29. Cass
CASS
The shot rings out.
But it’s not mine.
It comes somewhere down the line to my left, a flat, hard crack that punches through the still air, and a split second later, the world detonates around me.
The pheasants have been set loose. Squawking, fleeing, terrified. There’s a whirring, beating, frantic sound as they burst from the cages at the tree line, a hundred copper-and-emerald bodies climbing wild against the metallic sky.
Every man with a gun starts firing at once.
Bang. Bang. Bang-bang-bang.
The trees scream. The crows scream. Someone whoops. Someone else laughs the high, ugly laugh of a man with too much bourbon in him.
And me?
I scream, too.
My finger jerks against the trigger, and the shotgun bucks against my shoulder so hard it nearly takes my collarbone off.
The blast goes well wide—high and to the left, a dozen feet over Raymond’s hat and up into the canopy where it shears a handful of birch twigs loose.
They flutter down between us in slow motion, pale and curling, like sad confetti.
It goes without saying that Raymond does not die.
The recoil throws me back a staggering half-step.
My ears are ringing, my eyes are watering, and my nose is full of gunpowder and my own armpit sweat.
The whole symphony of gunfire is still going on around us, with every man in the firm too busy missing his own pheasant to notice that one wife at the edge of the woods just took a shot at her husband and pretended she was aiming for a bird.
My misfire is swallowed whole by everyone else’s.
Thank God, I think.
And then immediately: Goddammit.
I lower the shotgun slowly, hands shaking so violently I’m half-afraid I’ll set it off again into my own foot.
Raymond’s expression is?—
I don’t know what it is.
His brows are still pulled together. The smarmy half-smile has gone from his face, replaced by a suspicious squint. But it’s not a look of outrage. Like, if someone had just tried to unload a shotgun into my piehole, I wouldn’t be nearly that calm.
Which leads me to wonder:
Did he see the barrel? Did he know what I was doing?
He’d dropped his head right as I leveled it and his eyes met mine. In that regard, there’s no way he could have missed it.
But on the other hand, the pheasants came up and the shooting started at that same instant. Everyone everywhere is still firing wild into the trees. In the chaos of it all, did he understand what I intended to do?
I don’t know. I truly don’t. I’ve made it my full-time job for four years to read every little shift in his mood. But now, he’s produced an expression I have no entry for in my catalogue.
A pheasant, hit somewhere down the line, drops out of the sky and lands six feet behind him with a wet, broken-bag thud. Raymond doesn’t even glance at it.
His eyes are on me .
“Cassandra,” he says.
I gulp a mouthful of frigid, smoky air. “Sorry— I—” I lift the shotgun an inch and let it drop again. “It went off. I didn’t mean— It just went off.”
He looks at me for another long beat.
Then he smiles.
“Why don’t you hand that to me before you take somebody’s ear off, hm?”
My fingers are welded to the stock. The barrel droops in my grip but my knuckles won’t unlock. There’s a roaring in my ears that has nothing to do with the gunfire dying down all around us, the last pop-pop-pops drifting off into the trees.
Raymond holds out one gloved hand. Palm up. Patient. “Cassandra. Give me the shotgun, sweetheart.”
I don’t do it right away, though. First, I look at his face. The ruddy cheeks. The frost-stiff mustache. The eyes, cold as a shark’s.
He waggles his fingers. Come on, now.
Then I find the strength somewhere deep in me to summon up my fake smile. “Sorry,” I whisper. “It’s heavier than I thought.”
I hand it over.
Raymond takes it by the barrel. “There’s a good girl,” he praises. Then he tucks it under his other arm, alongside his own, and goes sauntering off toward the tent, whistling all the while.
I’m not sure how long I stand rooted in that exact spot before a hunting club staffer comes up to me. He’s polite and brisk in a green Crispin-branded vest.
“First time?” he asks kindly.
“Hm?” My own voice sounds to me like I’m trapped at the bottom of a well.
“First time shooting?” he clarifies.
“Yes,” I manage. “First time.”
“I hope you enjoyed it.” He smiles, professionally reassuring. “The kick surprises you. You’ll feel that one for a few days. Why don’t you head over to the warming tent, ma’am? They have hot cocoa.”
Hot cocoa. My laugh comes out as a single, strangled bark. He looks startled, so I press my mitten to my mouth and pretend I’m coughing.
“Thank you,” I say. “Yes. Hot cocoa. That’s exactly what I need.”
I turn toward the tent on autopilot and stumble along Raymond’s tracks.
Matvei is still out there in the woods somewhere. I don’t know if he saw.
I just know that I almost killed my husband with my own two hands, and that he almost certainly knows what I tried.
That afternoon’s lunch on the terrace is a horror show.
The Crispin staff have set up long tables under the cedar pergola at the back of the lodge, draped in white linen and hung with sprigs of cedar and tiny brass bells.
There are propane heaters at every corner, and the centerpieces are little brass pheasants.
I’m not a fan; if I never saw another pheasant in my life, it would still be too soon.
On the upside, they’ve laid out a buffet of food that, on any other day, I would have wanted to weep into. Roasted root vegetables glistening with rosemary oil. A crock of French onion soup the color of mahogany. Cornish hens, a charcuterie board the length of a coffin, mulled wine.
I cannot taste a single bite of it.
I have managed to choke down half a cup of broth and a heel of bread, and even that feels like it’s sitting just below the base of my throat, refusing to descend any further. The baby—my poor little passenger—must be getting nothing from me today but pure cortisol and adrenaline.
Sorry, kiddo. Tomorrow, we’ll do a smoothie. I promise.
Raymond is across from me, holding court with everyone in earshot. He hasn’t looked at me since the woods. His phone is face-down on the linen beside his fork, but he keeps checking it. Every two or three minutes, a discreet flip, a glance, a flip-back-down.
Bill and I are the only ones who seem to notice how preoccupied Raymond appears to be.
Down at the far end of the table, Matvei is sitting between two senior associates and a tax partner’s wife who is trying very hard to flirt with him.
He’s being polite but distant. To anyone who doesn’t know him, he’s a man having a perfectly ordinary professional lunch on a perfectly ordinary work weekend.
To me, though, he looks like he’s holding himself so still that, if he moved a single muscle out of turn, he would shatter into a hundred sharp pieces and ruin everyone’s Brussels sprouts.
He hasn’t looked at me, either. I don’t know if that means he saw, or he didn’t, or he saw and he’s furious, or he saw and he’s pretending he didn’t see, or?—
Stop. Stop, Cassandra. Eat your bread.
I tear off another piece of bread, put it in my mouth, and chew like it owes me money.
Susan Oglethorpe is three seats down on my side, eating her soup with unhurried elegance. Like Raymond and Matvei, she also shows no interest in looking my way. Her face is as empty as it ever was.
Did I dream up the whole thing? No, I couldn’t have. It’s seared in my brain.
There are no secrets in this firm. I keep hearing it, over and over. Just cryptic enough to terrify me.
Raymond’s phone vibrates again. He flips it over—and this time, he doesn’t flip it back.
He reads whatever’s on his screen. As he does, his jaw grinds and the color crawls up his neck above his collar in a slow, uneven tide.
Then he stands.
It’s abrupt enough that his chair scrapes loudly against the flagstones. The conversation at the nearest seats falters and dies.
“Bill,” Raymond grumbles. “Apologies. Something personal just came up back in the city. Can’t wait.”
Bill’s spoon pauses halfway to his mouth. “Personal? Right this minute?”
“Unfortunately so.”
“You sure I can’t?—”
“Quite sure.” Raymond is already shrugging into his jacket and tucking his phone into the pocket. “Sorry to leave you in the lurch. I’ll square it up with you Monday.”
Bill’s face twists, then irons itself out. “If you must, Raymond. We’ll miss you for the rest of the weekend.”
“I’m sure you’ll soldier on just fine.” Raymond turns his head, for the first time since the woods, and looks directly at me. “Cassandra.”
I lift my chin. My throat has gone so dry that when I swallow it clicks. “Yes?”
“Pack,” he orders. “Now. We’re going.”
I stare at him. The terrace has gone very quiet around us. Patricia is making a politely scandalized little O with her mouth. Susan has set her spoon down very carefully. Bill is studying the rim of his wineglass.
At the far end of the table, I feel it before I see it. The shift in atmospheric pressure. The tiny hum of attention.
Matvei has stopped eating.
I want so badly to look at him and beg for help. I have a horrible, horrible feeling that, if I leave with Raymond, I’ll never see Matvei again.
But I can’t look at him. It would reveal too much. Just because I might be about to die doesn’t mean I have to drag Matvei down to hell with me.
So instead, I dab my lips with my napkin. “Of course,” I hear myself say sweetly. I make my mouth pull up at one corner in a perfectly trained, hostess-issue half-smile. “Should I… Do I have time to finish my?—?”
“No.” He’s not even being mean about it. He’s just done with the conversation. “Now, Cassandra.”
I set my napkin beside my plate and stand. “Apologies, everyone,” I say to the table at large, in the lightest voice I can produce. “Sorry to abandon you mid-soup.”
“Lovely to see you, dear,” Susan murmurs.