2. Cali
CALI
The men work fast.
I stand at the top of the stairs and watch them buzz around, mostly because I can't seem to make myself look away.
Ronan tries to turn me toward the wall, to spare me the sight of it, but I put my hand flat on his chest and shake my head.
I need to see this. I don't know why. Maybe it's because for the last three months, everything has been done around me, and to me and for me, decided by other people while I stood there helplessly.
So I watch.
Two of them carry the tarp down the stairs. They grunt with the weight of the corpse. When they push through the door, I see the waiting van.
It's parked at the curb outside my broken front door, dark and unmarked, the back doors already flung open. One of Ronan's men is standing next to the vehicle, tossing in a bag of things that presumably came with the stranger. It hits the floor of the trunk and a few of its contents spill out.
A coil of zip ties. A roll of duct tape. A wool blanket.
"That's his?" I ask. "That bag?"
Ronan follows my gaze. "Yes. What about it?"
That slimy ripple of dread I'm becoming way too familiar with snakes its way through my stomach once again. "He wasn't here to kill me, was he?"
"No," Ronan confirms in a tight voice. "He wasn't."
As sick as this sounds, a murder would almost be more merciful.
This wasn't that, though. When I look at everything in that burlap sack and add it all up—zip ties for the wrists, tape for the mouth, a blanket to wrap a body that's still moving, thrashing, fighting, screaming—it can only lead me to one conclusion.
Somebody wanted me alive.
I think I might throw up. My stomach lurches, but I press the back of my hand to my mouth and wait it out. Ronan's hand comes to rest on my hip for reassurance. I don't want it there; he doesn't have the right to comfort me anymore; but I don't have the energy to move it away.
"Calista," he says. "I think you need to sit down."
"No."
"Your knees are bleeding."
"Funny enough, I'm actually aware of that. They're my knees."
He sighs but doesn't press the issue. He just keeps his hand where it is until the nausea passes. When it does—though it takes its sweet time in doing so—I straighten up and step out of reach.
Navi comes back up the stairs. He's got his phone in his hand and a look on his face I don't like, careful and closed, the look of a man deciding how much to say in front of me.
"Street's clear," he informs Ronan. "Van's loaded. We're rolling in two." He glances at me, then back to Ronan, and lowers his voice like I can't hear him from three feet away. "You want me to have someone look at her?"
"No," I interject before Ronan can answer on my behalf. "Nobody's touching me and I don't need a babysitter. I want all of you out of my house."
Navi's eyebrows go up.
"Except him." I point at Ronan without looking at him. "He stays, because he has some explaining to do. Everybody else, get the hell out."
Navi looks at Ronan. Ronan looks at me.
"You heard her," Ronan says at last. "Didn't sound like she was on the fence about it, did she?"
Navi nods and tromps back down. Within a minute, they're gone, all of them, as quickly and quietly as they came.
I could almost forget that they were here at all, except the front door is in pieces on my hallway floor and there's a wet patch on the wall where the plaster cracked and the smell of the spray bottle they used is pungent in the air, a chemical, lemony tang oozing over the top of something far worse underneath.
It's only then that I feel the full weight of what just happened.
I just let a criminal organization carry a dead man out of my house wrapped in a tarp.
I let them scrub the would-be killer's blood off my wall.
I let them take the body and the knife and the whole nightmare and fold it up neat and drive it away in an unmarked van, and not once did I think to intervene.
I have phones—I know how to dial a nine and a one and a one.
But I didn't.
What does that make me?
There's a line. Always has been. I could feel it, all this time, like a chalk mark on the floor. The line between what I am and what Ronan is. I kept telling myself I hadn't crossed it, not really, because I was just gathering data, just running the experiment, just being clever.
Well, I damn sure crossed it tonight. I didn't even think twice before I skip-da-dee-doo-da'd right over it.
I sense Ronan's attention shift toward me. "Calista, you should—"
"Sit your ass down right there." I point at the top step of the stairs.
"I'm the one issuing orders for the next little while, not you.
And order number one is that you're going to park yourself where I'm pointing and you're going to tell me every last little detail.
Order number two is that you had better not dare to use that patient, tired voice of yours when you do.
I'm sick of being micromanaged. I've had enough of that voice for one lifetime. "
There's a second where I'm sure he's going to refuse. I bet I could count on one finger the number of times Ronan has ever followed commands like this in his whole dang life.
But then, to my surprise, he nods and lowers himself down. Right on the same spot where I cried myself into a tizzy not too long ago. Funny how times have changed.
He dangles his hands on his knees, hunched forward, and looks at me. "Where would you like to begin?"
My legs are weak and trembly, but I don't join him on the stairs. I want to retain this power position for as long as humanly possible. For the first and maybe the last time ever, I'm the one looking down at him.
"Who wants me?" I ask.
"Someone who knew my father."
"Knew him how?"
He looks at his hands for a moment. They're huge, those hands, and freshly tainted with another man's life. But they just look like the same Ronan hands they always have been. They can be so, so soft; I've experienced it myself.
"He's the man who taught my father how to hurt people," Ronan answers at last. "Then my father improved on his methods."
"Are you going to be purposefully vague forever," I snap, "or are there some actual relevant details forthcoming?"
"His name is Lev," he goes on. "He was my father's lieutenant, back before I was born and all through my childhood.
My father—Igor—ran the Bratva, and Lev was his right hand.
His enforcer. He did the things Igor didn't want to dirty his own hands on.
" He rubs his thumb across his knuckles, slow, like there's some dirt on his own hands he wouldn't mind getting rid of.
"When I was a boy, Lev was always in the house.
He was there for all the worst moments. You remember when I told you about how my father treated my mother—well, Lev was as good as an accomplice.
He'd watch my mother sweep up broken glass on her hands and knees and he never once got up to help her.
He'd just sit there and drink his tea—the tea she brewed for him—and watch. "
I do remember that story in all its vivid, gory detail.
In my mind, I can almost hear the crash and crackle of that glass that Ronan's father hurled just inches shy of his mom's head.
And then the shrinking violet act she performed in self-defense in all the years that followed, so that she presented less and less of a target for him to strike, until finally, there was nothing left of her at all.
"When my father died," Ronan says, "I took over.
And I did things differently. I got rid of the old ways.
Some of them, anyway. Lev didn't like that.
You're soft. You're dishonoring his legacy.
He's been out at the edges of things for years, telling anyone who'll listen that I've gone weak.
Buying drinks for old men who miss the way things used to be. "
"Doesn't seem like he's 'out at the edges of things' anymore," I remark. "Seems like he's smack dab in the fucking middle."
"Yes, it certainly does seem like that," Ronan agrees. "I don't think it's a coincidence that Pyotr disappeared and Lev reappeared in the same short spell."
My nose wrinkles. "Who's Pyotr?"
"My money man. Former money man, I should say.
The one who knew where everything is hidden.
He wanted to retire, so against my better judgment, I let him go live out his golden years overseas.
But it seems that somebody took him out of a flat in Istanbul a few hours ago.
On the same night that somebody came to your house with a roll of zip ties.
" He looks up at me, his eyes hooded with concern.
"I don't believe in that many coincidences, Calista.
I think Lev's making his move. I think he took Pyotr for the money, and I think he wanted you for the leverage. "
"Leverage," I repeat. "How am I leverage?"
"You built a machine that can trace every dollar I've ever moved. And you're—" He stops before he finishes that thought.
But I have no intention of letting him off the hook that easily.
"Say it," I challenge. "Don't shy away now."
"You're the thing I care about," he murmurs.
"Anybody who's been watching me for the last few weeks knows that.
I wasn't subtle. I took you to a gala. I danced with you under the biggest light in the room.
I put you in front of every important person I know and I told them you built something extraordinary.
I wanted the whole city to see you." He shakes his head, and for the first time, there's something like anger in it.
But it's turned inward, aimed at himself, not at me.
"I painted a target on you. Because I was happy and I was a fool and I forgot, for a few weeks, exactly what I am and exactly what that means for anyone who stands next to me. "
I stand there and I take it in, all of it, the way I take in everything. Piece by piece. The shape of it forming.