36. Mat
MAT
In some regards, a ballroom full of three hundred drunk people is the perfect place to kill a man.
Unfortunately, it’s also the perfect place to lose track of a woman.
I looked away for an instant— one fucking instant— and she up and vanished. It’s only been fifteen or twenty seconds since that happened, but those have been the longest fifteen or twenty seconds of my life.
After subtly warning me not to interfere with that leering fucker of a congressman—which was really lucky for him, because I would have strung him by his entrails from the goddamn rafters just for touching her—she stepped back and fled.
I originally intended to give her thirty seconds to compose herself. I figured she’d go find a quiet space in a corner to breathe and reassemble her war paint.
But somehow, before I even reached thirty, I lost her.
And then, suddenly, there she is.
Problem is, someone else is after her.
I’m seeing in panes of color now. Her midnight blue dress slips into the darkness. A black block framed in white follows close behind.
I only see the back of the man on her tail, but it’s enough. Broad-shouldered, salt-and-pepper hair, the gait of a man who’s been told no perhaps twice in his life and didn’t enjoy the experience either time…
That must be the senator.
In the back room of Café Volna a few days ago, I floated my pet theory to Afon over glasses of tea: What if Raymond isn’t the head, but the face?
What if the legitimate-looking American with the law firm and the Patek and the country-club wife is the front, and the man calling the shots is someone higher up?
For instance, what if it’s someone with a Senate pin and a security detail?
Afon shut me down. It does not matter, he said.
Well, it fucking matters now.
Because I just watched Cass walk down a dim hallway, and I saw Senator Josiah DeMaris walk after her.
I don’t run. Running clears a path through a crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea, and the last thing I want is three hundred wedding guests turning their phone cameras on me.
Instead, I walk. Fast, but smooth. I set my whiskey down on a passing tray without looking.
I know I’m leaving Raymond behind, and fuck, maybe I’m destroying the entire plan. This was supposed to be the night, but I’m abandoning my post because the only thing that matters more than my freedom…
… is hers.
I glide past the pillars and into the corridor.
It’s badly lit in here. The powder room door is on the left, closed. The telephone alcove is on the right, curtain drawn. The corridor ahead doglegs once, and dumps into a service hallway that leads to the kitchens and the loading dock—the same loading dock I picked to host Raymond’s last breaths.
I’m about to charge down to the exit. But before I get that far, I hear noises.
A scuffle. A heel on carpet. A grunt.
I turn and rip open the curtain hiding the alcove. “How dare you touch her, motherfucker?”
I reach in and drag the mudak out of the shadowy corner by the back of his collars before he can even get a word in edgewise. He flies into the wall so easily. He leaves behind a bloodstained crack when he crumples to the ground.
I cock back one foot to deliver a swift blow to the bastard’s’ skull?—
—and then I hear, “… Matvei?”
It’s a woman’s voice, small and afraid. Cass’s voice, specifically.
But it’s not coming from the alcove.
I look back to see Cass emerging from the powder room behind me. She has one hand flat over her belly and the other over her mouth. Her eyes wide and wet and very, very alive.
The man groaning at my feet…
… is a very confused and increasingly angry United States Senator.
I look over my shoulder. In the alcove out of which I just dragged DeMaris, there’s no victim.
There never was one. There’s only a half-empty highball glass that the senator must have parked there when he ducked in to do whatever a drunk man in a tuxedo ducks into alcoves to do.
Take a piss, probably. Ride out a wave of nausea.
Not abduct my pregnant girlfriend.
“You fucking oaf!” the senator slurs as he uses the wall like a crutch to haul himself to his feet. “What the fuck are you doing? Do you know who the hell I am?”
I’m too stunned to reply. Did I get this all wrong? Is DeMaris innocent? Have I lost my damn mind?
“Hey, you! Dumbass! I asked you a question! Do you know who I am?” the senator yells again, louder this time.
I don’t answer. I can’t. My brain is still trying to reconcile the picture I had two seconds ago— Cass has been abducted, DeMaris is the head of Vainakh, I am her last and only line of defense —with the picture in front of me now:
A sloshed and irate politician with a split eyebrow, and Cass standing behind me, horrified.
Behind her, through the open powder room door, I catch a glimpse of an unconscious man slumped against the marble vanity.
His tux tie is loosened, his shirtfront splattered with what can only be red wine vomit, and his mouth is hanging open in the deep, untroubled sleep of a man who has been thoroughly defeated by an open bar.
I don’t recognize him. He’s nobody. The plus-one of a plus-one. A fool who promised to be on his best behavior and then quietly broke that promise to himself somewhere around the third Tabitha Twist.
Just like that, a new picture becomes clear.
The drunk idiot must have stumbled up to Cass in the dark, grabbed her, and then ended up in the women’s powder room to be deposited like the empty booze bottle he essentially is.
Cass had probably been trying to roll him onto his side so he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit when I burst in playing Liam Neeson.
I look at her again. She’s staring at the senator.
Then at me.
Then at the senator.
There’s a slow, terrible understanding, blooming in real time: I have just blown up the plan.
Catastrophically. Irreversibly. I just hurled a sitting United States Senator into a wall hard enough to leave blood.
And I did it because I was so certain—so fucking, marrow-deep, bone-stupid certain—that I was protecting her.
“Are you deaf, boy?” DeMaris is yelling now, propping himself unsteadily upright against the wallpaper. A thin red trickle is making its way down past his ear and into the starched collar of his shirt. “Do you have any goddamn idea?—”
“Senator,” I say coolly. Even now, I sound calm, though I’m anything but that. “I apologize. I mistook you for someone else.”
“You what? Who the fuck do you mistake for me? Who the fuck ? — ”
Footsteps approach. Multiple sets, rapid. From the ballroom comes a small woman in a black sheath dress with a clipboard wedged under one arm and an earpiece. A wedding planner, clearly.
Two men in dark suits flank her. These must be private security, clearly, hired up for the occasion. One of them has a hand resting on the radio at his hip; the other is already wielding a Taser in one hand and a nightstick in the other.
“Senator DeMaris!” the planner cries out. “I heard a commotion. Is everything?—”
“This animal assaulted me!” DeMaris jabs a finger in my direction. “I want him gone!”
The security duo steps up. That Taser is primed and ready. “Sir,” rumbles one, “I need you to come with me.”
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” I say, keeping my hands loose at my sides and very, very visible. “I thought?—”
“Now, sir.”
I could put them down. Both of them, easily. I have the Glock in the small of my back and a suppressor in my inside breast pocket. The planner doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman who’d be able to outrun me. I could be out of this building in under ninety seconds, no witnesses left alive.
But then what?
Cass will be left in the lurch. Any second now, more people will stumble in and add themselves to the list of loose ends I need to handle.
No, there’s no denying the truth: The plan, the third window, is dead. Firmly closed.
It’s best for everyone if I just leave.
So I do the only thing I can do. I nod. “Of course,” I say. “Lead the way.”
“You’re not going anywhere— ” DeMaris starts to roar.
“Senator.” The planner finally turns to him, and her voice changes, dipping into a warm and motherly register.
“Sir, why don’t you come with me and let me take a look at that cut?
Angie is on her way with the medical kit.
Tabitha is asking for you for the father-daughter dance in about twelve minutes, and we want to get you cleaned up before then. Sound good?”
DeMaris splutters. He gestures wildly all around him. But the planner has already gotten an arm around his shoulders and is whispering reassurances as she removes him from the scene.
The security goons await. The bigger one readjusts his grip on the nightstick.
“Coming, gentlemen.” I take one step.
Then I stop. Because I can’t leave without looking at her.
Cass is still standing in the doorway of the powder room. She hasn’t moved. The hand that was over her stomach has dropped to her side, where her fingers are working the silk of her dress between them.
There are no words for this. There’s no apology in any language I speak—and I speak several—that would do for this moment. I’m sorry, dikarka. I’ll make up for this.
But there’s no time for that.
It’s simply time to leave.
The security guards flank me as we pass back into the ballroom, hugging a rear wall while everyone turns their attention up to the band on stage.
I watch the planner and Senator DeMaris disappear into the crowd.
By tomorrow, the cut at his eyebrow will be a Steri-stripped inconvenience, and the official story will be that the senator took a tumble on his way back from the men’s room, ha ha, Jozy always could hold his liquor right up until he couldn’t, ha ha.
The Plaza will eat the cost of his dry cleaning.
His daughter will not be informed. There will be no police report.
The wedding planner is, in her way, doing me a favor. She’s saving the night. In fact, she’s saving everything—except the one thing I came here to save.
We reach the ballroom doors. They’ve been propped open with brass stanchions to let in the air. Just before I pass through them, I look across the room.
It takes me a second to find Raymond. He’s not where I left him.
For a half-breath, I think he’s gone—out, after Cass, on his way to somewhere terrible. My ribs flare with the nerve pain.
Then I find him.
He’s moved about ten feet to the left of the partners’ cluster, where he has a clean sightline through the propped-open doors and down the corridor I’ve just been escorted out of.
And he is looking right at me.
Not at the senator’s corridor. Not at the powder room. Not at the bridesmaid, Brittany, who is still fawning for his attention.
At me.
For most of the evening, Raymond has been wearing the face he wears at functions, the one that goes with the bourbon and the elbow-jabs and the off-color jokes about his wife’s dress.
Now, that face is gone. In its place is something I have never seen on him before. The cheeks are still pink, the bourbon is still in his hand, the tuxedo is still rumpled—but the eyes have changed. The eyes are flat and cold. Unblinking.
And entirely, entirely sober.
He tilts his glass an inch in my direction. It could be a mocking, all-knowing salute or simply a tired man adjusting his grip. From this distance, with this many floral arrangements between us, it could be anything at all.
But I know better. This is a small, private acknowledgement, from one man to another.
I see you, Matvei Satyrin.
Then I step outside and he disappears from view.