Chapter 22
CHLOE
Late autumn light slanted across the breakfast nook, pale gold that turned everything two shades warmer than it actually was. Rhea sat across from me with a half-eaten waffle and a worksheet pushed aside, busy instead with a colored pencil and a piece of construction paper folded in two.
"What are you working on?" I asked, stealing a strawberry off her plate.
"Hey," Rhea said.
"You were saving it for last. I respect that. I also took it."
She gave me a long-suffering look and went back to her paper. "It's a secret project," she said.
"From me?"
"From everyone."
"Mysterious. I love it," I said.
The compound was quiet in that house-full-of-men-in-a-meeting way.
Daniil and his brothers had disappeared into the study an hour ago with coffee and that set to their shoulders that meant Marchetti was on the table somewhere.
Beom-Beom sat propped against the napkin holder, damaged ear flopped to one side, watching over Rhea's shoulder as she worked.
I sipped my coffee and watched her tongue poke out the corner of her mouth in concentration. No school, no urgent anything, just toast and the rasp of pencil on paper. I had gotten used to this.
Then I heard the front door, and the laughter behind it.
You can tell, with the Sorokin wives, when something is about to happen. Heels in the hall. A bag rustling. Someone shushing someone else and failing.
Lily swept in first, both arms full of helium balloons in candy colors, her cheeks pink from the cold. Behind her, Jade carried a white bakery box the size of a small suitcase. Sienna brought up the rear with two paper bags from Whitfield Ramen stacked like a Jenga tower.
I stared.
"What is all this?" I asked.
Lily let the balloons go. They drifted up and bumped politely along the ceiling, ribbons trailing.
"Your man's birthday," Lily said, her smile sharp and delighted.
My mouth fell open.
"What? How did I not know?" I said.
"I just found out this morning," Jade said, setting the cake box gently on the island. "Lily told me at the crack of dawn like it was a hostage drop."
"Same," Sienna said, lowering the ramen bags. "The man does not put it on the calendar. The man does not acknowledge there is a calendar. The man would deny linear time if you asked him to confirm it."
I pressed my hands against my cheeks. I was already laughing.
"Okay," I said. "What's the plan?"
Lily pulled a glittery paper cone hat with an elastic string out of her bag and held it up like a trophy.
"Kiddie party," Lily said. "We make fun of them. They walk in, and they cannot say no in front of us. That is the entire trap."
There was a beat. Then we all lost it at the same time, the kind of laugh that makes your stomach hurt. Rhea, sensing chaos, abandoned her secret project and came running.
"What are we doing?" Rhea demanded.
"Baby," Jade said, dropping into a crouch, "we are throwing your uncle a birthday party."
Rhea's eyes went enormous. "Can I help?"
"You're in charge," Lily said. Rhea gasped like she had been knighted.
We moved into the dining room. Streamers came out of Lily's bag like a magician's scarves, and Sienna stood on a chair to thread them across the chandelier while Jade fed her the ends.
The cake landed in the center of the table, buttercream with rainbow sprinkles and Happy Birthday Daniil piped in crooked cursive across the top.
Balloons anchored to chair backs. Plates with cartoon stars at every place setting, and beside every plate, one pointy paper hat.
"Where did you even get all this?" I asked, taping a fan of streamers to the wall.
"Party City has a drive-through energy if you commit," Sienna said over her shoulder from the chair.
"That's not a thing," Jade said, handing up another streamer.
"It is when I'm the customer," Sienna said.
Rhea claimed a corner of the table with a stack of construction paper, three packs of color pastels, and the focused expression of a Renaissance painter. She would not let any of us look. She was working, she informed us. The rest of us were not to disturb her.
It took twenty minutes flat. Watching the three of them I realized they had done this before, maybe not for Daniil, but for someone. They handed each other tape without asking. They corrected each other's streamer angles before a word got said.
Lily glanced at her phone.
"Alek says they are wrapping up." She looked up, eyes lit. "Positions. They're coming."
We scrambled. Sienna flicked off the overhead and left only the soft lamp in the corner so the table glowed.
Jade dropped into a chair by the window.
Rhea hid her card behind her back and grinned with her whole face.
Lily took the far side of the room. I stationed myself by the door, party hat in hand, heart suddenly thudding.
I heard them before I saw them. Four sets of footsteps in the hall, the low rumble of Russian, Mikhail saying something in English about needing a sandwich the size of his head.
They came through the doorway in a row, and we shouted.
"Happy birthday!" we shouted.
Mikhail stopped first, blinked at the balloons, and broke into a grin that lit his whole face. Ivan stopped second, took in the streamers, and wore the look of a man who had walked into the wrong house. Alek stopped third, his single good eye moving slowly across the room, taking inventory.
Daniil stopped in the doorway.
His face did something I had never seen it do.
The muscle along his jaw worked once. His gray-green eyes went bright in a way that had nothing to do with light.
His mouth parted, then closed, then parted again, and for a second I thought my brawler bratva boyfriend was going to cry at the sight of streamers and a sheet cake.
"Is it really my birthday?" he said, low, almost to himself. "I did not expect this."
I stepped to him with the hat in my hand. He looked down at me. I rose up on my toes and set it on his dark hair, snapped the elastic gently under his chin. The scar at his temple caught the lamp light. He stared at me like I had just handed him something more important than I knew.
"Let's just be happy on your birthday," I said softly.
He swallowed once. He nodded.
Behind him, Mikhail snorted.
"Look at him," Mikhail said, pointing at his older brother's head and grinning wide enough to split his face. "Adorable. Soft. Edible. I want to put him in a stroller."
Sienna picked up another hat off the table, walked over to her husband, and put it on him without asking. The elastic snapped under Mikhail's chin and he froze, mouth still open mid-grin.
"Your brother shouldn't be cute alone," Sienna said sweetly, smoothing the elastic.
He stared at her. Then he started to laugh, helpless, and reached up to feel the cone on his own head.
"Devious," Mikhail said, still feeling for the cone on his own head. "Beautiful. I have been outflanked by my own wife."
"Mm," Sienna said.
We all turned, in slow unison, to look at Alek.
Alek had clearly decided to wear a neutral face. His mouth had assumed a polite shape. His good eye had assumed a polite expression. The neutrality was working visibly, which is the precise moment neutrality stops being neutral.
Lily was already moving. She crossed the room with a hat held in front of her like an offering. She did not ask either. She rose up onto her toes, the way only a ballerina does, and settled the cone on her husband's head, ribbon under his chin. She patted his chest once.
Alek did not speak. He accepted it. His mouth twitched, exactly once, at the corner. Lily saw it. Her grin widened.
Then there was Ivan.
Ivan turned on his heel and started for the door.
"Try to leave," Jade said calmly from her chair, not even looking up from her nails, "and you sleep on the couch. Try to run, and I sell your refrigerator."
Ivan stopped.
He stood very still. Then he turned back around, the face of a man marched to a guillotine he had personally built.
"Just give me the fucking hat," Ivan said.
Jade laughed, the bright real laugh that always made him soften at the edges, walked over, set the hat on his head with care, and rose up and kissed him on the cheek. The line of his shoulders dropped half an inch.
Rhea chose that moment to step forward, pastels in her fist.
"Hey," Rhea said, planting her hands on her hips like a tiny foreman. "Let's complete the look. What design do you want?"
The brothers complained in unison. Mikhail groaned with his whole chest like a felled tree. Ivan said "no" with the finality of a verdict. Alek said, in his measured Pakhan voice, "Rhea, perhaps another day."
Rhea's lower lip went out. Her eyes filled. Her chin trembled in a way so technically perfect that I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from clapping. Beom-Beom was clutched in her free hand and seemed to also be sad.
In ten seconds, a girl in two braids brought four bratva men to their knees.
Mikhail sat first. He dropped into a dining chair and tilted his face up like he was being knighted. "Make me terrifying," he ordered.
"Tigers are scary," Rhea informed him, already painting.
She drew one bold orange-and-black stripe across his cheekbone with the focus of a tattoo artist. Mikhail held very still.
When she finished, he turned to Sienna and growled.
Sienna did not react. She had been raising Mikhail like a houseplant for years and had learned not to water the dramatic ones.
Daniil sat next. Rhea climbed up on the chair beside him. Whatever she had been about to paint, he stopped her with a hand lifted, almost shy, and tapped his own cheekbone.
"A heart," he said. "Here."
Rhea looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, very softly, "Okay, Uncle Dan." She painted a small red heart on his cheek with so much care that I had to look at the ceiling to keep my face together.