Chapter 23
Dominik
“What did you do?”
It’s not a request. It’s not even a demand. It’s a woman who hasn’t decided whether or not she can carry the weight of something heavy and is asking for it to be handed over to her anyway.
I stand up from the chair, and the room tilts a degree. “What I had to,” I answer.
“Dom,” she says, my name a small, sharp thing in her mouth. “If you say that to me again like it explains something, I’m going to throw your chair down the hall and then kick you out of your own room.”
“You won’t,” I remark quietly. “The chair is almost as big as you are, hellcat.”
Her mouth does a thing that isn’t quite a smile. “Try me,” she responds. Then, she slips into the bathroom and returns with a glass of water she pushes into my hand, along with a handful of pills. Antibiotics, over-the-counter painkillers, fever reducers, etc.
I take them because she went to the trouble to retrieve them for me. Because she actually cares if the infection spreads, my temperature spikes, or if I’m hurting.
“I want details,” she says when the glass is empty, and my pulse has stopped racing. “Not the poetry. The truth.”
“You won’t like it,” I say.
“I don’t like anything lately,” she admits. “That’s not a good argument. Sit down.”
I sit and she takes a seat on the edge of the bed across from me.
“I made the kid remember how much he needs air,” I say as I lay it all out for her.
“With a tarp. I made him give me Miami and Bayonne and a man with a bar where shady meetings happen on Tuesdays. I asked if he wanted to keep enough fingers to hold a handlebar, and he made a good decision. I didn’t let him asphyxiate. ”
Alina’s face changes while I talk in the way people do when they add one number and then another and don’t lie to themselves about the sum. It’s a look I understand.
“You kept him alive,” she says finally, and there’s relief there she tries to hide and fails. “You could have—”
“I didn’t,” I say. “Because I may need him tomorrow.” I let the next piece come out where it can be seen because I can feel the question forming in her mouth. “Also, because if I killed him, I’d have to tell you, and I’m too greedy for the way you’re still looking at me right now.”
She swallows. The muscle leaps in her throat, and my hands want to stroke it. “That’s not fair,” she says, and she’s right. “You can’t do awful things and then use my feelings as your defense.”
“No,” I say. “I can’t. But I can tell you the truth about why I didn’t. You asked for the details, dikaya koshka. Sometimes that’s the part where I’m worse than you want me to be.”
She crosses her arms over her chest, lifts her chin. “Tell me everything,” she orders. “All of it. Don’t make me imagine worse.”
So, I do. Quietly and concisely, because she asked for the truth.
I give her Kyle’s loss of his stupid patch and the smell of mildew on the tarp.
I give her Reed and his upside-down magazine.
I give her Greene Street and the cold storage with its carrots and lettuce hiding rifles.
I give her the way the pliers felt in my hand without the noise of breaking that would last longer than it needs to.
I give her the way the chair bolt sang when I hit it with the mallet instead of a kneecap.
Then the sound of his screams when it didn’t miss his knee.
Alina holds it all. She doesn’t drop a single detail. When I’m nearly finished, she exhales like she’s been asked to lift a weight and discovered she can.
“You’re going to go after the rest of those guns,” she says.
“Yes. Tonight or tomorrow, possibly,” I say. “First, we have to deal with your brother.”
“Right,” she whispers.
“He’ll cough up the money he has in a parking garage. Petrov will let him think he can drop it and run. Then he’ll count it. And if it’s not two million, then it’s a number he’ll have to turn into names.”
“He won’t have it all,” she says, voice raw.
“I know,” I agree. “He doesn’t need to have all of it to get to keep breathing. He needs to have enough to make me believe he’s finally a man who takes your wellbeing seriously.”
It’s a split-second decision, but I don’t tell her about Archer’s regular monthly meetings with Popeye. Timing matters, and now isn’t the right moment to put this truth on her plate.
I’m not lying, though, when I tell her he’ll live for now. Archer just won’t be free to roam where he wants any longer without us knowing where to find him whenever we want to.
Between Alina and Gavriil, deciding Archer’s fate is starting to feel like I’m getting fucked between a rock and a hard place.
She closes her eyes. When she opens them again, they’re bright but not wet. They lift, hover, and settle on the place my bandage lives under my shirt.
“You can’t kill him, Dom,” she says, and the request lands where she knows it will hurt. “If he fails. You can’t.”
“If it’s a choice between him or you, I will not choose him.”
It occurs to me that the “him” I’m referring to isn’t just Archer now. It hasn’t been since the moment I dragged Alina off the street, kicking and screaming for him while she busted my nose. I didn’t know then that she would become the closest thing I’ve ever had to an answered prayer.
Alina’s throat works again. “That wasn’t the question.”
“I know,” I say. I pull myself out of the chair to go sit beside her on the bed, my bed, and cover her hand with mine.
“I won’t make any promises I can’t keep.
” I swallow the rest of it, about not lying.
“I’ll try to figure out a way for Archer to leave the city alive.
I’ll pay for his getaway myself if I have to.
But I won’t let you pay for it. You aren’t something I trade. ”
Her breath comes out in a small, almost-laugh, broken and grateful and furious. “You’re impossible,” she says.
“I can’t promise you I’ll change either,” I reply as I gently cup her cheek, feeling her lean into my touch. Good. I want her to gravitate to me.
“Maybe I don’t want you to,” Alina murmurs as her eyes meet mine.
I forget how to breathe for a few seconds as I gaze at her, seeing the honesty in her eyes. The fact that she would take me as I am makes me want her even more.
“I can’t wait to fully heal,” I say as my thumb grazes her bottom lip, making her breath hitch.
“So you can touch me again?” Alina asks.
“Fuck, I just want to hold you,” I admit.
Her face softens, and she doesn’t move away when I rest my forehead against hers. We stay like that for a minute, a quiet but deep moment for just us, before she draws away.
“Tell me the rest,” she says, and I know she means about Archer, about the drop. I tell her how it should go. The level of the garage. The way the cameras will stay blind because we paid for their cataracts.
“And then?” she presses. She’s relentless. She’s my favorite kind of exhaustion.
“Then we count,” I say. “Then I’ll keep a boy alive in a room that smells like oil for another night, and we’ll go to Bayonne to find the stolen pallets.”
“And in all that,” she says, low, “what am I supposed to do?”
“You eat and sleep.”
“And you?”
“I’ll come back,” I say, and decide that promising that one thing won’t get me killed any faster than not saying it would.
She turns her soft hand underneath mine and threads our fingers together.
It is a small act of treason against the life that taught me hands are for making the world obey me.
I memorize the feel of it anyway. If I let go, it isn’t because I want to.
It’s because this life hasn’t given me another choice.
“That’s enough for now,” Alina says after a moment. It’s the one mercy my body will accept from anyone who isn’t me. “I need to change your bandage. You bled through it again, didn’t you?”
“I’m sure I can manage that on my own,” I tell her.
“Why do it on your own when you have me?” she asks, her mouth set in a stubborn line that’s somehow better than anything else in my world.
“For now.” The “for now” protects us both from the future.
I stay seated when she expertly changes the dressing. When she’s done, she says, “You should try to lie down and get some sleep.”
“For you I’ll pretend for a few minutes,” I offer as I stretch out so that my head is on the pillow that still holds her warmth, her lavender shampoo.
She pulls the covers over me and steps back, studies me like I’m a foreign language she intends to learn, then glances at the window. “You’ll tell me when you leave and when you return?” she asks.
“I will,” I agree. Before she leaves the room, I say, “You haven’t mentioned your flowers.”
She shrugs and turns around in the doorway. “The roses were pretty I guess.”
“Gavriil must have sent them up with one of the guards. At least there were only eleven,” I breathe out.
“Twelve,” Alina says.
“What?” I snap, sitting up and grinding my teeth together.
“There were twelve roses. I plucked the black one out and threw it away in the bathroom.”
“Throw all of them out. Now,” I order her.
“Okay, but it’s a shame to let them go to waste, even if they are from him.”
I debate whether or not to tell her about the superstition, then decide she has a right to know. “Even numbers are only for funerals, dikaya koshka. It was a warning.”
“Oh,” she mutters. “I’ll go throw them away.”
“Thank you,” I say as I lay my head back down on the pillow.
As soon as I do, my phone buzzes and Alina huffs as if it’s her sworn enemy.
I pull the device from my pocket.
RENAT: Drop’s set.
I slide it back into my pocket. “Go eat and throw the roses away,” I tell Alina. “And if you have to overthink things, think in short sentences so I can’t hear you.”
She snorts, a quiet, unwilling sound that makes my day better than it has any right to be. “Yes, sir,” she replies, mocking and obedient at once.
I close my eyes and listen to her move through the apartment.
When sleep comes, it’s not a thing I deserve. It comes anyway and takes me one muscle at a time, without asking.
I wake to the sound of my name in a voice I let inside me. Except Alina isn’t lying beside me in bed or in the chair. She thinks by not being in the room, I would be able to sleep better. She’s wrong.
When I check my phone, I find that my men have already sent me pictures of pillars in a parking structure and the grainy images of Archer putting down a bag he pretends isn’t a confession.
The count isn’t two million. Of course it isn’t. It’s a number that would insult me if I had any illusions left about Archer’s loyalty to his sister.
I stand, stretch, feel the pull of stitches angry at their job as I leave the room. Alina’s door is shut, so I knock because I said I would. “I’m going downstairs,” I say when she opens the door that wasn’t locked. I like and hate that detail more than I should. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Okay,” she says, her mouth in a tight line. “Don’t… don’t do anything you can’t tell me about.”
“I won’t.”
She nods, swallows. And because I’m greedy, I bend, putting my mouth close enough to her ear that I could tell her a lie, and give her a small truth. “I’ll come back,” I say. “I’ll bring news to make your day better.”
“Promise?” she asks.
“Yes,” I agree, and then I walk past the two fresh guards and let the elevator take me downstairs. The garage smells the same and different. Renat and Petrov stand by a pillar with a bag that’s a smaller apology than the two it was supposed to be. Petrov puts the bag into my hand.
“Not quite half,” he says. “And a note that thinks it’s clever. He wants mercy on credit.”
“Unfortunate,” I say.
I think of Alina’s palm on my chest, the way she said yes to all the worst parts of me and asked for the next sentence anyway.
I think of Archer’s face when I tell him what the rest of the day costs.
I think of my brother’s voice when he decides whether to let me buy another hour of his patience.
I think of the week I promised myself with her when the hole in my side is just a scar.
“Let’s get to work,” I tell the men who’ve made it this far with me. “I owe a girl a better day.”