Chapter 29
DANIIL
The maps were down. That was the first thing I saw when I walked into the war room.
The wall where the Marchetti territories had hung for months was bare plaster, two stray pieces of tape still clinging to the paint where the corners had been.
A coffee pot sat on the long table in place of a sidearm.
Alek had his sleeves rolled to the forearm.
Mikhail had his boots up on a chair and a mug balanced on his knee.
Ivan stood at the window with his back to the rest of us, watching the drive, because Ivan was Ivan even on a quiet morning.
I poured my own coffee. I sat. Alek walked us through the week the way he always did.
The remnants of the Marchetti crew had been finished or had run.
Two of the businesses we had pulled back online were already turning a clean number.
No new chatter from the docks. The week, in plain Russian, had been boring.
I had not known I was waiting to hear that word until it landed.
I watched my brothers' shoulders drop by a finger's width each. Alek closed the folder. Mikhail finally took his boots off the chair. Ivan turned from the window and accepted a mug from his older brother without looking at it.
I set my coffee down.
"Good," I said. "Now we plan a proposal."
Three pairs of eyes. The silence had a shape to it.
"May I be excused from this part?" Ivan said, deadpan.
"No," I said.
Mikhail was already laughing, low and ugly. "Oh, this is going to be terrible."
"I have ideas," Mikhail said, when the laughter settled. He put his mug down so he could use both hands. "Hear me out. Chartered yacht. Out on the lake. Sunset. Four-piece band on the lower deck. You go down on one knee at the bow. Photographer, drone shot, the whole production."
"She gets seasick in a rowboat," I said. "She is also pregnant. You want me to put my pregnant fiancee on a boat at sunset in late autumn?"
"I am a romantic," Mikhail said.
"You are a menace," I said.
Alek leaned back. He had the calm of a man who had thought about this for forty seconds and decided he had the answer. "Candlelit dinner. Compound. Long table, the good linens. String quartet in the next room, soft. Just the two of you. Tasteful."
"That is the dinner she eats every other week," I said. "I am proposing, not feeding her a weeknight meal."
"I voted not to be in this meeting," Ivan said. "But since I am here. Call a priest. Take her to the church. Skip the production entirely. It is more honest."
"You want me to ambush her with a wedding instead of a proposal," I said.
Ivan shrugged one shoulder. "She likes you. She would say yes either way."
"That is the worst sentence to ever come out of your mouth, and you have said many things." I stood. I lifted my hands. The mug stayed where I had left it. "I am wasting my morning. I am going to talk to Lily."
"He says we are wasting his time," Mikhail said, delighted.
"We would be insulted if we were better at this," Alek said, mild, not offended.
"I voted priest," Ivan said. "Note it."
I left them in the war room with the bare wall and the coffee pot and the sound of Mikhail starting in on Ivan's church plan with the dedication of a man who would not let it go.
Lily kept a sitting room off the east hall, the one with the window seat and the small fire that always seemed to be lit whether anyone was in there or not.
I knocked once. She was already on the couch with a cup in her hands and a closed book on her thigh, as if she had known I was coming.
She probably had. Alek probably texted her between sentences.
"I want to propose," I said. "My brothers are useless."
"Yes," she said at once. "Tell me what you have."
I sat across from her. I told her what I had, which was an antique ring in a velvet box and a woman I would die for and a date inside the next two weeks before the weather turned hard. I told her the suggestions my brothers had floated. She did not laugh out loud. She did smile into her tea.
"There is a harvest carnival in the next town over," she said.
"It runs to the end of the month. String lights, a small Ferris wheel, a band by the cider tent.
Public, but big enough that we can stand in one corner of it and have it be only ours.
Family can drift in like normal carnival-goers. Your men can do the same."
"Ferris wheel is out," I said. "I am not putting her up in the air."
"I was not going to put a pregnant woman at the top of a Ferris wheel, Daniil.
Give me some credit." She set her cup down.
"There is an apple-bobbing booth on the south end.
Next to it, a small oak with a string of white lights wound up through the branches.
Quieter than the main strip. You can walk her there and it will look like you wandered. "
"That is the spot," I said.
"I'll handle the family," she said. "I'll bring her grandmother. I'll call Jacob. The brothers and the wives will be in place by the hour you set. You handle Chloe. You handle the ring."
"Done."
She looked at me. Her head tilted a little. "Show me."
I took the box out of my coat. I had been carrying it for six days. I opened it on her coffee table.
The ring was small. A single old stone in a setting that had not been new even when my mother had worn it, two thin curls of gold like leaves on either side of the stone.
It was not the kind of ring a man bought to be seen with.
Chloe's hand was small. Chloe did not like flashy.
I had thought about it for a long time before I went to the safe and lifted out the box that had not been opened since the last time my mother took the ring off in a kitchen in a city neither of us would name.
Lily looked at the ring. She looked at me. "Your mother's?"
"Yes."
She pressed her fingers to her mouth for a second. Her eyes went bright. She did not let them spill. "She would have loved her."
I did not have a thing to say to that. I closed the box and slid it back into my coat pocket, and Lily let me have the silence for as long as I needed it.
I told Chloe that night, in our bedroom, with Rhea standing on the foot of the bed in her pajamas because she had been told she could be there for the announcement. I did not say the word proposal. I said the word carnival. I said the word cider. I said the words caramel apple.
Chloe lit up the way she did when she could not pretend to be a grown-up about a thing. Rhea launched off the bed with Beom-Beom in a fist over her head.
"Beom-Beom votes yes," she informed us, breathless. "I asked him. He voted yes."
"He gets a vote now?" I said.
"Always," Rhea said. "You just didn't ask."
She climbed back onto the bed and bounced. The mattress took it. So did I.
"Will there be cotton candy?"
"Probably."
"Will there be one of those games where you knock down the bottles?"
"Probably."
"Will there be a Ferris wheel?"
"Yes."
"Can I ride it by myself?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because the answer to that one is always no until you are tall enough to drive."
She thought about it. She accepted it. She bounced one more time, then crawled across the comforter and laid her head on Chloe's stomach the way she had been doing for two days, very gentle, very serious, the bear tucked under her chin.
Chloe's hand slid into mine. She squeezed once. She did not know yet. She thought we were going for caramel apples.
The carnival sat at the edge of a town green I had never bothered to learn the name of, half on grass and half on a stretch of fairground gravel.
Lights had been strung between the booth posts in long warm loops, the kind that turned the air gold for ten feet under them.
Hay bales had been pulled into rough seating around a fire pit that was actually lit, woodsmoke drifting low.
A bluegrass band played by the cider tent with the kind of energy that said they had been at it for an hour and would be at it for two more.
The Ferris wheel was small and lit at every spoke, turning slow against a sky gone the color of a bruised plum.
The smell of caramel hit me before we had cleared the parking line.
Fried dough behind it. Cold air over the top of both, carrying the woodsmoke.
My men were in the crowd at a distance, in coats and knit hats, looking like fathers who had brought children to a fairground.
One of them was eating a candy apple. I almost laughed at him.
Rhea had Chloe by one hand and me by the other and she was pulling forward with a strength I did not know a body that size could generate. We hit the ring-toss booth first because she saw it first.
She tried six times. She missed six times. Her last toss bounced off the rim of a bottle and rolled back to her feet, and she stared at it as if it had personally betrayed her.
"Let me," I said.
I picked up three rings. I sank three rings. The man behind the booth raised his eyebrows in a way that suggested he had not seen that done sober in some time. He handed Rhea a small stuffed fox with one floppy ear, which she immediately introduced to Beom-Beom as a cousin.
"Did you just use bratva precision on a fairground game?" Chloe said.
"I used my arm."
"Your arm has bratva precision."
"My arm is just an arm."
"Daniil Sorokin. You just won a stuffed fox like a hit man."
The almost-smile came up before I could stop it. She caught it. She always caught it.
The caramel apple stand was three booths down. Chloe bit into hers and a long ribbon of caramel pulled and snapped, a piece of it catching at the corner of her mouth. I leaned in without thinking. I kissed it off. She tasted like sugar and the cold air.
Rhea made a noise from her stomach that was meant to be a gag. She did not actually leave. She bit into her own apple and chewed and watched us out of the corner of her eye like she was making sure we were not going to do it again. We did not. She looked faintly cheated.