known each other for what, not even two months? Half of that I spent pretending he didn’t exist.
He, on the other hand, has literally taken a knife in the ribs on my behalf. He could’ve walked away after the alley and called it square and no one in the world could blame him.
Instead, he keeps showing up.
There’s something about the way he moves through the world that makes me want to crawl inside his coat pocket and live there. He’s not careful with himself, exactly. He’s just certain . Sure of his hands, sure of his aim, sure of where the exits are.
Men like Raymond bluster and bullshit.
Men like Matvei simply do .
And maybe that’s the part I’m not supposed to admit out loud, even to myself: I like it.
I like that he’s dangerous. I like that the same hands that cleaned blood off my knee will put a bullet in my husband tonight without flinching.
I like knowing that, whatever kind of weapon Matvei is, he’s pointed at my enemy now.
Good girls don’t fall for monsters.
Lucky for me, I gave up being a good girl a long time ago.
The only downside is giving up the satisfaction of being the one to do it. The vengeful sister in me, the Mama Bear, wants to be the one pulling the trigger. I went to Khaza in the first place for a reason. Giana deserves my finger on the metal. Not someone else’s.
But the rest of me is overwhelmed with gratitude. Killing is not an easy thing. But Matvei? He’s going to carry that for me. On top of every other thing he’s done without asking what he gets in return.
And he doesn’t even know about the baby.
So maybe that’s why I grabbed him. It wasn’t fair to let him do on my behalf, again and again, without showing him the full picture. He deserves to know, and it fell to me to inform him.
Again, though: My timing is probably less than ideal.
Matvei has gone perfectly still in front of me.
His hand is frozen halfway to the small of his back, lips barely parted.
I need him to move. Let’s take a quick timeout here and break out of operator mode, so I can put a thumb in his chest and say, Hey.
Hey. Look at me. There are two of us now.
You have to come back from wherever you go when you do what you do.
Because I need you to. Because we need you to.
Then he blinks. Just once. It’s the only part of him that moves.
“Mat. Hi. Hello. Are you with me?”
“Say that again.”
“I’m pregnant.” I’m wringing my hands in front of me. “It’s yours.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Raymond hasn’t— He hasn’t been near me in five months. Not in any way that could —” I flop a vague hand at my abdomen. “— do that. So, yes. I’m sure.”
I can practically hear his brain rebooting, like one of those old computers with the spinning rainbow wheel. Please wait. Matvei Satyrin is processing.
“Look,” I blurt, “I know. Believe me, I know. The timing is criminal, no pun intended, and I really, really did not plan to spring it on you with a loaded gun in your waistband, but —”
“How long have you known?”
“Two weeks.”
His jaw works from side to side. “Two weeks.”
“Here, I have a— I have something else. Just— hold on.” I scrabble at the clasp of my clutch with hands that won’t quite cooperate. The little gold catch keeps slipping. I curse at it under my breath. “Here. Here, it’s —”
I pull out the sonogram. It’s been folded into quarters and refolded and unfolded so many times the creases are starting to fuzz. I’ve kept it tucked in the lining of my clutch behind a tampon and a tube of Chanel, the two things in my bag that Raymond won’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
I press it into Matvei’s hand.
He looks down.
And just like that, I watch the operator mask crack down the middle.
It’s such a small thing. A twitch at the corner of his mouth. A tiny softening at the outer edge of his eye. His thumb smooths over the paper like it might tear if he isn’t careful, like it’s not a Xerox of a Xerox of something that was barely discernible in the first place.
His other hand drifts up, very slowly, and presses against his ribs. Right where Mr. Refrigerator stuck him.
I don’t think he knows he’s doing it.
“That dot,” I explain. I have to clear my throat. “The little black blob in the middle. That’s the gestational sac. The white speck inside it is the yolk sac. There’s no, um, no heartbeat yet. It’s too early. I go back in two weeks. To ‘confirm viability.’”
He hasn’t uttered a word.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. And again, this timing sucks. I get that. But I needed you to know. Before you went in there. So that whatever you do next, you do it knowing that there’s two of us now. Three. Whatever. I can’t do math right now.”
He looks up from the sonogram. He steps in close.
“Change of plans,” he murmurs.
I stop breathing. “What? What does that mean?”
“It means we’re not doing it tonight.”
“ What? ”
“Not like this.”
“Mat. Mat , no. No, no, no. We are thirty seconds from done. He is in there right now . He’s drunk, he’s alone, he’s?—”
“I need to think.”
“You need to think ?” My voice has climbed half an octave. I drag it back down by force. “Matvei. Matvei. This was a mistake; I’m sorry. I should’ve waited, but?—
“ Dikarka .” His other hand comes up to cup my face. The sonogram is pinned between his palm and my cheek, slick paper against skin. Our first family group hug. “I need you to trust me.”
“I do trust you, but?—”
“Then keep doing that.” His thumb sweeps under my eye.
I didn’t realize I was crying. “This changes things, Cass. If I walk in there now, with this in my pocket, and something goes wrong—a janitor, a witness, a security camera I didn’t catch—and I get pinched, what happens to you?
What happens to this ?” He taps the paper again. “Hm? Tell me.”
He knows damn well there’s nothing for me to say.
Nodding, he peels the sonogram off my face. He folds it, very carefully, along the existing creases, lining each one up before he presses it flat. Then he opens his suit jacket and tucks it into the inside breast pocket, right over his heart.
“I’ll plan and come back to you with something better. Something that works for…” His hand drifts down between us, the lightest touch, two fingers against the silk over my still-flat belly. “… for all of us.”
His fingers stay there for one beat. Two. Then?—
“Cassandra?”
That’s Raymond’s voice. Sharp. Climbing.
“Cassandra. Where the fuck are you?”
I freeze.
Mat freezes.
And I have the most insane, the most absolutely deranged thought, which is that I want to laugh.
Not because anything is funny. To be clear, not one single thing about this is funny .
But my brain has finally caught up to my body, and what my body has been trying to tell me for the last forty-five seconds, what it figured out the moment Mat pressed his palm to my belly and said all of us , is this:
The plan didn’t just change.
Everything did.